Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts by L. Stephanie Cobb (review)

• Autores: Paul Middleton
• Localización: Journal of early Christian studies: Journal of the North American Patristic Society, ISSN 1067-6341, Nº. 3, 2018, págs. 502-503
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • [...]since Judith Perkins’s landmark work on the “Suffering Self,” a scholarly consensus has emerged that sees pain and suffering as the representation of the way in which Christians understood their collective self: a suffering body. [...]pain—specifically the endurance of it—stands as a central interpretive focus for constructions of Christian social identity. Cobb perceptively notes that the world of these texts and their hearers was a world full of pain, with no medical pain relief readily available. [...]against all audience expectation, in that world of pain, the martyrs’ faith, a faith they share, is uniquely analgesic. The confession Christianos sum blurs the distinction between the individual martyr and those who read or hear the martyr narrative, reinforcing the boundary between persecuted and persecutor. [...]by convincingly demonstrating that pain is not a major concern of these texts, Cobb undermines the traditional Bollandist notion that the presence of miraculous elements, such as insensibility to pain, should be a primary factor in dismissing the historicity of a martyr account; the purpose of all martyr texts is primarily theological.