Word: martyrdoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...carrying explosives and had blown herself up, killing four Israelis. The final scene shows the girl wistfully rummaging through her dead mother's bedside table. She finds a hidden stick of dynamite and picks it up. The implicit message is that someday Duha will follow her mother into blazing martyrdom...
...smuggling guns and explosives to becoming suicide bombers," says Anat Berko, an Israeli counterterrorism expert at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, who spent 13 years inside Israeli high-security prisons interviewing convicted terrorists. And yet it remains difficult to pinpoint why certain women turn to martyrdom. Behind the motives of religion and rage at Israeli occupation, Palestinian women, far more than men, tend to choose self-sacrifice as an exit from personal despair, while others are pushed into it for having broken taboos in strict Palestinian society. "These women are both victimizers and victims," Berko says...
...authors suggest the text was a polemic--and a losing one, since martyrdom became a pillar of the church. But its angry tone supports a favorite theme of Pagels': that not all early believers embraced doctrines now accepted as handed down directly from Jesus...
...Before either Christians or Muslims spoke of martyrdom, Jewish communities celebrated those who were willing to "die for God." After Jesus was crucified by the Romans, those who still remained his followers were suspected of treason against Rome, and leaders were executed. The focus on crucifixion has a lot to do with fact that his followers remained in danger of arrest, torture, and execution themselves. Without that I can't imagine that discussions of his suffering and death would have occupied the central place that they do for many Christians...
...concern was about leaders who encouraged martyrdom, and in this gospel, the other apostles stand in for these leaders, and he criticizes them harshly. I don't want to sound like I'm advocating the Gospel of Judas. What I love, is that this sort of document shows you the other side of the moon, the voices of the pe ople who were regarded as not articulating what became the official doctrine of the Church - a more dense, more detailed, more human picture of the early Christian movement than we've ever had available before...