MARTYR

MARTYR. The word means “witness” in its legal sense, as in the witnesses sworn in at a court of law. In Acts the word is used of the apostles (q.v.) as witnesses of Christ’s ministry and Resurrection. Soon afterward, with the spread of persecution of Christians, the martyr became identified as one who bears testimony to Christ’s victory over death through the sacrifice of his or her own life. In the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (q.v.), particularly his “Epistle to the Romans,” one finds a certain identification of the martyr’s sufferings with the passion of Jesus Christ in imagery, which further recalls that of the Eucharist (q.v.). The martyrdom of one of Ignatius’s correspondents, Polycarp of Smyrna (q.v.), became the paradigmatic account of a martyr’s death and model for the many that would follow. This document, too, makes heavy use of imagery from the Gospel accounts of the Passion, and Polycarp’s prayer before his death bears striking resemblance to the eucharistic anaphora. Polycarp’s “Life” also provides the first witness to the cult of the martyr. The saint’s community gathers yearly on the anniversary of his “birthday” (i.e., into the Kingdom of Heaven) around the place where his relics are interred.

Martyrs became the earliest heroes of the Church, to be followed on the cessation of state persecution with the conversion of Constantine, by the “bloodless martyrdom” of monasticism (qq.v.). Traditionally, martyrdom for the faith is automatic grounds for inclusion in the diptychs, recognition of saintliness-without any formal canonization process. The 20th c., especially in Soviet Russia, has given ample evidence that martyrdom is not an obsolete possibility. The Greeks, together with other Orthodox nations of the Balkans (qq.v.), have their “new martyrs” of the Turkish era.