Martyrs' Mirror or Bloody Theater?

by James W. Lowry

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The Martyrs' Mirror has these two names on its title page: The Bloody Theater and Martyrs' Mirror. We could set up a diagram of the two titles, where bloody would correspond to martyrs' and theater to mirror, showing that the two titles are roughly equivalent. Bloody and martyrs both refer to the suffering of Christians, and theater and mirror refer to the means by which the sufferings are portrayed.

Both theater and mirror could imply a question about how truth can be expressed. How do we portray reality accurately? It is a question about the sign (signum) versus the thing (res) which the sign expresses. We will deal with that question a little later after some preliminary discussion. But the main question is as follows: Why does it happen that we usually call the book the Martyrs' Mirror rather than the Bloody Theater? Bloody is perhaps an unpleasant word, but is that enough to account for our decided preference for Martyrs' Mirror when speaking about the book?

Origin of the Use of Theater
Who started using the word theater in the title, and what could be the justification? Theater and play-acting have no favorable mention in the Old or New Testaments1 although such forms of entertainment existed among the contemporary ancient Greeks. The closest approach to Greek theater might be found in the two books of Maccabees in their mention of the "place of exercise,"2 or gymnasium, built by the hellenizing Jews at Jerusalem by the permission of Antiochus Epiphanes. At such a place where men stripped themselves to exercise and compete in the Greek fashion, there could be exercisers and observers, although the emphasis was on doing the exercise. Of course, a theater is not a gymnasium, but there are some similarities.

Both of the authors of I Maccabees and of II Maccabees, despite their great differences of viewpoint, strenuously objected to the gymnasium at Jerusalem. II Maccabees 4:17 comments on this matter, "For it is not a light thing to do wickedly against the laws of God." I Maccabees 1:15 says that those who participated "sold themselves to do mischief." Traditionally Mennonites might be said to have viewed theater, and entertainment in general, as "mischief."

Again, can there be any justification for the use of the word theater in the title Bloody Theater? Two Scriptures come to mind. The Christians are "a gazingstock"3 and "a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men."4 Actors, of course, present themselves to be gazed at and deliberately become spectacles.

Christians were taken to the amphitheater in the days of the Roman Empire by their pagan persecutors and put on view for the entertainment of hardened crowds who came to watch their execution. Although they were on display in an amphitheater, the Christians were not acting, nor attempting to entertain anyone. They were simply living out a life of obedience to God, and this unfortunately brought them into the midst of a curious, sensation-seeking crowd. For the unbelievers it became theater, but for the Christians it was a matter of being and doing, of faithfulness. It was not a matter of portraying reality. It was reality.

Let's come back to the question the two titles could imply about how truth can be expressed. What is the difference between theater and mirror? Could we say it is a matter of the difference between art and truth, theater being art and mirror being truth? Neither theater nor the mirror are direct experiences of reality. Both include the interposition of a human device, on the one hand an artistically created play or on the other hand a glass specially polished or silvered to reflect whatever appears before it. It seems that a play is a signum--portrayal--farther removed from res--reality--since events pass through a human mind and are organized by the subjectivity of that mind and by the literary conventions of society for play writing and acting. The mirror, on the other hand, merely gives back what comes before it. Both play and mirror are at least one step removed from reality, but the play seems farther removed.

The Changing Names of the Martyr Books
To further consider theater versus mirror, let's look at the history of the different names of the martyr book. When did the word theater, and when did the word mirror come to be used first?

The Anabaptist martyrology was originally called Het Offer des Heeren (The Sacrifice of the Lord) and that name continued in all the editions down through 1599.5 After that, the name began changing.

Below is a list of the dates and the new names given (in English translation):
1615-History of the Martyrs or True Witnesses of Jesus Christ
1617 History of the True Witnesses of Jesus Christ; Who Declared in Manifold Sufferings and Sealed with their Blood the Evangelical Truth
1626 History of the Pious Witnesses of Jesus Christ, Who Declared in Manifold Sufferings the Evangelical Truth
1631 Martyrs' Mirror of the Defenseless Christians
1660 The Bloody Theater of the Baptism-Minded and Defenseless Christians, Who for the Testimony of Jesus Have Suffered and Were Slain...Being an Enlargement of the Earlier Martyrs' Mirror
1685 The Bloody Theater or Martyrs' Mirror of the Baptism-Minded or Defenseless Christians

Notice that Martyrs' Mirror first appears in the title in 1631. Notice also that van Braght himself first used Bloody Theater as a name for the martyr book in 1660. He felt that his use of this name was obvious and said that the book was a representation or exhibition of the blood, suffering, and death of those who for the testimony of Jesus Christ, and for their conscience' sake, shed their blood exchanging their life for a cruel death.6 But he gave no further explanation of the use of the word theater in the title. So the name Bloody Theater did originate with van Braght.

In the 1660 edition Van Braght moved the words Martyrs' Mirror far down the page, and so de-emphasized them. The 1660 edition was the only edition he produced.

By 1685 van Braght was dead, and the editors of that year's edition moved the words Martyrs' Mirror up the page to second place, where they have continued in each edition to the present.

Origins of the Use of Mirror
Let's go back in time to consider how the word mirror came to be part of the title of the Anabaptist martyr book.

The seeds from which the mirror metaphor in the title grew, lie in several statements of the Apocrypha and the New Testament. Always the mirror is an instrument of revelation, sometimes the stress lies on the revelation, and sometimes the stress is on its indirectness. One of the books of the Apocrypha, stressing the idea of revelation, speaks of wisdom and says, "For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God."7 This seems to have influenced Paul when he speaks in II Corinthians 3:18 of Christians as seeing the glory of the Lord in a mirror and being transformed by that view of God. Paul, using the same metaphor, but stressing indirectness, says that the spiritual knowledge of this present life is like the dim perception of images in a mirror in I Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a (looking) glass darkly."

Coming back to the stress on revelation, the writer in James 1:23-25 speaks of the Christian law of liberty as a mirror. He says that the obedient disciple keeps looking into that mirror and retains the image of what he ought to be in his soul.

When we look into a literal mirror, we see ourselves as we are--rather than as we ought to be. We need another image for what we ought to be. We can get that from a figurative mirror, from the Word of God with its picture of Jesus.

From such Biblical seeds, an Anabaptist use of the mirror metaphor grew in two of Menno Simons' writings, both produced around 1537. In his writing on the New Birth, Menno said that non-Christians ought to let Jesus Christ with his Spirit and Word be their example and mirror. In his Meditation on the Twenty-fifth Psalm he said that those who know God "view their consciences in the clear mirror of Thy (God's) wisdom." Wisdom here is either the same as Christ or the Word of God in a probable allusion to both Wisdom 7:26 and James 1:23-25.8

Menno's statements, as well as the Scriptures, may have influenced Lijsken Dircks, wife of Jerome Segers, of whom we read in the Martyrs' Mirror. A prisoner in Antwerp in 1551, she was being led after a hearing through a crowded public place. She said to the guards who were trying to shove the people away from her, "They may look on me and take a mirror (spieghel = mirror = example) from me, all who live the word of the Lord. "In the margin the author of the account gives a reference to Philippians 3:17, interpreting Lijsken's remark to mean that she gives herself as an example (mirror) of what happens to those who follow the Word of God.

--James W. Lowry, a former teacher, is currently a reference librarian in Frederick, Maryland. He has recently written The Martyrs' Mirror Made Plain, a study guide and handbook.

1 Acts 19:29 mentions a theater at Ephesus as the place where Paul's traveling companions were mistreated.
2 King James Version.
3 Ein Schauspiel. Heb. 10:33. Schauspiel is the German word for "play" or "theater."
4 Ein Schauspiel geworden der Welt und den Engeln und den Menschen. I Cor. 4:9. Gazingstock and spectacle are both Schauspiel in the German translation.
5 The editions of Het Offer des Heeren appeared in 1562, 1566, 1567, 1570, 1578 (twice), 1580, 1590, 1592, 1595, and 1599.
6 Martyrs' Mirror, p. 16. Also on pages 12 and 13 he mentions in passing how the heroes of ancient times "among the heathen" were honored by presentations of their lives "in public theaters."
7 Wisd. of Sol. 7:26.
8 Complete Writings by Menno Simons (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1956), pp. 96, 75.

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Mennonite Historical Bulletin, April,1997