Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.

While the political aspect of the traditionalist quest for prescriptive Christianity has been central to the story from the start, this chapter examines, first, the complicated way that religious and political norms are intertwined in American history and dependent on whether the Christian community is in a position of power or not. Second, the chapter examines two aspects of Christian identity that are especially important in understanding contemporary American politics: (1) a global Christian identity that understands Christians as those persecuted by godless secular society, and (2) an antignostic identity that understands Christians as those who wage war against “gnosticism,” a term applicable to whatever conservative Christians are currently combatting in the political sphere.

Amid the debates about the organization and unity of the church in third-century Carthage, Cyprian rose as a prominent and learned catechist. This chapter looks at several writings associated with basic education – Ad Donatum, Ad Quirinum, De dominica oratione – as well as letters from the ecclesiastical debates to shed light on the way these debates shaped approaches to teaching knowledge of God in catechesis.

This chapter argues that the religious policies of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) are not limited to its frequently noted anti-Puritan satire but are also concerned with Catholic dissent and, more generally, the question of the theatre’s legitimacy and effect on its audiences. The play’s parody of martyrdom arguably reflects the discourse of pseudo-martyrdom to which the Oath of Allegiance controversy had given rise after the Gunpowder Plot and which deeply divided English Catholics, who faced a choice between recusancy, conformity, or some form of semi-conformity. Jonson’s satirical portrayal of Puritans who unsuccessfully attempt to remain ‘religious in midst of the profane’ thus also speaks to Catholic concerns that conformity may eventually lead to an erosion of dissent. This chapter further argues that the Pauline theology of things indifferent is fundamental to the play’s ideological structure and informs both its treatment of religious dissent and the legitimacy of the theatre. Despite its comic resolution, Bartholomew Fair ultimately amounts to a coercive imperative of inclusion that undermines opposition both to the theatre and to the Established Church.

This chapter discusses the collaboratively written First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1599) as a response to Shakespeare’s irreverent transformation of the eponymous Lollard martyr into Falstaff. Oldcastle restores the Lollard martyr to his heroic stature and is therefore often read in terms of a moderate, that is, politically loyal and conformist form of Puritanism. However, the play arguably, in its representation of nonconformity and a conditional form of political obedience, is more radical than is usually assumed and voices a nuanced challenge to royal supremacy over the Church of England. As this chapter further suggests, the play’s nonconformist ethos therefore also contributes to a more ambivalent conception of theatricality than the one embodied by Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a conception of theatricality that is defined by a self-reflexive distrust in the space between seeming and being.

This chapter discusses Shakespeare’s Falstaff as an anti-martyr in the two parts of Henry IV. The character of Falstaff isloosely based on the fifteenth-century Lollard martyr John Oldcastle and was indeed once called Oldcastle in performance. Even though Shakespeare transforms the martyr into a cowardly dissembler, who has very little to do with the Lollard martyr, countless allusions to Oldcastle’s martyrdom provide a meaningful interpretative framework for Falstaff’s ‘better part of valour’. However, this does not mean that Shakespeare mocks the Proto-Protestant as part of a Catholic or anti-Puritan campaign. On the contrary, in contrast with the politically subversive martyr figure in 2 Henry IV, Archbishop Scrope, Shakespeare’s transformation of the Lollard martyr rather amounts to a defence of the Elizabethan ideal of outward conformity. Falstaff’s dissimulation, insofar as it can be read as a rejection of martyrdom, is a form of political obedience. Moreover, Falstaff’s dissimulation also entails a defence of theatrical dissimulation that aligns Shakespeare’s theatre closely with the religious policies of the Elizabethan government.

While many accounts of early Christianity see the early Church as a pacifist movement, closely following Jesus’ non-retaliatory teaching, this chapter argues that there is a more ambiguous relationship to violence in the first three centuries of the Christian movement, including military service. Aside from the violent rhetoric in the eschatological parables of Jesus, Christians appropriated the violence of the Hebrew Bible to shape negative views of outsiders, which in turn prepared the way from actualised violence in the post-Constantine era.

Fighting or war is often reduced to the Arabic word jihād by both Muslim and non-Muslim authors. Such a conflation, however, elides a broader semantic landscape for the term jihād as indicated in a number of Islamic sources; this landscape is resurrected to a considerable extent in this chapter by consulting a broad range of primary Arabic sources.

This chapter explores the development of shahr āshob and marṡiyah poetry from the Kanpur mosque incident of 1913. It argues that poets built on grief and lament to reclaim power and agency, reinterpreting grief and martyrdom in a Sufi perspective as positive symbols of love and faith, which nourished anti-colonial mobilisations in the 1910s and during the Khilafat movement (1919–1924). Iqbal’s poetry was emblematic in proposing a new positive and hopeful interpretation of grief as he turned ruins into new beginnings.

Chapter 3 continues the account of the contest between Mussolini and his unapologetically violent new movement and Amendola’s efforts to reform and defend liberal democracy. As a patriot and a liberal, Giovanni was as staunchly anti-Marxist as the sometime Marxist Mussolini had become. But with his armed squads and populist newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s political recipe was more successful than Giovanni’s purism and rigour. By 1924, Amendola was the leader of the Aventine Secession, a rump of parliamentarians who withdrew from the Chamber of Deputies when Mussolini’s aides murdered their moderate socialist colleague, Matteotti. Amendola maintained his Anti-Fascist leadership until he was assaulted by Fascists in Tuscany in July 1925. After a retreat to Paris and two unsuccessful emergency operations, he died in Cannes in April 1926. While Giovanni was heavily engaged in politics, he continued to wrestle with his relationship with his wife, Eva Kühn, and their four children. Eva went in and out of mental institutions, whether fairly or not. At some point in these years, Giovanni entered into a relationship with the independent Bulgarian-French journalist Nelia Pavlova.

The three subchapters demonstrate the early attempts at Christianizing historiography. The start of history is made by the historically perceived Resurrection of Christ, as outlined by Iulius Africanus. Christians are not simply part of a long history of human development, but they mark a new beginning of human history. What existed before, Paganism and Judaism, were only ephemeral preparations for Christianity. Like Eusebius later, he draws on pseudonymous writings, particularly documents that he refers back to the archive of Edessa. Origen, before him, had already approached history from a spiritual angle, largely disregarding the historical and chronological side of it, and making use of the canonical writings of the New Testament in an allegorical way by which he dissociates Christian history from that of Jews and Pagans, and sees it guided and foreseen by God. Very similar to Origen, Tertullian in the Latin speaking world portraits Christians in fighting of Pagans and Jews, but also deviant Christians, heretics and less commited brothers and sisters which he contrasts with those prophetic Christians who are fully engaged, are prepared for asceticism, rejection of pagan pasts and are willing martyrs. Instead of canonical scriptures it is the prophetic reading of the church traditions that inform about the origins of Christianity.

Chapter 5 explores Pseudo-Hegesippus’ brief yet striking engagement with the ancient Judeo-Christian discourse of martyrdom. It assesses the biblical figures cited in a speech made by the Jewish leader Matthias in De Excidio 5.22, and compares this to the story of the martyr deaths of the Christian apostles Peter and Paul in De Excidio 3.2, to show how De Excidio delegitimates the notion of Jewish martyrdom, implicitly leaving Christians as the only legitimate martyrs of the first century CE.

Milton’s Sonnet XVIII (‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’) propounds a familiar opposition between the ‘pure’ religion of Protestants and a corrupt Catholicism obsessed with material objects and images (‘stocks and stones’). Yet this ostensibly anti-Catholic poem veers brazenly and repeatedly into the language of relic veneration. Beginning with the poignant spectacle of the Waldensians’ bones scattered on the mountainsides, the sonnet goes on to weaponize human remains and grants them sacred force in the form of ‘martyred blood and ashes’ to be sprinkled over Italy. This chapter explores historical, confessional, and literary contexts for Sonnet XVIII’s surprising investment in human remains, both as objects arousing pity and as capable of a kind of material efficacy. Milton’s poem is situated within an extensive tradition of English Protestant poets and preachers, including Michael Drayton, John Donne, and Richard Crashaw, who had wrestled with the question of relics and the problem of scattered bones.

Chapter 3 shifts focus to the postrevolutionary era and how the revolutionary ideology and the national identity it inspired were used and misused by the new Islamic Republic. It also looks at how the Iranian people continued to appropriate and challenge the state’s ideology and representation. The chapter discusses the significance of the Iran–Iraq war (1980-88) in the early years after the revolution and how the war shaped contemporary Iran. While the Pahlavi’s maintained a discourse of monarchical ancient Iran and Persian supremacy, the new Islamic Republic made use of the Karbala paradigm and the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, which played especially well into the context of war and attack from an external force. Though the history and state remained the same, the opposing narratives offered by the old and new rulers speak to the nature of constructed national identities. In both cases, nationalism and Islamism have been crucial to their resistance movements. The Islamic Republic was brought to power by a revolution, whose opposition to the shah was embedded in anti-imperialist and Islamist rhetoric. Echoing Hamid Dabashi’s claim that Shiites must be perpetually engaged in resistance to oppression, the state depicts itself as continuously revolutionary and supports regional movements with analogous rhetoric.

Though not as famous as in Coptic traditions, Saint Thecla is still an important figure in Ethiopic hagiography. In most Ethiopic texts, she is known under the honorific title of “Thecla the Apostolic” (Ṭeqalā ḥawāryāwit). Ethiopians venerate her amongst the major saintly Christian figures as her Life is told and commemorated in the Synaxarium, the official Ethiopic book of saints. Moreover, a whole book, entitled the Book of Thecla (Masḥafa Ṭeqalā), is devoted to her. An abridged version of The Acts of Paul and Thecla, it tells the story of Thecla’s meeting with Paul, her conversion, her two trials, and the final healing of the governor who condemned her. This latter text is a noteworthy witness to the veneration and cult of Thecla in the Ethiopic realm. Thecla is also explicitly alluded to in other hagiographical texts, like the Epistle of Pelagia (BHO 890) and the Martyrdom of Abouqir, John, the Three Virgins, and Their Mother (Synaxarium, 6th of Yakkatit). Other Ethiopic Acts of saints also seem to refer implicitly to Thecla as a model for martyrs, especially female martyrs, such as the unedited martyrdom of her namesake, Thecla, and her four companions (BHO 1157 for the Syriac version).

In the first half of the fifth century, at the origins of Armenian literature, an anonymous author translated the apocryphal Acts of Thecla from the Syriac version of the Greek text (second century). The translation rapidly furthered the spread of the legend across Armenia. In that same century, three works written directly in Armenian presuppose the legend of Thecla. This article focuses on the narrative patterns and the ways in which the paradigms of holiness embodied by Thecla have influenced the representation of holy women who, in the Armenian tradition, are associated with the fundamental stages of the Christianization of Armenia. Thecla, indeed, served as a model of female sanctity along three important lines, namely as holy virgin, teacher and apostle, and martyr. As the venerated proto-martyr, she served as a model for the first female martyrs in the history of Armenian Christianity, respectively, in the apostolic age (Sanduxt) and at the time of the foundation of the Church of Armenia (Hṙip‘simē). The model of holy female apostle is found in the Armenian Martyrdom of Photine too. The Armenian tradition also contributed to the development of the legend and helped to make of Thecla a holy protector of Nicene orthodoxy.