Christian martyrdom as borrowing from Jewish/Pagan Martyrdom

Inconsistencies in the Passion Narrative

gLuke seems to make Jesus’ martyrdom like Socrates: Luke’s Jesus appears resolutely selfcontrolled. While his followers mourn, he is calm. He continues to instruct them just as he did throughout his ministry. We can see how Luke dodges some uncomfortable questions about Jesus’s behavior, but we still have to ask why and under what influences Luke would do this. One explanation is that Luke was attempting to portray Jesus as a kind of second Socrates (Sterling, “Mors Philosophi,” 395– 400). There are similarities between the Lukan Jesus and Plato’s Socrates, but many of these similarities can be found in other descriptions of the deaths of other philosophers or ancient ideas about death in general. Regardless of whether Luke has Socrates in particular in mind, it is clear that Luke has edited the passion narrative to make Jesus’s death reminiscent of the death of a philosopher and consonant with ancient views of death in general. He knows that his audience might find Jesus weak, unmanly, or contemptible, and he reconfigures the portrait of Jesus to make him more controlled and, thus, more virtuous. The effect is that the death of Jesus appears as a kind of philosophical martyrdom. Luke’s audience would understand the death of Jesus as the heroic death of an emboldened philosopher. The fortified Lukan Jesus was now much more appealing to Greco-Roman audiences, and this helped Luke win converts for Christ. Scholars generally assume that Mark’s account, as the earliest and simplest Gospel, is the closest to the events, but that Luke was more interested in making Jesus die well than in telling the events as they happened.