Is being beheaded your biggest issue?
May I ask what you think of Christians who were tortured in the past
Let's do the past first
Early Christians sometimes faced persecution and even death for their beliefs. Many were tortured first; some were not. Of Jesus’s 11 disciples (not counting Judas) Peter, Simon the Zealot, Phillip, Jude the brother of James, and Andrew were all crucified in various parts of the world. Peter requested to be crucified upside down, a request the Romans were only too happy to grant. Andrew’s cross was in the shape of an X, which is now called St. Andrew’s Cross and appears on the Scottish flag.
This list contains 10 of the most bizarre and painful methods of torture inflicted upon the Christians of antiquity through the Early Middle Ages. Much of this information has been gleaned from John Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs and corroborated elsewhere.
1- Cooked To Death
2- Dragged To Death
Mark, who wrote the Gospel of Mark, founded the Christian Church in Alexandria and preached to the masses that they should give up their Egyptian gods and goddesses. It’s not clear how long he was able to keep this up, but he did convert many before A.D. 68, when an angry mob tied a rope around his neck and dragged him through the streets behind a chariot
for two days without interruption. The dragging continued even after his death, until his bones were showing.
3- Skinned
Removal of the skin is so excruciating that victims invariably passed out multiple times during the torture. To prevent this, they were usually hung upside down so the excess blood flow to their brains forced them to remain conscious. The skin is not easy to remove, and torturers rarely made an effort to remove it in one piece unless they wanted a trophy. Typically, the skin was sliced into strips, then each strip peeled from the body with the aid of a knife. Often, the skin was thrown into a fire or to animals, or dangled before the victim’s eyes.
This is how Bartholomew, one of the 12 apostles,
was killed by locals in Armenia, into whose language he translated Matthew’s Gospel. The Armenians refused to abandon their idols and executed Bartholomew by crucifying him upside down and skinning him.
4- Sewn Into Skins And Eaten By Dogs
This torture was devised by Nero himself, not merely to cause Christians pain but to entertain him and his guests. Nero was infamously rumored to have crucified Christians on trees in his gardens, coated them with wax, and set them on fire to light his nightly walks (he evidently didn’t mind the stench). Others he ordered sewn into hides—any large animal was skinned, and the prepared skin sewn around the victim except for the head, hands, and feet. Then
ravenous dogs were set loose. The victim could only scuttle around on all fours like a crab. Nero was said to have laughed heartily as the dogs gnawed at the skin as they would a bone.
Julian of Antioch was tortured every day for an entire year and displayed to the crowds in every town in Cilicia, (a southern coastal region of what is now Turkey). He was then sewn into a skin filled with asps and scorpions and flung into the Aegean Sea. He was said to have floated all the way across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, Egypt.
5- Starved To Death
6- Boiled To Death
7- The Inquisition’s Auto Da Fe
The most common method called for the victim to be stripped to his underwear and laid face-up on an elevated platform. Thin cords were passed through holes and wrapped around the limbs, then drawn so tightly that they cut through the victim’s flesh to the bones. If no confession was made, the process was repeated up to four times. If this elicited no confession, the next stage involved folding the arms backward behind the victim with the palms outward, then both arms were tied to a winch that ratcheted them closer and closer until the backs of the hands touched. This ripped both shoulders out of the sockets with such pressure that blood spewed from the mouth. A surgeon would then set the joints and the victim was given two months in prison to recover.
Two months later, the last torture involved a heavy chain lashed around the body with both ends attached to a winch. The arms were pinned straight at the sides and the chain was passed around the wrists. Then it was tightened like a tourniquet until the shoulders and wrists dislocated. The joints were then reset, and the torture immediately inflicted a second time. If the victim still did not confess, he was sent to be burned at the stake. If he did, he was placed in prison for another month or two, then released a cripple.
8- Ground To Death In A Mill
Under the rule of Maximian, Saint Victor Maurus may have suffered the most excruciating death of all. He secretly ministered to his parishioners in Milan until about 303, when he was discovered and immediately
dragged through the streets behind a horse while the crowds stripped him naked and beat him, then demanded he recant. He refused and was stretched on the rack for a day, during which time he prayed to God for patience. He was then imprisoned—and immediately converted three of his guards. When Maximian heard of this, he ordered the guards beheaded, and Victor racked again, while the torturers beat him savagely with clubs. He was ordered to recant and refused a third time. Maximian had a Roman altar built and ordered Victor to sacrifice incense on it to Jupiter. This enraged Victor, who kicked over the altar. Maximian furiously ordered the offending foot cut off, after which Victor was flung into a stone mill used to grind wheat into flour, and the torturers ground him to death.
9- Broken On The Wheel
10- Having Their Guts Eaten By Pigs
In 363, under Julian the Apostate, Saint Marcus was Bishop of Arethusa, a town near modern Apameia, Syria. Julian ordered Marcus to repair a dilapidated pagan temple, but Marcus
destroyed it instead, then fled the city. He soon realized that his Christian followers would pay for what he had done if he did not return—and so he did. The enraged townspeople dragged him through the streets, stripped him naked, stabbed him all over his body with their pencils and quills, then smeared him with honey and suspended him in a basket in a town square, where the wasps and bees would swarm into the basket and devour him
Where was the rapture for those people and the ones who are still dying today????
