the execution and its message voluntarily taking the initiative and tipping off the authorities. It was however not, at least not to the same extent, wrong to participate when the process had started. In medieval theology some emphasis was put on the willingness of the martyrs to sacrifice their lives. A counterpart to this theological line of thought can also be found in the stories describing actual martyrs. The quest for martyrdom occasionally could be understood as verging on the suicidal when the choice of death seems to have been made not when confronted with the possibility of martyrdom but far ahead of meeting the danger.394 When looking at the early martyrs, researchers have come to different conclusions on the question of just how voluntary martyrdom was. Some understand it as clear that many themselves came to the judges with their confessions thereby making voluntary martyrdom a proven fact.395 Christel Butterweck instead saw this view as not proven while studying the longing for martyrdom, and its role as cause to the acts of interest in this study, and found that depending on the starting point one can affirm or deny such outcome of the longing for martyrdom in the early church.396 Also Brad Gregory in his study of martyrs and their motives criticises what he sees as an modernising psychological interpretation that hold all martyrs as pathological, and the notion that the willingness to die of martyrs was caused by ”the inevitability of execution.” In his own interpretation he states: ”Some martyrs indeed had a death wish – they literally wished to die – yet they wished to die as martyrs, not simply to end their lives.”397 Perhaps also, this discussion concerning the voluntariness of martyrdom is ultimately irrelevant, for Candida Moss strives to show that this distinction mainly is present in modern research and hard to find in ancient sources.398 394 See e g Rubin 1993 p 157 sqq, 169 sq. 395 Ste Croix 2006 p 65 sq, 153 sqq, 164 sqq and Bowersock 1995 p 1 sqq, 59 sqq, 71. 396 Butterweck 1995 p 245 sq. 397 Gregory 1999 p 100 sqq (quotations p 102 and 105). 398 Moss 2012. 115
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