Customer Reviews

A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity

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I have to agree with the Cambridge, MA, reader. While martyrdom has once again become a topic of considerable interest in the wake of 9/11, this is not the best exploration of the topic. The book hardly seems unbiased, and it seems to lack a thorough grounding in modern reading theories and hermeneutics.

Some time has now passed since the sociological conditions that inspired this book, namely the euthanasia debate of the '90s with such figures as Dr. Jack. In that time, the ideological axe of the authors in their interpretations has become far more apparent than perhaps when it was initially published--though it received no more than a tepid response then. Hardly the neutral book the authors claimed to offer. It is useful for identifying the crucial players in late antiquity, but the final product is one that is very far on one side of mainstream scholarship... without sufficient justification or even very enjoyable, coherent organization.

To mistake this book as a social and religious stand on suicidewould be an injustice. This book is an insightful historical accounton the act of suicide that encompasses the lofty idea quoted within its text, "Only by being grounded in the history of our own tradition will we be able to restore rationality and intelligibility to our moral attitudes and commitments." The writers waste no lines on the emotional rhetoric associated with the idea of suicide. Instead they make interesting observations such as, the distinction or lack thereof between martyrdom and suicide, the inclusion of a wide and varying amount of facts and references, and for those who find the correlation between literature and history fascinating there is a quotation by Socrates that can arguably be seen as a quote paraphrased by Shakespeare with his own delightful twist, "If it is unconsciousness, like sleep, in which a sleeper does not even dream, death would be a wonderful gain; To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream . . . " While I have a bias against suicide, finding it sad that anyone would wish to rush to an inescapable event, the issue of death is so complex and emotional that it must be debated with facts from all fronts. This text is a must read for anyone who enjoys learning about the past.

This book is excellent, well written, balanced, and richly informative. Anyone interested in an unbiased survey of the subject will be extremely satisfied with this important work.