203: Perpetua, the earliest Christian woman whose writings survive

ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 7, 2008 | Jeffrey Fisher

[CheshireTheCat]

There are many accounts of Christian martyrs in the annals of Christianity, but none quite like that of Perpetua, thrown to the beasts and put to the sword on March 7, 203, in Carthage.

There is no doing justice to the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity in a brief essay such as this; the fifteen minutes or so it takes to read the original document, which includes the earliest writing we have from a Christian woman (Perpetua herself), will be well spent.

In short, the twenty-two-year-old Perpetua, her slave girl Felicity, their friend Saturninus (whose first-person account is included in the Passion), and two of their companions were arrested for converting to Christianity, Septimius Severus having forbidden conversion on pain of death. As you might suspect, the document recounts their being browbeaten and intimidated, until eventually they are killed in public, as a matter of sport.

But this isn’t what’s really interesting about the story.

Women are common as saints and martyrs, and they often must resist or convert a pagan man, typically a husband. While Perpetua’s husband is peculiarly absent from her story, her pagan father appears repeatedly, pleading with her, begging her for his sake to renounce her Christianity and save her own life. Her retellings of these episodes are striking for the very human sympathy she has for her father, despite, or perhaps in part because of, the spare prose in which she relates it. She insists on maintaining her faith, but grieves for her father’s suffering, and not only when he is beaten before her eyes by the Roman governor....

[Kevmo]

beautiful story. thanks for posting it.

[super7man]

The articles at ExecutedToday are amazingly well written. They are all good reads.

[sauropod]

bkmk

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“ The articles at ExecutedToday are amazingly well written. They are all good reads.”

I totally agree with you. They are excellent snippets of most interesting and often odd history, things that wouldn’t rise to the level of Great History. But they really bring out the human dimension of those gone before us.

[drSteve78]

And weare all the better for it.