Elizabeth Finch: A novel

by Julian Barnes

And here we reach an important point. I suppose I’ve always instinctively (or idly) believed that those brilliant myths and martyrdoms, with their thumping messages of salvation, while doubtless being “improved” as they were told and retold, were rooted in some rougher original reality. When you look at a great painting of a violent martyrdom, it compels and convinces you as the representation of something that had once happened. But all those holy compilations, like The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, and their subsequent illustration, are mere edifying fictions rather than True Lives. Current opinion among scholars is not just that few of those famous martyrs ever existed, but the actual number of them was tiny. Of course, there were many Christians killed “simply” for being Christians (and refusing to deny their faith in a court of law); but again, far fewer than previously assumed. A “sober computation” concludes that in the first three centuries of the Christian era, “at least two and at most ten thousand Christians were executed by the temporal power of the Roman Empire.” (So much for St. Ursula’s eleven thousand!) As for the number of those who willingly sought their own deaths, in the sure and certain belief of being fast-tracked to heaven: “Even the Church Fathers can’t produce more than one or two cases of voluntary martyrdom.” Further: we think (or I thought) that pagans killed Christians, and Christians pagans, on and on, back and forth, in tit-for-tat slaughter...