Two Thousand Years of Martyrdom Quiz

Answer: Witness

Originating in the Greek word for 'witness', the term 'martyrs' was first applied to the Twelve Apostles who had followed Jesus and witnessed his life and teachings. It was soon extended to refer to other early Christian missionaries, and gradually came to be associated with the persecution that so often accompanied their evangelical work. Eventually the term became restricted to those who were put to death because of their Christian belief.

Answer: St. Stephen

Little is known about St. Stephen other than the account in the Acts of the Apostles about his trial for blasphemy, held in Jerusalem by the Jewish supreme court, the Sanhedrin. His death by stoning c.35AD was carried out by a crowd witnessed and egged on by Saul of Tarsus, a short while before Saul's own conversion to Christianity and subsequent martyrdom as St. Paul.

In Western Christianity, December 26th has become St. Stephen's Day.

Answer: St. John

Biblical scholarship is split on whether John of Patmos is the same person as John the Evangelist, and whether both of them are the same person as the Apostle John, the supposed author of the eponymous Gospel, three epistles and the Book of Revelations.

The Gospel of John refers to him as the Beloved Disciple, who sat on the right hand of Jesus at the Last Supper. Other accounts of John's life claim that he was boiled in oil but survived, and that he ended up on the island of Patmos, possibly in exile, where he died c.100AD.

The feast day of St. John is December 27th and he is the patron saint of Freemasons.

Answer: St. Sebastian

Sebastian is said to have been a captain in the Roman emperor Diocletian's Praetorian Guard, whose adherence to the Christian faith was at first unknown to the emperor. However, after he helped two Christian prisoners to escape in 288AD, Diocletian had him tied to a tree and shot full of arrows 'like a hedgehog'. Left as though dead, miraculously he survived and recovered, at which point he publicly harangued Diocletian in the street, who this time had him clubbed to death. Derek Jarman's film 'Sebastiane' was scripted entirely in Latin and depicts homosexual relationships between Roman soldiers in a remote military outpost. Jarman managed to hoodwink British film censors into giving a rating for the film's screening despite it retaining a scene with a male erection briefly visible.

Answer: Franciscan

Francis of Assisi founded his Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans) in 1209, and in 1219 he set off to Egypt to convert the 'infidels', sending five of the Order - Berard, Otho, Peter, Accurcius and Adjustus - to Morocco to do the same. When these 'mad' friars wouldn't go away or stop preaching, the Moorish leader Miramolin first imprisoned them, and then - in a fit of rage - personally beheaded them with a scimitar.

They thus became the Order's first martyrs. They were canonised as saints in 1481, and their feast day - the day of their execution - is January 16th.

Answer: Cross-dressing as a man

Joan of Arc deftly rebutted the subtle questioning at her trial designed to lay a trap of heresy for her. However she was found to have infringed the biblical law against cross-dressing - a reference to her cropped hair and the men's clothing she had worn since beginning her military exploits in 1429. Her defence to the charge was that she wore men's clothing 'to do men's work', and as a practical defence against rape - both of which were specifically allowed for by the Church as an 'exemption in case of necessity', but this was ignored. In defiance of Church procedures relating to women prisoners, she was held in a military prison and guarded by soldiers to increase her fear of rape during the trial. Having agreed at one point during her imprisonment to wear women's clothes, there is a suggestion she was raped or believed she was about to be raped - and put men's clothing on again. As heresy could only be punished by execution if there was a repeat offence, this provided the engineered basis for the judgement that she was a lapsed heretic. In May 1431 she was burned at the stake. In 1456 she was found innocent and declared to be a martyr by Pope Callixtus III, and she was canonised as a saint in 1920.

(Thanks to amcoffice for improving this question.)

Answer: The Oxford Martyrs

In the political and religious upheaval that followed the death of Edward VI in 1553, these leading Protestant churchmen who had supported the claims of Lady Jane Grey to the English monarchy were wrong footed by a reversal which saw Henry VIII's Catholic daughter Mary assume the throne.

In the five years of her reign, 'Bloody Mary' had nearly 300 Protestants and dissenters burned at the stake. Ridley and Latimer were publicly executed in Oxford in October 1555 (outside where Balliol College now stands in Broad Street) and Archbishop Cranmer followed them at the same spot in March 1556.

The Martyrs Memorial monument which commemorates their death is located just around the corner from where they were burned.

Answer: St. Oliver Plunkett

The young Oliver Plunkett travelled from Ireland to Rome in 1647 to train as a priest and did not return until 1670, when it was hoped that the English Restoration after Cromwell's revolution had ushered in a new period of religious tolerance. However, he was arrested in 1679 and charged with conspiracy to support an Irish rebellion against English rule.

After a Protestant jury in Dundalk acquitted him, and aware that no Irish jury would convict, the English government put Oliver Plunkett on trial before a kangaroo court in London. Most of his drawn and quartered remains are buried in Downside Abbey in England, but his preserved head is on display in a church at Drogheda in Ireland.

He was canonised as a saint in 1975.

Answer: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer was a fiercely outspoken critic of Hitler while working in England, the USA and Germany throughout the 1930s. Despite his opposition to Hitler he returned to Germany from the USA as war broke out, believing that it was his duty to oppose the Nazis at home rather than from abroad.

In 1943 he was loosely implicated in a unsuccessful plot against Hitler's life that had taken place the month before, and was imprisoned, but the failure of Claus von Stauffenberg's later assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944 revealed Bonhoeffer's connections with the plotters more directly.

He was transferred to Flossenburg, and in April 1945 he was stripped naked and strangled alongside other conspirators. Within a month the war was over. He is recognised as a martyr by the Church of England, and the Episcopal and Evangelical Lutheran Churches in America.

Answer: Óscar Romero

Romero was regarded as a conservative cleric on his appointment as Archbishop of San Salvador, and his appointment was welcomed by the Salvadorean government. He was quickly radicalised however by the actions of the death squads and began to speak out, urging the US administration - unsuccessfully - not to support the El Salvador regime.

In March 1980 during mass, as he was consecrating the host as the body and blood of Christ, he was shot down on the altar by a death squad. Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, US-trained and backed by conservative elements in the Washington administration, and the leader of El Salvador's death squads from 1978-1992, was named by the UN in 1993 as the person who ordered the killing.

In 2010, Salvadorean president Mauricio Funes apologised for Romero's death and for the government's complicity in it.

The canonisation process for Archbishop Romero began in 1997, although by 2010 his martyrdom had not yet been officially recognised by the Catholic Church.