Robert Price reviews Candida Moss's "Myth of Persecution"

[Leucius Charinus]

http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/ ... cution.htm

Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution:
How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom
reviewed by Robert M. Price.

It seems inevitable that some will compare this fascinating revisionist history to William Arens’s The Man-Eating Myth (1979), and Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1974), even to Holocaust denial. Go ahead! Church historian Moss does indeed reject as fabrication a major belief about the massive suffering of pious innocents in the past, only the fictive victims are Christians, not Jews. The real difference, however, is that Moss offers close analysis of texts, nuanced sifting of evidence, and persuasive arguments. Those who deny the Nazi persecution of Jews are using that denial to facilitate their dreams of repeating the Holocaust, whereas Candida Moss hopes by her scrutiny to disarm new violence inspired by false visions of the past and the hatreds they nourish.

[MrMacSon]

There was an article earlier this year by theologian Michael Jensen who did a PhD on martyrdom -

• Christian martyrdom and modern identity: Against Candida Moss and Salman Rushdie

Dr Jensen had posted an article on martrydom on the same site three years previously - Martyrdom as an affirmation of life

[Leucius Charinus]

With respect to where the martyrdom "legends" fit in to the overall picture it is interesting to note that there appears to be
the following chronological sequence of genre in the history of Christian related literature (ignoring any actual dates):

• *DRAFT Chronological Sequence of Authorship of Christian Literature "GENRE"
  
  *1) The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible to the LXX
  
  *2) The authorship of the Greek New Testament
  
  *3) The authorship of the Christian NT and LXX with "Christian Nomina Sacra Codes"
  
  *4) The authorship of the martyrdom legends <<====================== "Myth of Persecution" ????
  
  *5) The authorship of the non canonical (Gnostic / Heretical) Gospels and Acts etc (Note: the order of 4 and 5 might be reversed)
  
  *6) the authorship of "Christian Ecclesiastical History"
  
  *7) The authorship of the legends of Christian Saints (Christian Hagiography)

Others may disagree with this DRAFT arrangement, but such a draft is necessary in order to identify and to discuss anachronisms.

But thanks Mac for the reference to Michael Jensen. The theologian Michael Jensen appears to subscribe to a view that looks on the surface to be something like the belief in the reincarnation of the "Christian Psyche" down through the ages, from the early centuries of the common era through to the 21st century. This sounds a bit far-fetched:

Be that as it may, it must be said that Moss takes the most sceptical reading of these texts as a matter of course - indeed, she is far more sceptical of their historical veracity than other scholarly readers have been. This has the effect of minimizing the fact that the experience of persecution enters the Christian psyche very early on.

However it seems that both Price and Moss appear to agree about "the fictive and anachronistic features of the martyr accounts".

Martyr accounts started to flourish once the Diocletian trouble was past, and for reasons of ecclesiastical power politics. Eusebius, a great cataloguer of martyr-fictions, tended to meld the (real and imagined) pagan persecutors of the past with their supposed successors in his own day, the so-called heretics, both of them Satan’s agents to subvert and to destroy the One True Church. This equation allowed him to invoke the martyrs as endorsing the theological opinions of Eusebius’ own party.

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Throughout The Myth of Persecution I could not help noticing again and again how what Moss says about the fictive and anachronistic features of the martyr accounts applies equally to the New Testament writings. She seems to draw a distinction.

The reason it was so easy to forge or invent martyrdom stories is that, unlike the New Testament but like the overwhelming majority of early Christian literature, stories about martyrs weren’t canonized. This meant that when they were copied, the scribes responsible had considerable freedom to alter, expand, edit, or invent traditions as they saw fit. Sometimes authors were just adding to an earlier tradition. They set down in writing campfire stories or gossipy oral traditions, the origins of which are completely unknown. Other times they edited a text to make it more orthodox, placing creeds, statements of faith, or denouncements of heretics on the lips of the saints. (p. 235)

In order to identify "the fictive and anachronistic features of the martyr accounts" one must place all Christian literary accounts into a sequence by genre, which is why I created the draft listing above. The identification of the anachronistic features of the martyr accounts entails examining the historical appearance of this genre within the overall sequence of the historical appearance of all such genres.

However I do not see that the theologian Michael Jensen is adding anything to the historical reconstruction of this genre of Christian literature.

His appeals are to the emotions of the reader and are firmly theologically based:

Confessing "I am a Christian," as the martyrs have done, is also a refusal to accept alternative ways of finding and describing one's self by means of (for example) security, pleasure, power, action, nationhood, ethnicity, or honour.

Instead, Christian discipleship means giving one's self over to a divine designation, even if that means suffering and death. In the face of the trials and temptations that are an inevitable part of human experience, it is an offering of one's self up to the providence of God as it is evidenced in the life, death, resurrection and promised return of Jesus Christ.