Dying to Live Forever: Identity and Virtue in the Resurrection of the Martyrs

In recent scholarship the emergence of belief in the resurrection of the body in the writings of the early Church has been linked to the experience of martyrdom and persecution. By contrast, this article seeks to treat the resurrection of martyrs in the writings of the apologists as part of a broader philosophically informed conversation about identity and change. Rather than seeing the writings of the apologists as contingent theology, it argues that writers like Tertullian and Athenagoras use the resurrection of the martyrs both to address anxieties about the persistence of identity, and to highlight the ethical importance of the functionality of the body