How to Live

Martyrdom as Witness

42 passages, 5 quoted here · Broad agreement in this library

Christians who died rather than deny Christ, and why their deaths were called witness.

Where they stood

Each row is one claim. Each name is a writer, placed at the date of the passage. Select a name to read what they said.

3 of the 3 writers here teach: “Martyrdom is confession and warfare for God.” They answer a rival view: “Christians complain of persecution while wanting to suffer.”

teaches it partly rejects it later writer, summary only

Martyrdom is confession and warfare for God3 teach

Tertullian ×3 Minucius Passion

Christians complain of persecution while wanting to suffer1 reject

Tertullian

What each writer said, earliest first

Tertullian Teaches: Martyrdom is confession and warfare for God

c. 155–c. 220 AD · Apology 50

So you ask why we complain of your persecution when you yourselves are willing to suffer, since you ought to love those through whom you suffer exactly what you want.

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Tertullian Teaches: Martyrdom is confession and warfare for God

c. 155–c. 220 AD · To the Martyrs 1

Blessed designated martyrs, while the lady mother church from her breasts and individual brothers from their own resources supply you in prison with food for the flesh, accept something from us as well, to nourish the spirit. For it does no good to fatten the flesh while the spirit hungers.

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Tertullian Teaches: Martyrdom is confession and warfare for God

c. 155–c. 220 AD · To the Martyrs 3

But now, blessed ones, grant that even a prison is unpleasant for Christians. We were called to the military service of the living God at the very moment when we answered the words of the oath.

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Minucius Felix Teaches: Martyrdom is confession and warfare for God

fl. c. 200 AD · Octavius 37

What a beautiful sight for God when a Christian grapples with pain, when he stands arrayed against threats, punishments, and tortures, when, laughing, he drives home the din of death and the executioner's horror, when he raises his freedom against kings and rulers and yields only to God, whose he is, when he taunts the…

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Passion of Perpetua and Felicity Teaches: Martyrdom is confession and warfare for God

c. 203 AD · Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 1

She will now narrate the whole order of her martyrdom, exactly as she left it written in her own hand and from her own understanding. "While we were still with the persecutors," she says, "my father kept trying to turn me away and cast me down out of his affection.

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Other passages filed here (37)