'My share of God's reward': Exploring the roles and formulations of the afterlife in early Christian martyrdom

This dissertation explores the roles and varying formulations of the afterlife in early Christian martyrdom accounts. In Hellenistic Jewish and Christian literature, the afterlife or personal immortality becomes inexorably linked to the Noble Death as the reward or compensation for martyrdom, a connection firmly rooted in the Deuteronomistic notion that divine justice will not allow the righteous to suffer unjustly without compensation. This marriage is fostered within Hellenistic Jewish literature by the Greco-Roman preoccupation with the Noble Death. Beginning with a brief investigation of the change in attitude toward a Noble Death and the postulation of a personal immortality among formative Judaisms of the Hellenistic Period, one notices a spirit of theological experimentation that passes on to early Christianity. Through a survey of martyrological thought within the New Testament, selected early Christian theologians addressing martyrdom (Ignatius, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and Origen of Alexandria), and the martyrological Acta traditions (as compiled by Herbert Musurillo), it becomes evident that formulations of personal immortality are greatly varied among early Christian martyrology, but personal immortality is always present within these texts and is integral to the basis of a Noble Death for Christ functioning therein as compensation for the loss suffered by the martyr. It is my observation that a pattern is also visible within the trajectory of Christian martyrological ideology and narratives, in which the attitude toward martyrdom vacillates between a more life-affirming one and a more world-denying one, in which death is preferred over life.