From the time of marcus aurelius onwards, christians are their valuable fater for for the games. This is 15 hundred years of people beefing up the numbers and telling more stories in order to make their versions of those stories have more of an impact. And so what they don't know that, you know, they think that the christians are being humiliated. You know, they see the crowds laughing at them as they're being executed. What they don’t know is that thechristians themselves are circulating stories that are giving a completely different meaning to these deaths. Those are the stories that are eventually going to get carr forward and are going to become the
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the accounts by Eusebius of Caesarea (c260-339 AD) and others of the killings of Christians in the first three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus. Eusebius was writing in a time of peace, after The Great Persecution that had started with Emperor Diocletian in 303 AD and lasted around eight years. Many died under Diocletian, and their names are not preserved, but those whose deaths are told by Eusebius became especially celebrated and their stories became influential. Through his writings, Eusebius shaped perceptions of what it meant to be a martyr in those years, and what it meant to be a Christian.
The image above is of The Martyrdom of Saint Blandina (1886) at the Church of Saint-Blandine de Lyon, France
With:
Candida Moss
Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham
Kate Cooper
Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London
And
James Corke-Webster
Senior Lecturer in Classics, History and Liberal Arts at King’s College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson