Early Martyr Narratives

Eric Rebillard is the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Cornell University. He is editor of Greek and Latin Narratives About the Ancient Martyrs, and author of Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity and The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity.

"Rebillard has thoughtfully and effectively attempted to retranslate, redate, and reshape the way that we think about and use 'authentic' accounts of martyrdom in the telling of Christian history… Though brief, The Early Martyr Narratives leaves its reader with much to chew over and digest…[Rebillard's] arguments have wide-reaching ramifications for text criticism and early Christian history and challenge us to rethink why and in what ways we talk about the past." (Journal of the American Academy of Religion) "Rebillard's radical discussion is a significant contribution to the study of early Christian martyrdom. Not every scholar in this field will give up the quest for original versions of the martyr texts, but this volume is a must read for everyone who is interested in early Christian martyrdom. Rebillard has persuasively argued for a fundamentally new and principally literary approach to early Christian martyrdom writings," (Review of Biblical Literature) "[A] well-researched and tightly argued book. its argumentation rests in every step on a thorough analysis of a representative and relevant number of primary texts in dialogue with a vast array of modern scholarship in four languages...Thanks to the foundation laid by this book, the texts in the Musurillo-volume are now more detached than ever before from their being part of a semi-canononical collection in order to be fully integrated within the much vaster dynamics of late ancient literature." (Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses) "A breakthrough work. Éric Rebillard is uniquely and eminently qualified to confront the problem of the dual legacy of the Protestant-Catholic polemics of the Reformation that focused on the 'genuine' status of the accounts of saints and martyrs on the one hand, and of the emerging concerns of 'scientific historiography' of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the other." (Brent Shaw, author of Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine) "At both the macro and micro level, in respect not only to broad literary questions but also to debates about the transmission and editing of individual texts, The Early Martyr Narratives makes significant contributions to our understanding of the real roles played by these accounts in the life of the Roman empire's Christian communities." (Dennis Trout, author of Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry)