Tertullian, Antidote for the Scorpion's Sting 8

We press a single point, and this alone is our challenge: are martyrdoms divine commands? Recognize that, and you will trust the commands by reason, because God never commands anything without reason. After all, the death of His faithful ones is honored in His sight, as David sings (Psalm 116:15). I do not take this for the common debt owed by all; that death is just, yes, but ignominious, the wages of transgression and deserved condemnation. The death that is added to it, though — the death born of religious witness and the battle of confession, for justice and for a sacrament — that is another matter. As Isaiah says: "See how the righteous perishes, and no one takes it to heart; the devout are taken away, and no one understands. From the face of injustice the righteous perishes, and his burial will be in peace" (Isaiah 57:1-2). Here you have both the preaching and the reward of martyrs.

From the very beginning, justice has suffered violence. The moment God began to be worshiped, religion drew envy's aim: the man who pleased God was murdered, and by his own brother at that — so that impiety, having tasted blood at home, would more readily hunt the blood of strangers. In the end, not only the just but the prophets as well. David was hounded, Elijah driven into flight, Jeremiah stoned, Isaiah sawn in two, Zachariah slaughtered between altar and sanctuary, stamping the stones with perpetual stains of his blood (Jeremiah). The very climax of the Law and the Prophets — not a prophet but an angel — was cut down by a contemptuous slaughter for the fee of a psalm-singing girl. And certainly those who were driven by the Spirit of God were directed by Him into martyrdoms, so that they might also suffer what they had preached.

So too the three brothers. When the dedication of the royal image pressed the city with its duty, they did not ignore what faith — which alone had not been taken captive in them — demanded: to die rather than serve idolatry. They remembered Jeremiah writing to them as that captivity loomed: "And now you will see the golden, silver, and wooden gods of the Babylonians carried on shoulders, striking fear into the nations. Take care, therefore, that you do not become like the foreigners, and be seized with fear when you see the crowds worshiping before and behind them; but say in your hearts: 'You, Lord, we must worship'" (Jeremiah). And so they spoke, their confidence conceived from God, when they shook off the king's conditional threats with the strength of their spirit: "We have no need to answer you on this. The God we worship is able to deliver us from the fiery furnace and from your hand; and then it will be clear to you that we will neither serve your god nor worship the golden image you have set up" (Daniel 3:16-18). Oh, a martyrdom perfected without suffering! They suffered enough, they were scorched enough — those whom God shielded, lest His power seem a lie.

Nor was Daniel spared the pattern. A suppliant of God alone, he was denounced and demanded by the Chaldeans; the lions' accustomed ferocity would have devoured him at once, had Darius's worthy confidence in God been allowed to fail. Moreover, it was necessary for every preacher and worshiper of God who, provoked to idolatry, refused obedience, to suffer — in keeping with that same logic by which the truth had to be commended to those present then and to posterity afterward, for which their passion would stand as the truth's defense; because no one would choose to be killed unless he possessed the truth. Such things from the beginning — both commandments and examples — prove that faith is indebted to martyrdom.