Under Caesar's Sword Responses to Persecution and Martyrdom in Comparative Perspective

In 2019, Cambridge University Press published an edited volume entitled Under Caesar's Sword, the product of a three-year study on contemporary Christian responses to persecution in various parts of the world. As part of the overall findings, the project directors noted three primary methods of response: (1) Survival strategies (trying to avoid the attention of the persecutors); (2) Association strategies (building relationships beyond their own communities in order to create a broader network of potential support); and (3) Confrontation strategies (directly challenging the persecutors through various means including martyrdom, which Christians accept as an act of resistance). These categories provide a useful heuristic tool for reevaluating the discourse in some early Christian texts, including the apocryphal acts of the apostles and other texts related to martyrdom. This article employs the insights from Under Caesar's Sword to explore examples of all three strategies from the earliest Christian centuries. However, not all strategies were equally appreciated in that time. Because suffering came to be so closely linked to Christian identity, survival strategies were sometimes critiqued as evidence of a lack of faith.