What kind of claim is Christianity making, given that its oldest word for a believer is a courtroom word for someone giving evidence?
Open a dictionary at martyr and read down past the senses everyone knows. First, a person who chooses death rather than renounce their religion. Second, one who dies or suffers greatly for any cause. Third, someone who simply endures a lot. Then, fourth: a person who seeks sympathy or attention by feigning or exaggerating pain.[^dict]
Sense four is the one we actually use most days. Somebody is being a martyr about the dishes. And it is not simply a weaker version of the first sense: two and three dilute the word, while four inverts it, since a witness reports what is real and the sense-four martyr manufactures what is not.
A word that started somewhere serious has ended up meaning the opposite of serious, which happens often enough in English that it is barely worth remarking on. What is worth remarking on is where the word started, because it was not where I assumed. The Greek martys has nothing to do with suffering at all. It is a courtroom word. It means a witness: the person who stands up and says what they saw.[^martyr]
So the word has travelled from a man under oath to a man sighing about the dishes, and the middle of that journey is a piece of history rather than a piece of linguistics.
Once the word is in view, the register of the earliest Christian writing changes character. I had read these sentences for years as devotional language. They are not. They are depositions.
> This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.[^acts2]
> And ye are witnesses of these things.[^lk24]
The commission that sets the whole thing in motion uses the same term. Not go and believe, not go and be transformed, but ye shall be witnesses unto me — first in the city where it happened, then outward.[^acts1]
Paul, standing in front of a Roman governor and a client king, does not appeal to inner conviction. He appeals to their own knowledge of recent events, and the line has the bluntness of a man who expects to be checked: this thing was not done in a corner.[^acts26]
The sharpest of them is a sentence people quote for other reasons. Writing to Corinth about what happens if the resurrection did not occur, Paul does not say that the apostles would be mistaken, or misguided, or tragically sincere. The Greek word he reaches for is pseudomartyres — false witnesses, the ordinary term for people who give untrue evidence.[^pseudo] Perjurers. He frames the alternative to his claim not as an error but as a crime, which is a strange thing to do unless the claim is the sort of thing a court could hear.
The King James translators rendered martys as witness nearly every time it appears. Twice they did something else.
The first is Paul remembering the stoning he had stood and watched: and when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed.[^acts22] The Greek is tou martyros sou, built on the same noun as everywhere else.[^acts22gk] The second is a letter to a church in a hard city: Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you.[^rev2] Again the same Greek noun, martys.[^rev2gk]
It is worth knowing what Stephen had been doing when he was killed. He was in a hearing. Charges had been laid, witnesses produced, a council convened, and he was answering them at length when the proceeding came apart and the crowd finished it outside the city. The first man the word gets attached to in its new sense died at the end of a trial, in the middle of giving evidence.[^stephen]
And what he says at the end is not his own. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit — then, on his knees, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. Both are, almost to the word, what had been said from the cross a few years earlier: the spirit committed, the killers forgiven. Whatever that is, it is not nerve. He is not producing a death. He is repeating one, in the borrowed words of a death already died for him.
The language, meanwhile, had not changed at all. The translators reached for a different English word in exactly the two places where the witness had been killed for the testimony, and their ear was picking up something real, because by the second century the Greek itself had made the same move. The earliest surviving account of a Christian execution outside the New Testament is the Martyrdom of Polycarp, an old bishop burned and then stabbed at Smyrna; the traditional date is the middle of the second century, though the dating is disputed.[^polycarp] By then the word for a person giving evidence had become the word for a person killed for giving it.
That is not a decision anyone took. It is a word being worn into a new shape by what kept happening to the people who used it. And it left a fossil in the English language, which is why we can still see it.
The word gets conscripted into an argument, usually within about a minute of the subject coming up. They died for it. Nobody dies for something they know they made up. So it must have happened.
I have used that argument. I no longer think it works, and it seems worth saying why before saying anything else, because a bad argument offered for a true conclusion does more damage than silence.
The first problem is the obvious one, and it is not a problem about Christianity. People die for beliefs that cannot all be true. Sincerity is evidence of sincerity and of nothing further, and any argument that would prove several incompatible things at once has proved none of them.
The second problem is less often admitted by the people making the argument. We do not actually know how most of the apostles died. Sean McDowell wrote the standard monograph on this and graded the evidence case by case, and he is an apologist, not a skeptic — which makes his results more interesting rather than less. Only four reach the highest confidence: Peter, Paul, James the son of Zebedee, and James the brother of Jesus. Thomas and Andrew are somewhere in the middle. For the rest, his own assessment is that the material is late, full of legend and self-contradictory, and that we simply do not know.[^mcdowell] The one apostolic death the New Testament records, it records in a single sentence, with no scene and no last speech: and he killed James the brother of John with the sword.[^acts12]
There is a third gap, which I have never seen an apologist raise. Even where we know a man was executed, we rarely know he was offered a way out. A martyrdom argument needs someone who could have retracted and did not, and the sources mostly do not tell us that.
So the popular version does not survive. What survives is smaller, and I think more interesting.
Most people who die for a religious claim die for something they were taught. They received it, they found it credible, they held on to it under pressure — and their courage says a great deal about them and nothing whatever about whether the thing is so.
The first Christians were in a different position, and the difference is not about their character. They were not claiming to have received a doctrine. They were claiming to have seen a particular man alive after his public execution, in a named city, within living memory, in front of people who were still available to be asked. That is a claim with a surface that can be scratched.
It does not follow that they were right. It follows that the honest options are few. They saw something. Or they were badly mistaken about what they saw. Or they were lying — which is the option Paul himself names, in the technical vocabulary for it, and then declines.
The second of those is the serious one, and it deserves better than the caricature it usually gets. Almost no historian working outside faith commitments argues for fraud; the live account is that grief, expectation and the group dynamics of a shattered movement produced experiences its members sincerely described as seeing him. That explanation has real purchase. It costs nothing in terms of the honesty of the witnesses, which is the part the martyrdom argument was supposed to secure, and it takes seriously that people in extremity do see things. Where it strains is not in the individual case but in the spread — that the same conviction took hold among people who were not grieving in the same room, including a brother who had not believed and an opponent who had been working against them.[^spread] Whether that strain is fatal to it is exactly the sort of thing reasonable people go on arguing about, and I am not going to pretend the argument is finished here.
The narrowing is the whole benefit, and a narrowing is not a proof. What the word does is tell us what kind of claim we are handling. We tend to assume religion asks for assent to things that by their nature cannot be examined — an inner light, an intuition, a way of seeing. The oldest Christian word for a believer is none of that. It is the word for someone standing up in a legal proceeding to say what they saw, under a penalty for getting it wrong.
Though writing that, I notice where I have been sitting all this time. On the bench: sorting depositions, grading the reliability of witnesses, deciding what I will admit. It is a reasonable seat from which to look into a word. It is not the seat the documents give us. In them the examination runs the other way round, and the people weighing the evidence turn out to be the ones being weighed. That is the part of the claim nobody has ever warmed to, and no quantity of good evidence has ever made it welcome.
And then there is the thing I had not noticed at all, which is that the word was his before it was anybody's.
At the one trial that mattered, in front of a Roman official with the authority to kill him, Jesus is asked a direct question about who he is, and answers in the vocabulary of the witness box:
> To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.[^jn18]
The court did not believe him. The evidence was given in the proper form, in front of the proper official, and refused; and then the man who had given it was taken out and killed for having given it. He did not walk out of the court a free man. He was the one condemned, and the condemnation was ours.
That is the part I keep returning to. We are people who go quiet when a room turns — I have gone quiet in rooms where nothing whatever was at stake — and the testimony we cannot keep was kept, all the way to the end, by someone else. Not kept as an example set for us to match. Kept in our place, while we were elsewhere, saying nothing.
Paul, writing to Timothy, remembers that scene the same way — Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession.[^tim] And when Revelation opens by naming him, the title it gives him first is ho martys ho pistos, the faithful witness — followed immediately by the first begotten of the dead.[^rev1][^rev1gk] The courtroom sense of the word runs all through that book; it is not a stray metaphor.[^kidder]
Which means the word for a person killed for their testimony was being used of him before the church had a single martyr of its own. Stephen and Antipas were witnesses to something outside themselves. He was a witness to himself — and then, according to the testimony, the evidence he had given was verified in the only way such evidence could be, by his being alive to give it again.
That is the claim. Whether it is true is a different question and a longer one, and the word cannot settle it.
So: a term of Greek legal procedure, worn by two centuries of executions into the name for the executed, carried into Old English before the year 900, and arriving in a modern dictionary at sense four, where it means somebody making a show of a headache.[^dict]
I do not think the drift is a scandal. Words wander; that is what they do, and there is something almost affectionate about a word that has been softened by long peacetime use.
But it is worth knowing what is underneath it. The people who first used it were not describing what they had suffered. They were describing what they had seen, and offering to be questioned about it.
[^dict]: "Martyr," Dictionary.com, senses 1–4 and etymology (Late Greek mártyr, from Greek mártys, mártyros, "witness"; into Old English before 900) — dictionary.com/browse/martyr. [^martyr]: On the original secular and legal sense of martys and its extension during the early Christian centuries to those who suffer or die for their testimony, see Martyr. [^acts2]: Acts 2:32 (KJV). [^lk24]: Luke 24:48 (KJV). [^acts1]: Acts 1:8 (KJV). [^acts26]: Acts 26:26 (KJV), Paul before Festus and Agrippa. [^pseudo]: 1 Corinthians 15:15 (KJV): "we are found false witnesses of God." The Greek is ψευδομάρτυρες (pseudomartyres), nominative masculine plural of ψευδομάρτυς, with the verb ἐμαρτυρήσαμεν (emartyrēsamen), aorist active — 1 Corinthians 15 parsed. [^acts22]: Acts 22:20 (KJV). [^acts22gk]: Acts 22:20, Greek: καὶ ὅτε ἐξεχύννετο τὸ αἷμα Στεφάνου τοῦ μάρτυρός σου — Greek New Testament, Acts 22. [^rev2]: Revelation 2:13 (KJV). [^rev2gk]: Revelation 2:13, Ἀντιπᾶς ὁ μάρτυς μου — μάρτυς, Strong's 3144 — Revelation 2:13 Greek text analysis. [^stephen]: Acts 6:11–7:60 (KJV): suborned witnesses, the council, Stephen's defence, and the stoning outside the city. [^spread]: On the brother: John 7:5 and 1 Corinthians 15:7. On the opponent: Galatians 1:13 and 1 Corinthians 15:8 (KJV). [^polycarp]: The Martyrdom of Polycarp, the earliest account of a Christian martyrdom outside the New Testament; the traditional mid-second-century date has been contested, with Candida Moss arguing for c. 200 or later — Martyrdom of Polycarp. [^mcdowell]: Sean McDowell, The Fate of the Apostles: Examining the Martyrdom Accounts of the Closest Followers of Jesus (Ashgate, 2015). McDowell rates Peter, Paul, James son of Zebedee and James brother of Jesus at the highest probability, Thomas and Andrew lower, and judges the remaining evidence late, legendary and contradictory. Summarised at Christian Research Institute. [^acts12]: Acts 12:2 (KJV). [^jn18]: John 18:37 (KJV). [^tim]: 1 Timothy 6:13 (KJV). [^rev1]: Revelation 1:5 (KJV). [^rev1gk]: Revelation 1:5, ὁ μάρτυς ὁ πιστός — μάρτυς, Strong's 3144, nominative masculine singular — Revelation 1:5 interlinear. [^kidder]: S. Joseph Kidder, "The Faithful and True Witness of Revelation 1:5 and 3:14," Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 28/1 (2017): 114–131, on the juridical force of martys in Revelation. Cited here for its lexical observation only; JATS is outside our tradition and its wider argument is not adopted.