Review: Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia: Martyrdom and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity, by Kyle Smith

Abstract

Kyle Smith, Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia: Martyrdom and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity . Oakland, CA, University of California Press, 2016, 256 pp, $95.00, ISBN: 9780520289604 Kyle Smith has written a provocative, engaging, and elegant book. In Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia: Martyrdom and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity , Smith has masterfully utilized more familiar sources, such as Eusebius' Life of Constantine, as well as sources less well-known—at least to some Western scholars—such as the Syriac texts: Aphrahat's Demonstrations , The Martyrdom of Blessed Simeon bar Ṣabba‘e , and the History of Blessed Simeon bar Ṣabba‘e . Through his reading of these texts, Smith critiques previous historiography and demonstrates new possibilities and avenues for constructing the history of Persian Christians in the fourth century and their relationship to Constantine and the Roman Empire. Smith begins his book not with the fourth century but, rather, with the twenty-first. The opening pages of Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia offer readers a brief vignette describing the 2008 kidnapping and subsequent murder of Monsignor Paulos Rahho—a Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul in northern Iraq. By weaving in the contemporary narrative with his historical reconstruction of fourth-century politics and the concomitant historiography from that moment, Smith underscores the power of historical narratives in affecting contemporary issues of identity, religion, and politics. More specifically, Smith sees the capture and murder of Rahho, one that has been understood as part and parcel with anti-Christian sentiment in the region, as the culmination of well-known and well-rehearsed tropes about suffering and …