For centuries in the Christian world, in both East and West, the saints were powerful. “Christians prayed for their (ordinary) dead, but they prayed to the martyrs,” says one historian.1 They did this because they believed that the martyr-saints were with God and had the power to help them. The suffering and the death of the martyr were regarded as heroic, but also as sacrificial. The martyrs went to their deaths willingly, later accounts insist, not to secure a reputation for heroism, but rather for the sake of the Christian community.
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