The martyrs.
Not a historical category. Twenty-one Coptic and Ghanaian labourers were beheaded on a Libyan beach in February 2015 and were in the Coptic calendar within the week. The altar in an ancient church is a tomb, and the relic underneath is the point.
Martyrdom is where Christianity started and it is not over. Perpetua's prison diary from Carthage in 203, written in her own voice before she was killed in the arena, is among the earliest surviving texts by a Christian woman anywhere. The cult of the martyrs shaped the physical church: Christians met at their graves on the anniversary, built altars over them, and the Roman requirement that an altar contain relics comes straight from that. What is uncomfortable, and worth saying plainly, is what happened after Constantine — Christians with imperial power produced martyrs of their own, from Donatists to Anabaptists to Orthodox clergy under Soviet rule, and a great deal of Christian martyrology is Christians killing Christians. The contemporary cases are mostly in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan and North Korea. The twenty-one men killed in Libya in February 2015 were Coptic migrant labourers plus Matthew Ayariga, a Ghanaian who reportedly refused to be separated from them; the Coptic Church canonised them within a week, and Rome added them to its own martyrology in 2023.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.