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Willing to Die

Martyrdom in the Mennonite Imagination

by Jennifer Otto

  • New to Eden
  • Hardback
  • 240 pages
  • Publisher: Fortress Press
  • 15.9 x 23.5 cm

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For students of church history and theology

Unpacks how martyrs were defined and remembered

Helps you understand deep intra-Christian debates

An insightful exploration of martyrdom, memory, and the history of the early Anabaptist movement.

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As the Reformation spread through Europe, thousands of individuals faced imprisonment, exile, and even execution for the crime of permitting themselves to be re-baptized. In the eyes of the established Church authorities--whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed--these dissenters were justly condemned as dangerous heretics. But to their fellow Anabaptists, they were martyrs, reliving the persecution suffered by the early Church. Willing to Die explores the relationship between the figures of the martyr and the heretic in relations to the early Anabaptist movement, illuminating how the promoters of believers' baptism could be understood by their fellow Christians as earnest advocates of the restoration of the church of the apostles, or as a seditious threat to the common peace. As recent scholarship on early Christian martyrdom has shown, the fact of death alone has never sufficed to make someone a martyr. Rather, martyrs are created by being commemorated as such by a community. From the earliest days of Christianity, one community's martyr could be another's heretic. By compiling martyrologies that included some executed Anabaptists and excluded others, surviving Anabaptists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries joined a centuries-long intra-Christian debate in which the commemoration of the special dead define the boundaries of legitimate beliefs and practices of the True Church.

  • Title

    Willing to Die

  • Author

    Jennifer Otto

  • Book Format

    Hardback

  • Publisher

    Fortress Press

  • Published

    September 2026

  • Weight

    318g

  • Page Count

    240

  • Dimensions

    15.9 x 23.5 cm

  • ISBN

    9781506496283

  • ISBN-10

    1506496288

  • Eden Code

    7436052