Suffering for your beliefs ......Early Christian Martyrdom ... today on the wireless

Now I am looking forward to listening to this edition of In Our Time.

The Martyrdom of Saint Blandina, 1886

Partly because of the subject matter and also because of the insights it might offer up about anyone who is strong enough to suffer for their beliefs.

*Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the accounts by Eusebius of Caesarea (c260-339 AD) and others of the killings of Christians in the first three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus. Eusebius was writing in a time of peace, after The Great Persecution that had started with Emperor Diocletian in 303 AD and lasted around eight years. 

Many died under Diocletian, and their names are not preserved, but those whose deaths are told by Eusebius became especially celebrated and their stories became influential. 

Through his writings, Eusebius shaped perceptions of what it meant to be a martyr in those years, and what it meant to be a Christian.

With, Candida Moss, Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, Kate Cooper, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, James Corke-Webster, Senior Lecturer in Classics, History and Liberal Arts at King’s College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson"*

Picture; The Martyrdom of Saint Blandina (1886) at the Church of Saint-Blandine de Lyon, France, Author Delfin Le Dauphin, Licensing, I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: w:en:Creative Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

*Early Christian Martyrdom, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blandina