Perpetua, Felicity, and 21st-century Martyrdom

– by Christian T. George

“Two jewels have flashed in the Church today.” So preached St. Augustine in his sermon “On the Birthdays of Saints Perpetua and Felicity.” Today, we join Augustine in celebrating the heroic legacies of these two women who dared to act upon their convictions, even when those actions stood in direct violation of the laws of their land.

For eighteen centuries, Christians have remembered Perpetua’s plight thanks to a diary she kept in the days leading up to her execution. In it, we have the earliest known writing from a female Christian. But when coupled with the diary of another prisoner, Saturius, we also discover a fuller picture of the events that transpired on the fateful day of March 7, AD 203.

Vibia Perpetua, an upper class, well educated, married woman of twenty-two, lived in Carthage, Africa (modern Tunis) with her father, husband, infant son, and slave, Felicity. Having become followers of Jesus Christ, and in direct violation of an edict issued by Emperor Septimius Severus forbidding new Christian converts, Perpetua and Felicity were imprisoned and sentenced to death in the local amphitheater.

“I was terrified,” confessed Perpetua, “because I had never experienced such darkness before. What a rough time we had between the intense heat resulting from overcrowding and extortion by the soldiers.”

According to Roman law, if Perpetua had recanted her beliefs and offered a pinch of incense to the pagan gods, she would have been released from prison. It was a matter that her father, a pagan, firmly pressed. Undeterred by her father’s arguments, Perpetua pointed to a nearby water pitcher and said, “Can it be called by any other name than what it is?”

“No,” her father replied.

“So, too, I cannot be called anything else except what I am, a Christian.”

Her father then attempted a more convincing argument. In his arms, he brought Perpetua’s infant son. “Consider your son,” he said, “who will not be able to live once you are gone.” Even this, however, did not dissuade her decision.

Perhaps an even more astonishing act of boldness is found in the actions of her slave, Felicity, who was eight months pregnant when the two women were arrested. In ancient Rome, it was illegal to execute pregnant women. After the baby was born, it was legal and even encouraged to commit infanticide. Babies with birth defects were thrown in the large trash heaps that collected outside the walls of the city. But inside the womb, prior to its birth, the infant was fully protected by law. For this reason, it seemed as if Felicity might be spared the agony of execution. Yet because she sought the great privilege of martyrdom, incredibly, Felicity induced labor prematurely and gave her infant daughter to be adopted by a Christian sister. According to the account of her martyrdom, Felicity was still lactating when she, Perpetua, and a handful of young male converts entered the amphitheater on March 7.

In the first and second centuries, Christian martyrdoms were common in amphitheaters throughout the Roman Empire. In his Annals, the Roman historian Tacitus describes how, in AD 64, Christians were interrogated, tortured, and executed during the reign of Emperor Nero.

“Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted .… Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”

Jesus had warned his followers that discipleship had a cost. “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of earth” (Acts 1:8). The Greek word Luke uses for witness is martos – the root of our own word martyr. Martyrdom actually became an effective method of evangelism in the early church – the ultimate witness for those who took Jesus’ words seriously: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). All of Christ’s disciples were martyred (except for Judas, who committed suicide). Simon, Andrew, and Bartholomew were crucified; James was beheaded; John was boiled alive in oil; Matthew was stabbed; Thomas was speared, and so on. Even Jesus himself suffered the agonies of Roman execution – he never required of his followers anything he was unprepared to do himself.

According to the account of Perpetua’s martyrdom, after being thrown to the ground by a wild cow, Perpetua – apparently concerned with modesty – adjusted her tunic and then “pinned up her disheveled hair.” The woman would, at the very least, die with her dignity. Then she pulled Felicity, who had been trampled by the beast, to her feet.

Still alive, they were ushered to the center of the oval stadium with the other prisoners who themselves had been attacked by leopards and bears. After exchanging holy kisses, the group was systematically decapitated. When the gladiator finally arrived at Perpetua, he attempted to pierce his sword through Perpetua’s collarbones into her heart. His efforts to dispatch her proved unsuccessful. Astonishingly, “she herself guided the faltering right hand of the novice gladiator to her throat.”

For eighteen centuries, the martyrdoms of these two women have inspired and challenged the church to “not be afraid of those who can kill the body, and after that can do no more” (Luke 12:4). And as we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century, their voices grow louder – their gems shine brighter. For never has there been an era in history in which government-endorsed genocides and state-sponsored Christian martyrdoms have become as normative as they currently are. According one survey, there has been an average of 100,000 Christians martyred every year in the last decade. By 2025, that number is expected to grow to an annual death rate of 150,000.

If Tertullian was right in saying the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, we should expect to see a forest of activity emerging in areas of the world where Christians endure the most extreme forms of suffering. One region that has recently taken center stage is the People’s Republic of Korea. Last February, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued the results of a yearlong investigation into the human rights violations there. The 400-page report is particularly damning to President Kim Jong-un, who denies all charges of human rights violations.

“One report describes how security agents are trained to suppress religious activities, and how they are rewarded for uncovering clandestine activities on the basis that religious practitioners are deemed political offenders. Identified Christians are interrogated for longer periods, usually under torture, in an effort to identify other members of underground Christian churches.”

Once located, North Korean Christians are stripped, imprisoned, starved, beaten, tortured, and raped. There are even accounts of women forced by prison guards to drown their newly born infants. This, coupled with the hand-drawn sketches of Kim Gwang-il, an eyewitness who spent two years in one such prison, proves the title of a recent article in The Economist is an understatement: “Humanity At Its Very Worst.”

Humanity has been at its worst before. One survey records that, since AD 33, there have been approximately 70 million Christians martyred for their faith. The number is probably much higher. In spite of the holocaust currently underway in North Korea, the UN Report does show signs that persecution has not attenuated the spread of Christianity. There are currently between 200,000 and 400,000 Christians privately practicing their faith, despite risks of imprisonment, torture, and execution, in North Korea.

Two modern day Perpetuas and Felicities may even be seen in the sisters of a man the report anonymously labels “Mr. A.”

“Both of Mr A’s sisters were punished severely for their religious belief and activities. One was discovered to be preaching Christianity to a friend and was caught with a Bible resulting in a 13 year sentence in an ordinary prison camp (kyohwaso). The other was caught in China. As a result of the starvation rations and horrendous living conditions, the first sister almost died in prison and only survived after Mr A paid a substantial bribe to free her after three years of confinement. The other sister was labelled a political criminal because it was discovered that she had practised Christianity in China and had also attempted to flee to the ROK. She was sent to Yodok Camp and was never heard from again.”

Testimonies like these, and the voiceless galaxy of others, warn us against the dangers of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace,” a grace that isn’t worth much because it doesn’t cost much. They challenge us as individuals and also as the American church to think deeply about what our roll will be in the expansion of global Christianity. Will we succumb to a catatonic Christianity that stands motionless while our brothers and sisters are systematically persecuted? Or will we, like Bonhoeffer, exchange a cheap grace for a costly grace – grace that bids us come and die?

One thing is certain. The early church does not have the monopoly on martyrdom. We have our own gems, too. Gems like Cassie Bernall, five years the younger of Perpetua, who was martyred for her faith at Columbine High School in 1999. “I will die for my faith,” she wrote in her diary just days before her execution, “It’s the least I can do for Christ dying for me.”

The twenty first century has seen the excavation of numerous jewels that shine as stars against the evil darkness of our day. And they remind us that Perpetuas and Felicities still walk among us. The question becomes, will we walk with them?

Before her execution, Perpetua offered one final message to Hilarian, the Roman Procurator who had sentenced her to death. “You [judge] us,” she boldly said, “but God will [judge] you.”

Like the blood of Abel crying up from the ground, Perpetua’s words “still speak, even though [she] is dead” (Hebrews 11:4). They sound in the face of every ruthless dictator. They echo in the halls of every oppressive regime. They bring hope and justice and peace to those suffering inhumanely in prisons throughout the world. And they also speak of a day when “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10). On this day, the Great Excavator will raise all of God’s gems from the ground. And “the Lord their God will save them . . . for like the jewels of a crown they shall shine on his land” (Zechariah 9:16).