Discourses of Criminality in Early Christianity

My dissertation complicates and opens new avenues of research on early Christian martyrdom by arguing that the concept of the martyr as an innocent figure who does not deserve to die is dependent on the neglected figure of the guilty criminal who does deserve to die. The first part examines the importance of aesthetics in Roman discourses of justice and how Christians reproduced this in their martyr texts. Criminals were compared or equated with allegedly sub-human creatures who were publicly punished or exploited for spectacle, including slaves and animals. Criminalized Christians were painted with the same brush, but when Christians wrote narratives about martyrs, such as the Martyrs of Lyon, they generally worked to separate martyrs, those who do not deserve to die, from associations with criminals, despite Jesus's and martyrs' designation of criminal by authorities. Against negative portrayals of condemned criminals, martyrs were asserted to be pure, beautiful despite tortures, hyper-rational, and human in a way criminals lacked. The second part shows that Christians were also invested in distinguishing dead martyrs from the ghosts of criminals. Biothanatoi, ghosts of the violently dead, often executed criminals, were a feared type of ghosts whose body parts were used in magic, magic that often understood them as suitable for enslavement and punishment. Executed martyrs were thought to be examples of these ghosts, a subject worthy of reproach for critics of Christianity and a concerning misunderstanding or misrepresentation for many Christians. Those critical of Christianity, such as Eunapius and the emperor Julian, would rhetorically heighten their criminality, whereas Christian apologists and teachers, such as John Chrysostom and Tertullian, would defend martyrs by emphasizing their innocence and exaggerating the guilt of other executed people.