Review: Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts, by L. Stephanie Cobb

Abstract

L. Stephanie Cobb, Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts . Oakland, University of California Press, 2016, 264pp, $95.00, ISBN 9780520293359 Divine Deliverance should be required reading for anyone interested in ancient Christian martyr texts. It demands that we jettison our widely held assumptions that the martyrs were depicted as suffering and that the audience is expected to identify with their pain. Most scholarship holds that early Christian communities, reflecting the ancient cultural turn (identified by Judith Perkins) toward configuring the subject as “sufferer,” saw martyrs as sufferers whose endurance should be imitated and whose pain should, if possible, be replicated. Instead, drawing on a historically sensitive audience-response theory that provides a framework for understanding how ancient audiences engaged with texts, Cobb persuasively argues that these texts did not view suffering as something to be imitated, but as something to be overcome—“a problem to be solved” (157). After situating her intervention within current discourse and laying the methodological foundations for her readings (“Introduction”), Cobb reminds us (“Chapter 1: Bodies in Pain: Ancient and Modern Horizons of Expectation”) that pain has a complex relationship to physical injury, and that “discourses of pain are culturally situated” (27). Consequently, depictions of physical harm must be distinguished from depictions of pain and suffering: the narrative description of bodily injury does not entail a protagonist suffering or signal that a reader should empathize. Narrative depictions of violence may not even be concerned with pain; they may have ideological aims to which pain is unrelated, incidental, or subordinate. On this point, Cobb brings a host of ancient, medieval, and modern perspectives to bear. For example, the works of Seneca and Lucan describe physical dissolution at great length but, Cobb notes, with no concern for victims' physical pain (15–16). Cobb pushes us to suspend our modern impulse “to supply the experience of pain” when we read (30). Cobb then turns fully …