Acts of the Martyrs () are accounts of the suffering and death of Christian martyrs which were collected and used in early Catholic church liturgies, as attested by Saint Augustine."Acts of the Martyrs." Cross, F. L., ed. The Oxford dictionary of the Christian church. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005
Their authenticity varies, the most reliable derive from accounts of trials such as that of Saint Cyprian or of the Scillitan Martyrs. Although, some claim that the latter has been embellished with miraculous and apocryphal material. As it stands, few of these trial accounts survive.
A second, the , includes the martyrdoms of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Saint Polycarp, and the Martyrs of Lyons, the famous Acts of Perpetua and Felicitas, and the Passion of Saint Irenaeus. In these accounts, miraculous elements are restricted, which proved to be unpopular and was often later embellished with legendary material.
A third category includes accounts that are believed by some to be largely or purely legendary. The Acts of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and those of Saint George fall into this category.
Eusebius of Caesarea was likely the first Christian author to produce a collection of Acts of the Martyrs.
A related form of writing was chivalric romances, which either preserved a few kernels of fact in popular or literary tradition, or were works of pure imagination. Nonetheless, they were intended to edify rather than deceive the reader.
Romances should be separated from hagiographical forgeries, whose intent was to alter history by, for example, falsely attaching a saint's name to a particular place.Bridge, James. "Acts of the Martyrs." The Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910
Origins The expression generally applies to all narrative texts about the deaths of the martyrs, but it possesses a more precise and restricted meaning referring, in technical terms, to the official records of the trials and convictions. These official records were shorthands and were transcribed by the officials of the court chancery () to be preserved in its archives. Due to this relationship with the court of the proconsul, they were also called "proconsulares" (). Once the distinction is made, the name of the act is reserved for the verbal processes (such as ). For references relating to the martyrs, the name of is applied in all of its diverse forms (, , ). Such a distinction is also justified by the different purpose and nature of both types of documents: the records have no hagiographic character, while the Passions are characterized by their purpose and edifying religious sense.
The preserved records are limited to about a dozen fragments, so most of the narrative texts about the martyrs are the Passions. The scarcity of official records and direct documentation has been controversial. The old Christian communities had a great interest in maintaining the memory of their martyrs, as proven by the news referenced in the story of the martyrdom of Polycarp (m. 156),«...probably the 22 of 156...» (Quasten 2004:86). whose memory was venerated annually in İzmir. Cyprian used to recommend his clerics take detailed notes of the deaths of the martyrs. These valuable testimonies were also the oldest news about the martyrs. According to what is known to date, there is no precise idea of the extent to which Christians transcribed the records of the trials; it is undoubtedly very likely that some of those who witnessed the development of stenography in their text, in the same manner as the of the court, gave it to the community for preservation in the archives of the church. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by the details and notes of the judge or martyr and seems to interrupt the rigid protocol form. On the other hand, it did not prove easy for Christians to obtain copies of the verbal processes that were saved in the proconsular archive; on occasion, large sums had to be paid.. No precedents have been preserved that allow us to know if the Church of Rome, which had organized a section of notaries, took the initiative of collecting the records of its martyrs, nor is the news that Julius Africanus did a similar task as far as Rome is concerned, trustworthy. Information about the other communities is still less certain.
During the persecutions of Diocletian, there appears to have been a wholesale destruction of documents. There are no traces suggesting that the churches were involved in restoring the destroyed hagiographic texts after the persecution ended. The events of later centuries, such as the western Germanic invasions in the fifth and sixth centuries, may have caused the irreparable loss of the writings still preserved.
Division and classification Given the enormous number of hagiographic texts and the heterogeneous nature of their origin, authority, and value, critics have proposed a classification to guide their study.
It has been observed that a classification of the texts based on the criterion of the authenticity of the martyr, or the legitimacy of his cult, is not valid or useful.
Similarly, a classification based on extrinsic characteristics, such as the one that divides the hagiographic documents in , , , , , etc., according to the object of the story, is not useful. Neither does the classification meet the demands of criticismCf.(Grossi-Gondi1919:1). of two large groups, contemporary and subsequent documents, since it does not express anything about the value of the document.
According to Hippolyte Delehaye, the safest criterion is based on the degree of sincerity and historicity offered by the literary genre of the document.Cf. Les legendes hagiographiques, 3 ed., III.
According to this criterion, six groups of texts are established:
Verbal processes contained in official relations preceding the proconsular archives or direct transcriptions, such as the S. Cypriani Act, for example. Accounts of eyewitnesses or trustworthy contemporaries, whether they are direct testimonies, testimonies of other people or of a mixed type, such as by Eusebius of Cesarea. Narrations from which information or a document can be extracted from one of the two preceding groups, such as the of Symeon Metaphrast. Stories that, except for the name of the sepulcher and the cult of the martyr, lack a historical basis. One such example being that of . Purely fantastic stories, authentic products of the imagination, for example, . Narrations of legendary characters that falsify historical facts and can be defined as false.
Considering the elements that distinguish the six groups, it is possible to verify that the first and the second refer to a uniform type of text, owing to the contemporary and direct nature of the information presented. The next two groupings contain stories that, in varying degrees, are based on at least partially reliable data. The last two, on the other hand, are true fantasies without historical basis.
Following the same criteria as Delehaye, the texts can be classified into three simpler groups:
Official records and accounts of direct testimonies. Narratives based on documents belonging either to the first group or, on a certain number of safe historical elements. Novels or hagiographic fantasies.
Literary scheme Except for the official records, all of the narrative documents mentioned above offer, from a literary point of view, common characters, since they are all the result of an elaboration and compositional process typical of hagiographic literature. The tendency to the schematic form has a remote origin, and whose footprint, already manifested in ancient texts, is very close to the type and narrative sincerity of the original story. This has happened, for example, in the , in which it is possible to recognize the attempt of the hagiographer to assimilate the death of the martyr to that of Christ. This theme, of the martyr who imitates Christ, appears already in the first Christian writers. From the fourth century on, certain patterns or essential criteria are fixed, and the hagiographers adopt certain narrative characteristics that became the literary genre of the passions.
In the first place, the legal tone of the Roman criminal process in the first records has been preserved; sometimes even some of the passions make reference to it, showing how, on more than one occasion, the lost records served as sources. The introductory formula of the consular date of the records preserves the indication of the emperor, governor or proconsul, even in historically erroneous cases. The phases of the procedure—arrest, appearance, interrogation, torture, judgment and torment—preserve and constitute the structure of the narrative; likewise, the protagonists, usually few in number, of the ancient records are preserved: the martyr, the judge or magistrate, and the executioner; in the second place, the Christian spectators who animate their companion; and, finally, the hostile mass of the pagans. On a similar scheme, the evolutionary process of the passions develops, throughout the fourth until the twentieth century, with successive enrichment and formal improvements, including fantasies, common places, and errors, due to both ignorance and blind piety of the hagiographers. These unsubstantiated relationships can be broken down like this:
The apostle and even the small initial group of martyrs came to be united with topographically or liturgically close groups; The figure of the persecutor was typified as the cruelest of those known and traditionally considered as such: Decius, Valerian and Diocletian; and the same happened with the figure of the governor (, ), who was often called Anulinus, a historical figure of the fourth century. The interrogation was prolonged in an inordinate way, often putting into the mouth of the martyr professions of faith imitating the theology of the time and the New Testament writings; The martyr was made to pronounce controversial discourses, plagiarizing the content of other works, generally apologetic writings, addressed to the pagans or against heresies.
The same happened with the narrations of the pains and tortures, prolonged and multiplied without saving prodigies made by the martyr, adorned with spectacular elements provided by fantasy and legend. This transformation and development, negative from the critical point of view, was influenced by several factors to a considerable degree: the spread of the cult of the relics, with its inevitable abuses; veneration of the martyred saint, as patron saint of the city, monastery or church, which obliged the writer to find or invent a living; the particularly religious and devout environment of the Middle Ages, favored by the monks, who were among the most active writers of the hagiographic texts.
Compilation