ABSTRACT
The emperor Julian’s refusal to execute Christians, thereby creating new Martyrs was more traumatic to later historians than it would have been if he had brutally executed his Christian opponents. Christian self-identity was disturbed and disrupted when deprived of martyrdom as the way which they viewed their status as an oppressed and persecuted church, which during the fourth century had become central to Christian self-identity. Fifth-century historians, rather than giving up the strongly held identity of Christians suffering persecution under non-Christian emperors, reinterpreted what persecution itself meant. This chapter suggests that we look at the Christian response to Julian’s relationship with Christians through the lens of trauma theory to understand the fifth-century Christian impetus to re-interpret persecution and how it changed from Diocletian violence to Julianic inconvenience.
