Reddit reviews The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom
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They literally worship a martyr. They figure that if they're not being persecuted, they're not doing something right, so they just imagine it for themselves.
There's a great book called The Myth of Persecution that looks into the history of this weird drive of theirs. It was present since the very beginning of the Christian church.
That too is myth.
Source: I heard it on NPR from Candida Moss, author of The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (amazon link).
Highly recommended:
The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida Moss.
The martyrdom traditions of the Apostles are all 2nd century at best. The only one who has arguable attestation (from Josephus) as having been killed was James, but Josephus doesn't say why James was killed and it's highly questionable whether he's even making a reference to the putative Apostle at all.
Stephen is probably a fictional character (though Robert Eisenman makes an interesting argument that the Stephen story in Acts is a gloss on the killing of James). Not that Acts can be use as valid evidence anyway, but even internally Stephen is not actually a witness of Jesus, just an ecstatic bbeliever.
Even beyond the total absence of evidence that any direct followers of Jesus died for their beliefs, we don't even know what their beliefs were. There is no good evidence that any of them ever even claimed to have seen a physically resurrected Jesus (as opposed to visionary experiences) and there is decent evidence that they did not make that claim.
As a matter of fact, we can't really confirm that any of these characters even existed.
Let me focus on your claim about the martyrdom of the saints, and whether that really serves as evidence for the claims of Christianity. Sorry for the essay, hopefully my points are clear.
If you are really interested in a deep dive I'd encourage you to listed to a 3-episode series of the (Atheist) podcast Reasonable Doubts:
The guest in episode 113 is Candida Moss, who just released a new book "The Myth of Christian Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom". Candida Moss is not an atheist, she is a Christian, and a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame.
I haven't read the book, but I've listed to the podcasts several times, and I think I can summarize the arguments and discussion:
The first and most significant problem with the "Argument from Martyrs" is that it accepts the narrative of the book of Acts and the epistles in the New Testament at face value. This is circular reasoning: the truth of the New Testament is what is in dispute. We (atheists) don't accept the accuracy or reliability of the Bible, so you can't use even the mundane parts of the New Testament narrative (the journeys of the apostles) to argue for the truth of the miraculous ones (Jesus' resurrection).
Secondly, extra-biblical stories about the martyrdom of the apostles from early church tradition are highly suspect. They seem to have appeared 2-3 centuries later, and bear characteristics of mythology, not history. This is one of the main points of Moss' book, so I'd encourage you to listen to the first podcast or pick up her book for full details and documentation.
Third, the "Argument from Martyrs" is sometimes summarized as "why would they die for a lie?", but when you really flesh out the argument, it has a very high bar to pass. Just any believer being killed isn't enough; after all, we don't count modern Muslim martyrs as evidence for the truth of the Koran, right? For this argument to really work, the believer has to have the following characteristics:
There are no disciples who's death meets all these criteria. Paul and Stephen are ruled out, they were not eyewitnesses. Other deaths in the book of Acts, if you read the narratives carefully, either read as executions of political/social troublemakers, or provide no opportunity for them to recant.
And finally, even the core claim "nobody would die for a lie" is provably false. There are probably a hundred reasons someone might die for something they knew was false. Here are an easy half dozen off the top of my head:
Take a modern example: the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. In his early life he was convicted of fraud for a variety of scams involving "seer-stones" he read while gazing into his hat. Later he claims to have been given the Book of Mormon by the Angel Moroni, which he translated from "reformed Egyptian" (a made-up language) while reading magic golden plates (that nobody else saw and later disappeared) in his hat. Sound familiar?
To anyone (except a devout Mormon), it is clear that Joseph Smith was a fraudster, and knew that he was inventing a religion out of the air. He knew that it was a lie, and yet he held firm to his teachings until his death in 1844 at the hands of an angry mob.
Do we take that death as evidence of the truth of his religion? No, we don't.
Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.
And they will continue to believe that christians have been persecuted since Roman times even though that is not true. Even a Notre Dame historian had to admit the historical christian persecution is just another sales tactic to get money from the dimwits.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527
And there's scholarship to suggest that lots of the martyrdom stories are later romantic inventions of the church fathers who were obsessed with the ideal of a "good death". This coming from Christian scholars even.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527
As far as apostles dying for a lie, I don't think critical historians really agree with this apologetic/traditional claim. Possibly a few apostles died, but I think most of these claims are later legends.
I haven't read it yet, but Professor Moss of Notre Dame has a book on the subject you might be interested in http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373556152&sr=8-1&keywords=the+myth+of+persecution
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2901880
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0062104527
Check out the book above, and the article related to it. It's been very well received recently. Although the idea that the accounts of martyrdom were exaggerated has been around for a while.
Christians persecution at the hands of Nero was probably more to do with them going against the empire, not paying taxes etc, than their actual religious beliefs. Romans were actually very religiously tolerant as long as you paid your taxes.
> Pagan Romans persecuted the Christian Romans while the Christian Romans fled or became martyrs.
This is largely BS. Persecution complex is a strategy for building a fortress mentality among Monotheists. FFS, even today, American Christians (the most powerful and wealthiest religious group in history) believe that they are being persecuted. They believe that Christianity is the most persecuted religion, not just around the world, but even in the USA itself.
The whole "Romans Fed the Christians to the Lions" stories are propaganda material.
Read: The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Professor Candida Moss
> In The Myth of Persecution, Candida Moss, a leading expert on early Christianity, reveals how the early church exaggerated, invented, and forged stories of Christian martyrs and how the dangerous legacy of a martyrdom complex is employed today to silence dissent and galvanize a new generation of culture warriors.
> According to cherished church tradition and popular belief, before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal in the fourth century, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. These saints, Christianity's inspirational heroes, are still venerated today.
> Moss, however, exposes that the "Age of Martyrs" is a fiction—there was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches.
> The traditional story of persecution is still taught in Sunday school classes, celebrated in sermons, and employed by church leaders, politicians, and media pundits who insist that Christians were—and always will be—persecuted by a hostile, secular world. While violence against Christians does occur in select parts of the world today, the rhetoric of persecution is both misleading and rooted in an inaccurate history of the early church. Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get Christians and, rather, embrace the consolation, moral instruction, and spiritual guidance that these martyrdom stories provide.
I just started reading the Myth of Christian Persecution. Can't wait to get to the meat of it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527
Interesting. I may have to get my hands on that one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Persecution
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/24/the_myth_of_persecution_early_christians_werent_persecuted/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/candida-moss/the-myth-of-christian-persecution_b_2901880.html
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527
The Christians were not persecuted in the first century. They were a laughable little cult and not at all a threat to the ruling authorities, either Jewish or Roman. The notion that someone put a sword to their throat and said "renounce your belief in the resurrection or diiiiiiie" is complete nonsense.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0
> It may perhaps be a grand illusion, a trick played on us by our brain, but would that illusion be any more grand than to say that it all is an illusion and we shouldn't simple become skeptic solipsists?
Well, there's some new breakthroughs in neuroscience that seem to point towards us not having free will. But to me, the idea that given the exact same scenario with the exact same inputs could result in a different decision doesn't make any sense to me unless you just say that choices are random (which I wouldn't exactly call free will either).
> I mentioned this in another post, but I believe that one sins against the observer. If a man beats his wife in front of his child, he sins both against the wife and the child. Moreover, a guilty person forgiving fully another guilty person would not be the fullest expression of mercy.
This answers why you think you should also atone to god, but it doesn't answer why you believe it's moral for someone else to take your punishment for you.
> This discovery of an empty tomb, the visions of post mortem Jesus and the belief-to-the-death of early Christians of the veracity of his being risen from the dead.
Not sure what you mean by multiply attested, but none of these facts are corroborated outside the bible. There's also new literature out there that seems to point heavily towards the idea that early Christian persecution was a myth.
They lied. Just like they lied about everything else.
>Suetonius was contemporary to Tacitus, and describes the fire as a great calamity. Nero is considerably more villainized in his account, described as having ordered the fire set. He makes no mention of Tacitus.
Suetonius was 13 years younger than Tacitus and most of what he wrote follows Tacitus' work. Yes, Suetonius is harder on Nero than Tacitus, but Tacitus is the one who made up the story about burning Christians.
Regarding the fire, Tacitus is the one who claims it destroyed most of Rome, while Suetonius claims that it was staged by Nero. My point is that Tacitus has been proven to exaggerate, and he was only 8 years old when all of this supposedly happened (Source: Just look up when he was born and when the fire took place).
Regarding the burning of Christians (again), we know that the Romans fed Prisoners to animals. But again, Tacitus is the only one who claimed that Nero was using them to light up his garden. This book about the Roman colloseum even states there's no evidence in their records that Christians were used in the fights. When you think about it, Rome had freedom of religion at that time, good record keepers, lots of historians. What they do record is imprisoning people for cannibalism, and things we would today call terrorism. At that point in Christian history, Martyrdom was a guaranteed ticket to heaven, so it was in their interests to cause trouble in the name of Jesus, and then get killed for it. But Romans weren't killing them for being Christians. Even if you consider Nero's actual historically verified act of blaming the fire on the Christians, they would be charged for arson and murder. Not being Christian.
There's actually a really good book that goes into some deep detail about why legends of 300 years of persecution are probably myths, and makes some other good points about why Tacitus is probably making stuff up (or misremembering). For example, during Nero's reign, Rome was actually trying to protect freedom of religion - one of the reasons why Nero's golden dome was so loudly protested (imagine if America was claiming you had the choice to practice whatever religion you wanted, while they erected a gigantic golden cross in the whitehouse front lawn.).
Need I remind you again, that Tacitus was just out of childhood when these things were going on, and then wrote about them much much later. He was 8-10 years old while these events happened, and 50 years later he was still writing the annals when he died. I really doubt he was huddled amongst charred buildings or hiding in the gardens as a child and writing these things down.
As a senator he did have access to the state records, and yes, a most of what Tacitus wrote can be verified by archaeology and other historians of his time. However, he recalls a much greater fire than what historians today found to have actually happened, and again, he is the only source of a story about Nero using Christians as candles.
> See myth of Christian persecution, Christian persecution complex. You seem to have it.
Since /u/PadreDieselPunk is doing a great job responding to your other points, I just want to focus on this comment you made in passing. This assertion, lately popularized by amateur authors such as Candida Moss, is demonstrably false. These bush-league studies come out every once in awhile for shock value, and to make a quick buck from people who don't know any better. But these works (like Candida Moss') are universally panned by professional historians and historiographers. Including atheistic ones. The professional book reviews of these types of books (the ones that appear in peer-reviewed journals of history and archaeology) are very, very fun to read. They tear them apart.
If you want to be taken seriously around these parts, you should do your homework a little better. Don't simply grasp at fallacious and absurd historical arguments because you think it will earn you some quick debate points. Stick with the facts.
> James' death is recorded in acts
Oh, well if it was written in an ancient text, it must have happened. Like everything else written in ancient texts, right?
> it strikes the question of why Christians have had such a long history of persecution.
Yes it does.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371062874&sr=8-1&keywords=the+myth+of+persecution