Martyrium en Persecutio Een studie naar de primaire bronnen over martelaarschap en vervolging tijdens de keizers Decius en Valerianus

Authors from the early church give for the period under study an entirely different interpretation of the concepts of martyrdom and persecution than the current view that these two Roman Emperors among others ordered the Christians to be tortured and killed. In their own words the early Christian authors write in an insider language in order to keep their secrets. They provide keys for other insiders to read about the essence of purification.
At the time Christianity was much more than a belief. The Christians involved followed a path of purification to gain divine knowledge granting the soul everlasting life in paradise. Martyrium (literally: testimony) was the highest conceivable spiritual level for Christians on earth and was achieved by bearing witness to the divine mystery. This mystery involved the resurrection of the soul and the transformation of ‘the old man’ into ‘the new man’.
In walking this path of salvation, Christians often died as a result of torture. Someone whose goal was to purify the soul as much as possible, often a fellow Christian, was to perform ‘the rite’. Deaths might also be the result of persecutions comparable to inquisitions that the various Christian movements inflicted on each other in order to gain the upper hand.
One can distinguish at least seven different types of Christian persecutions, which have been confused with each other. The persecutions by Decius and Valerianus meant that they prohibited the horrific Christian practices, either out of pity, either because Christians were not functioning properly as intermediaries between the divine and the human world..