Here are some spot-on questions from readers with (spotty?) attempts to answer from me….

QUESTION:  (Note: this is a question about my views on how early Christians appealed to their martyrs as evidence of the truth of the Christian message in order to convert outsiders.  The question is specifically based on the book called “the Martyrdom of Polycarp,” our earliest account of a Christian being tried and martyred for his faith)

Your integrated model, developed over this series, is becoming clearer: hell provides urgency, miracles provide credibility, and martyrdom functions as miracle in human form. That is a coherent and serious historical account.

But reading Polycarp’s response to the proconsul, I find myself pausing.

The proconsul threatens him with fire. Polycarp answers calmly. He does not sound like a man under pressure making a difficult calculation. He sounds almost expectant, as if death is not the worst thing that could happen to him, but something closer to a threshold he is ready to cross.

Your model explains well why that composure was persuasive to outsiders. What it seems to leave open is what produced that composure from the inside: why death itself appears to have been experienced differently, not just argued about differently.

That inner reordering, from death as threat to death as awaited encounter, seems to ask for more than urgency plus community plus miracle claim.

Does your framework account for that transformation, or does it explain the conditions under which such transformation became possible, while the transformation itself remains open?

RESPONSE:

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