Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

Bauman-Martin: Women on the Edge 275
ways of thinking about the self by constituting its members as a community of
sufferers because of persecution. 82 Christian writings of the late first and early
second centuries nearly unanimously assert that to be a Christian is to suffer. 83
Suffering and martyrdom were esteemed and emulated and “within the Christian
thought-world [these behaviors] were not only normal but normative.” 84
Perkins demonstrates that, in the Christian context, suffering at the hands
of non-Christians helped to invert social categories and enabled Christians to
resist normative Greco-Roman categories of value. The second-century account
of the martyrdom of the slave woman Blandina specifically makes the point
that, in spite of her social status as weak and insignificant, she became powerful
and exalted because of her ability to endure suffering. 85 The endurance of pain,
specifically by society’s most powerless members, was consistently represented
by Christian writers as an empowering reversal of social constrictions and definitions.
The Petrine women, then, participating in both Christian and pagan
cultures, may have appropriated a suffering identity as one way to negotiate
between conflicting paradigms.
Furthermore, Christian sources of the second century insist that the
endurance of persecution attracted converts. Tertullian wrote: “We multiply
whenever we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed” (Apol.
50), and Justin asserted that “the more we are persecuted, the more do others
in ever increasing numbers embrace the faith and become worshipers of God
through the name of Jesus” (Dial. 110). Regardless of the accuracy of this
claim, it appears to have been believed by Christians and deepens the meaning
of the reassurance to the Christian wives in 1 Pet 3:1 that their unbelieving husbands
“may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct.”
The Roman method of establishing dominance through force was thus
82 Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian
Era (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8–14.
83 E.g., Barn. 6.9 and 7.11; Iren. Haer. 2.22; Pol. Phil. 9.1; and Clem. Alex. Strom. 1 are a few
examples. Perkins demonstrates that this attitude is documented outside of Christian writings as
early as 111 C.E. in the letters of Pliny to Trajan, and that by the middle of the century Galen could
write of the Christian contempt for suffering and death (Perkins, Suffering Self, 18–19).
84 Perkins, Suffering Self, 33. This valorization of suffering continued into the medieval
period, in which women took on the suffering of Christ and gained community esteem. Ellen M.
Ross’s The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997) offers insightful parallels. She writes: “In and through their suffering in solidarity
with Christ, medieval holy women become identified with him so closely that they become
brokers of the spiritual power that inheres in Jesus himself. Through their suffering, holy women
become like Jesus” (pp. 12–13). She adds that although the valorization of suffering may seem
“bizarre and unhealthy to many of us now . . . the study of history is not always about seeking comfortable
life-models. . . . We may be intrigued and challenged by the power and integrity of this
medieval world in which suffering manifested divine presence” (pp. 134–38).
85 Perkins, Suffering Self, 1, 13.