Why isn't Judas considered the greatest hero in Christianity?

SystemShock said

It shows a willingness to die for an ideology. But if the criteria is getting killed for an ideology by someone else, that too is common throughout human history: non-Christians during inquisitions/invasions/conquests, anyone who's been killed/executed fighting a revolution... there really is nothing special about early Christians being executed for their religion.

Speaking of Christians specifically, you don't know if those early Christians were given the chance to recant; you don't know that they didn't retaliate or resist in any way; you don't know if their executions were the result of merely professing an ideology, or because of the perceived threat of that ideology to the ruling party, which are two different things.


Perhaps that's why we are non-religious.

Click to expand...

Perhaps, but my comment was merely an observation, nothing more meant by it.

While neither of us can say authoritatively what exactly happened, there are plenty of written examples and eyewitness accounts of such happening that it's hard to deny that many of the faithful who were martyred were killed for either not recanting or not renouncing their faith. We can quibble over statistics, but to blanket deny that anyone would ever do that is to ignore multitudes of eyewitness and first hand accounts of people being martyred.

I'm not talking about people fighting a revolution. I'm talking about people who were peaceful and not a threat to anyone being martyred for no other reason than being Christian.

Certainly it's happened to adherents of other religions. I don't deny that. But I think it's a topic worth acknowledging that Christians have faced persecution for 2000 years simply because of their faith.

And sure, a lot that's happened over that period of time has been a mix of politics and religion, but that doesn't invalidate the idea that people have been killed on the basis of faith alone for centuries.