Posted on 05/03/2013 10:50:36 AM PDT by marshmallow
Candida Moss, a professor of early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame and a practicing Catholic, wants to shatter what she calls the “myth” of martyrdom in the Christian faith.
Sunday school tales of early Christians being rounded up at their secret catacomb meetings and thrown to the lions by evil Romans are mere fairy tales, Moss writes in a new book. In fact, in the first 250 years of Christianity, Romans mostly regarded the religion's practitioners as meddlesome members of a superstitious cult.
The government actively persecuted Christians for only about 10 years, Moss suggests, and even then intermittently. And, she says, many of the best known early stories of brave Christian martyrs were entirely fabricated.
The controversial thesis, laid out in "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom," has earned her a lot of hate mail and a few sidelong looks from fellow faculty members. But Moss maintains that the Roman Catholic Church and historians have known for centuries that most early Christian martyr stories were exaggerated or invented.
A small group of priest scholars in the 17th century began sifting through the myths, discrediting not only embellished stories about saints (including that St. George slew a dragon) but also tossing out popular stories about early Christian martyrs.
Historians, including Moss, say only a handful of martyrdom stories from the first 300 years of Christianity—which includes the reign of the cruel, Christian-loathing Nero—are verifiable. (Saint Perpetua of Carthage, pictured in the stained glass window above, is one of the six famous early Christian martyrs Moss believes was actually killed for her faith.)
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I wonder if the professor tells her students about persecution of Christians in modern times. During the Spanish Civil War, for example, nearly 7,000 Catholic priests, nuns, and monks were executed by Leftist forces.
Do you think that the mythology surrounding Peter and Paul’s martyrdom is true? I think that is highly likely as the two would be considered political rabble rousers and they could be considered easy scapegoats for Nero. However, you are right that the stories of the early martyrs contains some quite fantastical elements... St George and the Dragon and St. Catherine of Alexandria come to mind. It is easy to distinguish what might be a myth from more realistic stories like Perpetua’s.
Lol! Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch, could it?
Today's generations have been so thoroughly "dumbed down" by what has been called an "education system" and its influence on scholarship, even that which should inform those in positions of leadership in America's churches, that many will accept this "professor's" word as valid commentary, never bothering to question sources or authenticity.
Democrat candidates, funds, PACs : $40,860.00
Republican candidates, funds, PACs : $6,700.00
The moron professor probably thinks that the Sudan is a perfectly safe for a openly practicing christian to live...
It's not like they joined the Lubavitch cult.
It was similar for Christians in Tokogawa Japan - read “Silence” for a nicely done rendition. They would make everyone step on pictures of Christ or saints or spit on crosses to demonstrate they weren’t Christian and if they didn’t they put em to the sword...katana that is.
In the 'Spirit' of judge not least I be judged, I will answer in this manner. I do not find in Catholic doctrine, any part of the first five commandments. The church has become the object of worship with a flesh woman being the object of veneration and keeper of the flock. Seems only plausible that what goes around will naturally come around.
If Catholics were executed in only a ten year window, then why are there so many martyrs who died under many different Roman tyrants?
What about Saul of Tarsus? Was his story a myth? What about Saint Maurice?
Moss really has no more to say that Gibbon said 250 years ago. Of course the persecutions were exaggerated, but only because the state lacked the means and the will to to act systematically. The Romans were pikers compared with the Bolsheviks who killed a thousand priests.
Chabad certainly has its problems, but denying the historicity of the events in the Torah isn’t one of them. In fact, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe was standing firm on this issue when everyone else was wobbling.
Good points. And if she doesn’t get what you are saying then she misses the reason why Christians were so hateful to other Christians after the persecution was ended by Constantine. The African Church remained divided right down to the Vandal conquest and afterwards, because some Christians collaborated, some aposticized and then had the nerve to be accepted by those who had remained faithful and had suffered rather than yield. St. Augustine himself was unable to unite Christians by persuasion and was forced as the governor to use force to keep the Donatists and the Catholics from fighting. Nothing is more bitter than a war between brothers.
Chabad gets heck from the lax and the observant, doesn’t it?
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