Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] We take our stand, then, on a single step, and press only this one question: are martyrdoms commanded by God? For you will believe them reasonable once you know they are commanded, since God commands nothing without reason. It is true that in his sight the death of his devout ones is honored, as David sings — not, I think, that common death which is the debt of everyone (indeed that other death is disgraceful too, on the charge-sheet of transgression and the desert of condemnation) — but that death which is approached for the sake of testifying to religion and the battle of confession, on behalf of righteousness and of the sacrament. [2] So too Isaiah: "Behold," he says, "how the just man dies, and none lays it upon his mind; and just men are gathered away, and nobody marks it; for the just man is snatched from before the presence of iniquity, and his burial shall be with peace." Here too you have both the preaching and the reward of martyrdoms. For from the very beginning righteousness suffers violence. [3] As soon as God began to be worshiped, religion drew envy as its lot. The man who had pleased God is killed — and by his own brother, no less. So that impiety might more readily hunt down the blood of strangers, it took its first hunting-trip on its own kin — and in the end it pursued not only the righteous but the prophets too. David is hounded, Elijah is driven to flight, Jeremiah is stoned, Isaiah is sawn in two, Zechariah is butchered between the altar and the temple, marking the stones forever with the stains of his own blood. And the very seal of the Law and the Prophets — called not a prophet but an angel — is cut down by an insulting death, all for a dancing girl's lamp-oil. [4] And of course those who were driven by the Spirit of God were directed by that same Spirit into martyrdoms, suffering the very things they had foretold. So too the trio of brothers: when the dedication of the royal image pressed the crowd into compliance, they did not fail to recognize what faith — the one thing in them that captivity had not taken captive — demanded, namely, that they must die rather than commit idolatry. [5] For they remembered Jeremiah's letter to those on whom that captivity was closing in: "And now you will see the gods of the Babylonians, of gold and silver and wood, carried on shoulders, displaying terror to the nations. Beware, then, lest you too become like the foreigners and be seized by fear, when you see the crowds worshiping before and behind them; instead say in your heart: You, Lord, we must worship." [6] And so, with confidence conceived from God, they spoke — with what vigor of soul they shook off the king's conditional threats! "There is no need for us to give you a reply touching this order of yours. Our God, the one we serve, has power to pull us free from the blazing furnace and out of your grasp, and once that is done you will see clearly that we mean neither to bow to your idol nor to adore the golden statue you have raised." [7] O martyrdom, perfect without the suffering! They had suffered enough, been burned enough — God covered them precisely so that his power would not seem to have been a lie. And Daniel too, a suppliant of no one but God, and therefore denounced and demanded by the Chaldeans, would certainly have been devoured on the spot by the lions' habitual and confined savagery, if Darius's worthy confidence in God had been meant to be disappointed. [8] But it was fitting that every preacher and worshiper of God who, when challenged to idolatry, had refused compliance, should suffer — in keeping with that same principle by which the truth had to be commended, both to those then present and to all who came after, a truth for which the suffering of its own defenders would vouch, since no one would have chosen to be killed for nothing unless he possessed the truth. Such precepts and such examples from the very beginning show that faith owes martyrdom as a debt.