Martyrs of exile : John of Ephesus and religious persecution

Abstract

In the late sixth century, John of Ephesus drew on a familiar narrative of early Christian martyrdom to encourage anti-Chalcedonian Christians to endure sufferings that he claimed were caused by imperially sanctioned religious persecution against God’s true saints. Nevertheless, while John’s Church History and Lives of the Eastern Saints paint a picture of the pervasive suffering and persecution of true Christians, the details of his stories differ significantly from the gory hagiographies of many early Christian martyrs. Rather than state-sanctioned torture and gruesome deaths, John’s saints suffer most often from loss of property and from exile; they are more in danger of hypothermia from the winter cold than of being torn limb from limb. This chapter examines the rhetorical representation of persecution in the writings of John of Ephesus in comparison to pre-Constantinian stories of Christian persecution and in the wake of the post-Constantinian legal response to forms of Christianity that differed from imperial orthodoxy. I argue that although the Roman Empire’s treatment of Christians who refused to participate in key ritual offerings, whether second-century altar sacrifices or sixth-century Eucharist offerings, shifted, John of Ephesus interpreted the ostensibly kinder and gentler reform-minded imperial pressures of his later period as equally threatening to Christians’ eternal salvation as earlier pressures had been. For John, this conflation between these periods and these experiences thus justified narrating the stories of exiled anti-Chalcedonian saints through the familiar rhetoric of early Christian martyrdom and persecution.