A Memory of Violence: Sixth-Century “Culture Making” in a Heretical Empire

This essay was part of a panel at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature celebrating the work of Elizabeth Castelli. Read the full forum here. 

In her groundbreaking 2004 book Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, Elizabeth Castelli memorably shifted our gaze from the martyrs’ torn bodies to their hagiographers, requiring us to consider how these narrators shaped their stories and to what ends, with a firm eye on such studies’ relevance for our own world. As her book’s back cover summarizes, “Martyrs are produced, Castelli suggests, not by the lived experience of particular historical individuals but by the stories that are later told about them.”[1] To make this argument, Castelli drew on the theoretical framework of collective memory, shaped by the ideas of Maurice Halbwachs, in order to demonstrate the ways in which a violent death alone was not enough to produce a martyr. “Martyrdom is not simply an action,” Castelli wrote: “Martyrdom requires audience (whether real or fictive), retelling, interpretation and world- and meaning-making activity. Suffering violence in and of itself is not enough. In order for martyrdom to emerge, both the violence and its suffering must be infused with particular meanings.”[2]

I have always loved Elizabeth Castelli’s work but I found it particularly indispensable for my latest book, A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity (2025). Sixth-century Syriac miaphysite Christians, often overlooked in Western history, drew on these shared early martyrs’ stories to shape their own legitimizing narratives of suffering and persecution in a later Roman Empire that too often supported their Christian opponents who accepted the 451 Council of Chalcedon. Reading these sixth-century texts in conversation with Castelli’s work suggests that miaphysite Christianity survives today in the Syrian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Armenian Orthodox Churches in part due to these later authors’ success in expanding their vocabulary of suffering and persecution to more easily associate their fifth- and sixth-century ascetic heroes with the second- and third-century martyrs of the early church, showing the relevance of Castelli’s work for this later period with implications also for further understanding religious radicalization today.

Chalcedon as ContextAs scholars of second- and third-century Christian history already know, Elizabeth Castelli’s work has become foundational for any study of early Christian martyrdom; my purpose here, though, is to show that her influence is much wider. It largely goes without saying that any study of the pre-Constantinian Christian martyrs’ texts will be profoundly influenced by her Martyrdom and Memory book. As a sophisticated methodological study of the construction of community identity through shared memories of meaningful suffering, her book also lays the groundwork for countless other projects across time and space. Because the context of my own project is often less familiar to readers, I will run through a quick refresher of the fifth- and sixth-century doctrinal conflicts before diving more deeply into the ways in which Elizabeth Castelli’s work makes my own and others like it possible.

When Emperor Theodosius II confirmed Cyril of Alexandria’s teachings as the legitimate outcome of the imperial Council of Ephesus in 431, he likewise affirmed the council’s anathematization of the teachings of Nestorius, whom Theodosius had appointed two years earlier as Patriarch of Constantinople. In accepting Cyril’s claim that Jesus’s mother Mary bore not only the human messiah but at the same time God’s divine Son, Theodosius paved the way for Christian teachings about the unity of the Son of God’s fully human and fully divine aspects. When a monastic leader in Constantinople named Eutyches, however, was accused of arguing in opposition to Nestorius that the human and divine aspects of the Son co-mingled in a single human-and-divine nature, some leaders accused him of heresy in the opposite extreme from Nestorius, concerned lest the human and divine aspects be understood to fuse into a new nature that was neither fully human nor fully divine but a unique mixture of the two. Some of Eutyches’s teachings were thus condemned at a local council in late 448 under the authority of Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople, but at Emperor Theodosius’s second imperially sanctioned Council of Ephesus months later in August 449, Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria renounced Flavian who was beaten by his detractors and soon died. One year later Emperor Theodosius himself unexpectedly died, and another year later in autumn 451 the new imperial couple, Emperor Theodosius’s older sister Pulcheria and her new husband Marcian, called the Council of Chalcedon that reversed the 449 council, exiling Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria and redeeming the memory of his opponent Flavian of Constantinople. These chaotic imperial and episcopal vacillations had significant implications, as the Council of Chalcedon led to the development of miaphysite Syrian, Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches separate from the Chalcedonian orthodoxy of the later Rome Empire.

The century between the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and Emperor Justinian’s Second Council of Constantinople that reaffirmed the orthodoxy of Chalcedon in 553 was a period of dramatic upheaval as those who accepted the outcome of Chalcedon and those who rejected it both strove to claim the mantel of imperial orthodoxy, with power vacillating from one side to the next. Miaphysite Christians had some support during Zeno’s seventeen-year reign from 474 to 491, and stronger support from his successor Anastasius who reigned twenty-seven years until 518. In 518, though, Justin I supported aggressive tactics against miaphysite leaders and monks, and imperial support for Chalcedonian Christianity became irreversible under his successor Justinian, especially after his wife Theodora’s death in 548; in 553 Justinian called the Second Council of Constantinople to reaffirm Chalcedonian orthodoxy and he died in 565.

John of Ephesus grew up in the early sixth century in a northern Mesopotamian miaphysite monastery in Amida that was several times forced into exile, and he survived wars and bubonic plague under Justinian. In the earlier sixth century, miaphysite authors like Severus of Antioch and Philoxenus of Mabbug told the story of these controversies through the lens of the early church, constructing a history of new (miaphysite) martyrs who suffered unjust persecution at the hands of Chalcedonian Christian troops and bishops; decades later after Justinian’s death, John of Ephesus expanded these narratives. Martyrdom and Memory provides an intellectual and methodological framework for studying the ways in which these sixth-century miaphysite Christians constructed their identity as devout victims of imperial injustice such that Chalcedonian Christians took on the role of the pre-Constantinian persecuting empire and miaphysite Christians emerged as the true martyrs of God’s devoted and importantly orthodox church.

A Poetics of Suffering: Fifth- and Sixth-Century Martyrs

While my book traces a number of inter-related rhetorical strategies by which early miaphysite Christians resisted imperial Chalcedonian pressures, a through-line is what I’ve termed a “poetics of suffering.” These authors often explicitly claimed the tradition of the pre-Constantinian martyr-heroes as their own. Their imitation, though, came in many forms, from persisting in miaphysite Christianity in the face of exile or other physical violence in times of Chalcedonian imperial aggression, to a much less demanding practice of denying themselves too much luxury during years of imperial support. In some cases, miaphysite authors conflated suffering from the plague, self-chosen struggles of ascetic practice, and violent imperial persecution in order to emphasize their message that suffering was part of the human condition, and enduring through temporary bouts of earthly suffering was the mark of the truly orthodox Christian. I quote from my book’s introduction: “As many scholars have noted, narratives of suffering were prominent in early Christian identity constructions. Elizabeth Castelli’s work has been critical in these conversations; she argued, for example, ‘that the memory work done by early Christians on the historical experience of persecution and martyrdom was a form of culture making, whereby Christian identity was indelibly marked by the collective memory of the religious suffering of others’.”[3] Elizabeth Castelli’s work helped me imagine how these miaphysite narrative strategies worked together to produce a Christian community that understood its identity and legitimacy through such a poetics of suffering.

While many understandably think of the pre-Constantinian period as the period of Christian martyrs’ stories, Elizabeth Castelli’s focus on the role that martyrdom stories play in community identity and culture-making made it easy to move between periods of imperial support for miaphysite Christians and periods of their imperial persecution, and to see the narrative continuities along with narrative shifts between these periods. “The ways in which competitions over authority and identity were intertwined with narratives about violence,” I observe, “are particularly clear in late antique stories of martyrdom and persecution. Elizabeth Castelli affirms this when she studies not early Christian martyrdom itself but ‘the culture-making aspects of its representations’.”[4] Thanks to her work, alongside that of Diane Fruchtman and others,[5] I came to see even the periods of miaphysite imperial power, such as when Bishop Severus was in his episcopal see in Antioch from 512-518 under Emperor Anastasius, as sites where martyrdom narratives continued to participate in miaphysite Christian ‘culture-making.’ After all, as Castelli has noted, an interpretive audience, not just an act of violence, is necessary to make a martyr, so it was possible for Severus of Antioch’s miaphysite congregants to imitate the martyrs even in periods of imperial support.[6]

As my book argues, “Like his colleagues, Severus employed a wide range of meanings of key terms such as ‘martyr,’ ‘contests,’ and ‘athlete’ in order to strengthen connections between earlier times and his own, expanding the possibility of which behaviors and people deserved the respect and praise given to the martyrs.”[7] For example, in Homily 97, “Severus asked his audience to imitate ‘the valiant martyr Thecla . . . the virgin and martyr’ not by dying but by imitating her virtue, ideally by imitating her virginity, but at the very least by being honest and chaste within marriage.... In Homily 78 Severus likewise asked his audience to learn from the martyrs Tarachos, Probos, and Andronicos not a quick death, but to be consistent in their thought, their support of the church, and the constancy of their prayer.”[8] In Homily 18 Severus even went so far as to say from the relative comfort of his episcopal see in Antioch, “For if we wish it, there is even now a time for martyrdom/witness [sāhduthā].”[9] In Homily 41 Severus claimed “that by abstaining from all passions during Lent and thereby mortifying their bodies, his audience would be, like the martyrs themselves, ‘decorated by the crowns of martyrdom [sāhduthā]’.”[10] Through such generous comparisons, Severus made it possible for his congregants to strive toward imitating the martyrs at all times, a lesson that would have had more physically dangerous implications in times when miaphysite Christians faced widespread persecution than in the years when Severus preached these homilies in Antioch.[11]

In addition to these more expansive definitions of martyrdom, though, before and certainly after Severus’s time in Antioch he and other miaphysite monks and clergy also faced exile and other forms of physical violence, including at the hands of military troops and Chalcedonian episcopal enforcers. In such times it was of course even easier to identify with the martyrs of the early church. In fact, John of Ephesus’s writings are in some ways the culmination of these earlier miaphysite writings. John wrote his Ecclesiastical History and his Lives of the Eastern Saints in the wake of Emperor Justinian’s death. “John and other sixth-century miaphysite authors use their context of outbreaks of the plague, famines, and military struggles to amplify the suffering caused by doctrinal conflicts. As Elizabeth Castelli has shown, ‘suffering violence in and of itself is not’ sufficient to produce Christian martyrs; that suffering must be ‘infused with particular meanings’ that attach the sufferer to the broader history of Christianity and the world.”[12] In his influential writings, John did just that. Writing in support of miaphysite leaders who had been forced from their churches and monasteries, with rare but critical examples like John of Tella who died a violent premature death at Chalcedonian hands, John of Ephesus tied together struggles caused by plague, wars, earthquakes, and famine with those of ascetic renunciation and imperial violence. The result, as Elizabeth Castelli primed us to expect, is a powerful narrative of Christian orthodoxy as a narrative of triumphant struggle in the face of meaningful suffering that helped miaphysite congregations survive. As Castelli argued, “From the Christian point of view, the commemorative practices associated with the production of ‘martyrdom’ were a major defense of the borders of ‘Christianness,’ and that defense necessarily involved the production of a Roman imperial other whose political and cultural dominance bore the caricaturing stamp of oppositionality.”[13] Although the sixth-century empire had long supported Christianity, the mechanics of the rhetoric remained the same for miaphysite Christians who saw the empire in heretical hands persecuting God’s true followers just as it had before Constantine.

Conclusion: September 2025

In Martyrdom and Memory, Castelli writes, “The reception histories of early Christian martyrdom do not stop in the late ancient or medieval periods; they continue into modernity and, as it turns out, into postmodernity.... That it does so within the context of Protestant evangelicalism – a form of Christianity markedly devoid of anything approximating the Catholic cult of saints – invites a more detailed exploration.”[14]

On the morning of Wednesday, September 10, 2025, I discussed “Stories of Early Christian Martyrs” with my lower-division “Introduction to Judaism, Christianity, Islam” class of forty undergraduates at the University of Tennessee. We spent time on the Letters of Pliny and Trajan, emphasized the local and sporadic nature of Christian martyrdom before the mid-third century, and discussed some of the reasons that Christians might have seemed suspicious and sometimes even dangerous – dissing the gods who protected the empire, threatening the stability of the Roman family through celibacy, and meeting privately surrounded by rumors of cannibalism centered on misunderstandings of the Eucharist. I ended class that day with a discussion of a passage from Martyrdom and Memory that encouraged the students to see a distinction between a death and the subsequent community work that produces a martyr by giving special meaning to that death and tying it to the community’s understanding of itself. Four hours later the world learned that Charlie Kirk had been killed; by the next morning our campus and much of the country was holding our breath; some already called Kirk a martyr and others had already lost their jobs for their responses to his death.

This made returning to my classroom Friday morning in East Tennessee much more complicated than I had previously anticipated. We were scheduled to continue our discussions of early Christian martyrs and then transition to Diocletian, Constantine, and Eusebius in the early fourth century. I could not have been more grateful that I had left them with Elizabeth Castelli’s wisdom. Her book’s transition from early Christian martyr narratives to her last chapter’s analysis of Cassie Bernall’s 1999 death in the Columbine High School shooting became my grounding rod for that Friday’s sensitive discussion. Teaching on a campus where a tenure-track faculty member received a termination notice because of their response to Kirk’s death,[15] I was enormously indebted to the scholarly framework that Martyrdom and Memory provided; it helped these mostly first-year students, many from religiously and political conservative communities, track in real time the construction of a new martyrial narrative and discuss its role in shaping cultural memory and community identity like the early martyr narratives had done so many centuries past. Those days represented a particularly delicate moment. I was enormously proud of my students for rising to the challenge with sensitivity, care, and insight, and I will always be grateful to Elizabeth Castelli for making those conversations possible.

Elizabeth Castelli’s work transcends the usual boundaries of time and space in its long-lived and wide-reaching relevance. Her work not only contributes to the study of the early Christian martyrs’ stories and early Christian history, literature, and culture more broadly, but to the very ways that we think of martyrs. By focusing on the ways in which later writers constructed their stories of these past deaths, she made visible not only their constructed nature but the value that the narratives had for those who produced and circulated their stories. She writes, “The memory of martyrdom, I have argued, lies at the heart of a certain practice of culture making, and it remains an urgent task to continue to engage the complex and multifaceted effects by which meaning is generated out of suffering.”[16] Her work has already proven invaluable for decades since its 2004 publication, and if my own recent book and September 2025 teaching experiences are any indication, her work – and its urgency – will continue to guide us as we think about Christian culture-making around narratives of violence and suffering in antiquity as well as in our current world for many more years to come.

Christine Shepardson is a Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

[1] Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University, 2004), book jacket.

[2] Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 34.

 [3] Christine Shepardson, A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California, 2025), 11; Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 4.

[4] Shepardson, A Memory of Violence, 114; Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 4.

[5] Diane Fruchtman, Living Martyrs in Late Antiquity and Beyond: Surviving Martyrdom (New York: Routledge, 2023); L. Stephanie Cobb, Dying to be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts (New York: Columbia University, 2008); L. Stephanie Cobb, Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts (Berkeley: University of California, 2016); Candida Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven: Yale University, 2012).

[6] Compare Shepardson, A Memory of Violence, 133; Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 34.

[7] Shepardson, A Memory of Violence, 128.

[8] Shepardson, A Memory of Violence, 130; Severus, Cath. Hom. 97 (PO 25.121, 134), 78 (PO 20.278, 295). Catherine Burris, “Imagining Thecla: Rhetorical Strategies in Severus of Antioch’s 97th Cathedral Homily,” Studia Patristica 42 (2006): 83-87.

[9] Severus, Cath. Hom. 18 (PO 37.13).

[10] Shepardson, A Memory of Violence, 131; Severus, Cath. Hom. 41 (PO 36.17).

[11] Shepardson, A Memory of Violence, 131-132.

[12] Shepardson, A Memory of Violence, 225-6; Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 34.

[13] Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 35.

[14] Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 173.

[15] Olivia Lee, “UT professor under investigation after social media post, termination imminent,” The Daily Beacon September 15, 2025,

[16] Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 196.