Fatal Charades and the Christian Martyrological Imagination

When Tertullian mocked Romans for dressing up criminals as Attis and Hercules to have them executed in the amphitheater, he was referring to the practice that Kathleen Coleman termed a “fatal charade.” The irony missed by Tertullian and his many interpreters lies in his scorning this mimicry while admiring the executed Christians who imitated Jesus. This paper argues that early Christian martyrdom was a reimagined form of a fatal charade. Unlike the Roman practice that was designed to humiliate the victims, Christians desired to become the god that they imitated. Contemporaneous anxieties concerning ontological blending through performance fueled the martyrological fantasy. By placing spectacular execution within the wider sphere of imperial and late antique performance culture, this paper demonstrates how the imitatio Christi in early Christian martyrdom can be understood as the result of the imaginative collation of fatal charades and transformative mimesis.