Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa

The Donatist Church of North Africa was known as the Church of the Martyrs , yet its martyr stories are virtually unknown. The Donatists lived in Africa Proconsularis, Numidia and Mauretania (present-day Tunisia and Algeria), and their communities produced songs, sermons, pamphlets and stories of martyrs. These documents were suppressed in antiquity, and few of them survived. They remained untranslated, and were therefore mainly ignored by scholars, who instead relied on what the opponents of the Donatists had to say. The translations in this volume present stories which provide an opportunity to glimpse the daily life of the Church which for over a century was the faith of the majority of North African Christians. Their champions include a saintly bishop who was thrown from a cliff - and never landed - and sarcastic teenagers whose story would provoke more adolescent rebellion than pious behaviour. The narratives represent the lives and deaths of Christians who carried on pre-Constantine traditions from the 4th century to the advent of Islam.