Perpetua bravely held Felicity in her arms, anticipating their deathtogether as sisters in Christ. The bull’s horns had already woundedFelicity, and the crowd wanted the coup de grace. Then, abruptlyand inexplicably, the bull stood still. The crowd hushed. This animal wasnot following the script. Now the crowd let loose with demands forblood, and gladiators rushed forward to finish the work. Felicity diedquickly. When Perpetua’s executioner hesitated, she herself helped guidehis blade into her body. The Coliseum had never before seen such a spectacle. Perpetua camefrom a wealthy family. Her father was pagan but her mother and brothers were Christians. Perpetua had a nursing baby at the time of her arrestfor confessing Christ. Her father urged her to renounce faith, for hissake and for her family. Even Roman authorities urged her to offer asimple sacrifice to Roman power. She refused. She would not renounceChrist as Lord, claiming that the name that belonged to her was thename of a Christian. Felicity was a slave—and pregnant. Since Roman law prohibitedthe execution of pregnant women, sentence was delayed. Felicity gavebirth in prison to a baby girl that would be adopted by Christians. Whenprison guards wondered how she would handle facing beasts in thearena, especially
Read MoreUnlike his apostolic companions, John died quietly in the city ofEphesus, serving the church he loved. But he didn’t live a quietlife. By the time he died, John had been part of the twelve disciples of Jesus, participated in the early life of the church in Jerusalem,traveled widely, and had written five New Testament books (the Gospelof John, the letters 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and Revelation). John certainly had an impressive résumé of accomplishments, but he would probably have been the first to point out that anything he had done in life paled in comparison to what Jesus did for him. John’s character résumé tells us a lot about the ways Jesus changes a person’s life. The fact that John survived the other apostles points to the kind ofunique suffering he endured. All of the other disciples suffered and died;John suffered and lived. Though not technically a martyr, John’s lifedisplayed a martyr’s qualities. He was a living sacrifice worthy of imitation. And as we shall see, he only escaped actual martyrdom by God’sintervention on several occasions. John and his brother James were two of the more fiery members ofJesus’s disciples. Artistic renditions and personal impressions often create a
Read MoreBartholomew came as a reluctant seeker, brought to Jesus byPhilip, who couldn’t wait to spread the word about the Messiah.Bartholomew’s initial response to news about Jesus was a mixture of skepticism and sarcasm: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). As he had done the day before when meeting Simon, Jesus greetedBartholomew with perceptive and challenging words. Jesus immediatelylet Bartholomew know that He really understood him. Imagine a persongreeting you with, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is nodeceit!” (John 1:47). Bartholomew was stunned. “How do You know me?” he blurted.Jesus had just identified his central impulse. He didn’t feel complimented;he felt completely known. He was curious about how Jesus did it; towhich Jesus responded with a description of Bartholomew’s locationwhen Philip found him. Jesus’s perception was enough to convince Bartholomew that Philip was correct. This was in fact the Promised One.And he said so: “Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King ofIsrael!” (John 1:49). Jesus received Bartholomew’s declaration with thepromise that he would eventually have many more reasons for recognizing the Son of God. Bartholomew was one of the group of five apostles who began tofollow Jesus shortly after His wilderness experience.
Read MoreArrests, beatings, and intimidation had become common. A groupof believers were randomly rounded up and carted off to Herod’sdungeon. Among them happened to be one of the apostles—James. The event seemed little more than the usual inconvenient harassment that the Roman leaders felt obligated to perform at the insistence of certain Jewish leaders, who seemed obsessed with the followers of Jesus. But things took a sudden turn when James was hauled out without fanfare and summarily executed by the sword. The church in Jerusalem was stunned; their opponents were elated (Acts 12:1-2). James’s death turned out to be a political experiment on Herod’spart. He must have been sick and tired of the bickering in his courtover the Christ-followers who seemed to be spreading like an infection. They didn’t do anything wrong except provoke extreme hatredfrom others. But when the old politician saw the excited response toJames’s death among his political allies, Herod decided he couldafford to eliminate a few more of these Christians. His attempt to killPeter failed, and before he could devise a further plan, he was distracted by a crisis in another part of his kingdom. Herod died shortlythereafter when “an angel of the Lord struck him down,
Read MoreIf the queen and the archbishop had their way, Puritan preacher JohnPenry would simply and quietly disappear from the face of the earth.Why else would he be dragged suddenly, at about the dinner hour,from his cell near Old Kent Road and told to prepare for death? Whyelse were the gallows so quickly erected and the sheriff ordered to denythe condemned man a customary courtesy: a farewell speech affirminghis innocence and loyalty? Why else, apart from sheer hatred, would thefather of four young daughters be condemned as a traitor on the basis ofwritings never published or released to the public? Penry was born on a farm near Llangammarch, Cefn Brith, Wales,and converted early in his life to Protestant faith. In England, to be aproper Protestant was to be a member of the Church of England, whichrecognized the queen as its head. An improper Protestant was part of thedissenting or free church movement, which was tantamount to disloyaltyto her majesty, potentially an act of treason. That potential could be apowerful tool in the hands of political enemies, and Penry had one—thearchbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgrift. Penry had indirectly criticizedthe archbishop for failing to provide Wales with Christian nurture in his1587 tract entitled
Read MoreJohn Nesbit was a fighter, a soldier in the Thirty Years War on theContinent, a warrior among the Scottish Covenanters. But hesuffered scars and wounds of the heart nearly more severe thanthose of the body. By the time he was captured and tried, he wasalready taking leave of the struggles he had seen on Earth and waseager for Heaven. When Nesbit returned from war in Europe, King Charles II hadbegun to impose his will on Scotland and the Scottish church, a willopposed by the determined free-church Covenanters. They resisted anyking as church-head and the king’s priests as intermediaries. The Covenanters believed with equal ferocity in Christ alone as head of thechurch and armed resistance as the right of all who seek to worshipthat way. The Covenanters would not bow to Charles without a fight. But Nesbit had other business, too. He married Margaret Lawand they raised a family. He kept a handwritten New Testamentpassed on to him from a great-grandfather who was one of the barefoot preachers sent to England in the fourteenth century by JohnWycliffe. He studied, learned, worked, prayed, and often hid fromCharles’s dragoons. But he couldn’t hide forever. Severely injured on the field at RullianGreen, Nesbit was
Read MoreMichael Sattler was born in 1495 and became a monk. Likemany Reformation-era monks, he wrestled with his sensualpassions and his love for God. Sattler broke his oath of celibacy for an equally unavailable woman named Margarita, a nun whoalso broke her oath for marital love. Later, the Sattlers would die for afar greater love: their bond with God. By 1526, the Sattlers had returned to the Anabaptist movement,which Michael had been forced to renounce years earlier to avoid imprisonment. Now, with his Anabaptist convictions strengthened, Michael dedicated his life to preaching at a church in Horb, a strongly Catholic region of Austria. On February 4, 1527, in the small German town of Schleitheim, the Anabaptists met and introduced to the world a new way of understanding church and Gospel. The Sattlers traveled to Germanyfrom Horb for the deliberations that produced the “Seven Articles of theFaith,” also known as the “Brotherly Union.” Michael Sattler helpedwrite this founding document of the Anabaptist movement. But traveling home from that meeting, Michael and Margarita Sattler were captured and their articles confiscated. They were transformedfrom Anabaptist advocates to Anabaptist martyrs—a twist of events thatpropelled the church further than Sattler could ever have imagined.Tried before a
Read MoreTwo men named Philip occupied the stage in the early church. Onewas Philip the apostle, the first person called by Jesus to followHim. The other was Philip the evangelist, one of the seven chosenby the church to help with the special needs of the growing band ofbelievers in Jerusalem. Both men had similar evangelistic hearts, and theaccounts of their lives have often been intertwined in subsequent history.Their stories are further complicated because they each appear to havefathered several daughters. Philip the apostle is mentioned several timesin the Gospel of John but only once in the book of Acts (1:13). Philip thedeacon appears in Acts and is instrumental in the conversion of theEthiopian eunuch as well as in the spiritual outbreak among the Samaritans, recorded by Luke in Acts 8. Philip the deacon later hosted theapostle Paul on his last journey to Jerusalem (Acts 21:8). They may havehad further contact during the two years that Paul was imprisoned inCaesarea before his journey under guard to Rome. Philip the apostle came from Bethsaida, a town in northern Israelclose to Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee. His non-Jewish name mayindicate the degree to which Bethsaida was influenced by the Greekculture and government language
Read MoreConvinced that the intolerant law of Massachusetts Colonybanishing Quakers violated God’s law, Mary Dyer would notstay quiet or stay away. Dyer was a Quaker, and Quakersbelieved that God could communicate directly to us and that salvationcould be assured. This was considered heresy by the Puritans in Massachusetts, so they banished her from the colony. Dyer challenged that law with a persistence that finally led authorities to a critical decision: Agree with Dyer and change the social structureof the colony, or silence her. Mary Dyer died on the gallows on June 1,1660, affirming her stand against the government that persecuted herQuaker faith. “Nay, man,” she said at the last, “I am not now to repent.”Dyer had other alternatives. For one, she was married to a respectedcolonial official, William Dyer, who more than once had rescued herfrom a Massachusetts jail through his political connections. He too wasa Quaker but less militant than she, who never dodged a fight over religious freedom, especially when her “inner light”—God’s voice to thesoul—bade her confront the secular powers. For another, Dyer had the testy patience of Massachusetts GovernorJohn Endicott on her side. When her fellow Quaker “lawbreakers,” William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, were hanged in 1658,
Read MorePerhaps Christendom’s greatest historical embarrassment, the Crusades, at the time were a brilliant strategic move by papal leaders to unite a warring Europe against heathen enemies threatening the Byzantine church. Not that Pope Urban II in Rome cared much about Constantinople or vice versa. Each part of the church had excommunicated the other in the Great Schism of 1054. But internal feuding needed alternative war games, and the call to defend the Holy Land and the Eastern Church against invading Turks presented a quite legitimate target for knights and lords otherwise bent on battling each other. The First Crusade, led by Peter the Hermit in 1095, was a militarydisaster. The same could be said for one of the last crusades—the Children’s Crusade of 1212—when hundreds of youngsters sailed fromMarseilles toward Palestine and fell into the hands of slave traders.Between these, however, many great medieval reputations were made.Richard the Lion-Hearted of England was one of many who led armiesto victory, his soldiers bearing the famous sign of the Red Cross. In 1099,Jerusalem was taken. When Godfrey of Bouillon was offered the throneof Jerusalem, he refused to wear a crown of gold in the city where hisSavior had once worn a crown
Read More