Lexicon

G3144 - martys

Strong's: G3144 · martys, plural martyres Pronunciation: MAR-toos Part of speech: masculine noun New Testament occurrences: 35 English descendant: martyr, through ecclesiastical Latin martyr

Rembrandt's painting of Stephen kneeling in a red robe with his arms raised to heaven while a crowd lifts stones over him and riders watch from the left

The stoning of Stephen, whom Paul later called "thy witness" (Acts 22:20). Rembrandt, The Stoning of Saint Stephen, 1625, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Semantic range

Martys is a person who can attest to something because he saw it, heard it, or knows it, and who says so. In the New Testament it moves along a line from the courtroom to the cross.

A legal witness. The Mosaic rule of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15) stands behind Matthew 18:16, 2 Corinthians 13:1, 1 Timothy 5:19, and Hebrews 10:28. False witnesses (martyres pseudeis) are produced against Stephen (Acts 6:13) and lay their garments at Saul's feet at his stoning (Acts 7:58). At Jesus' trial the high priest asks, "What further need have we of witnesses?" (Matthew 26:65; Mark 14:63).
God called as witness. Paul's oath formula, "God is my witness" (Romans 1:9; 2 Corinthians 1:23; Philippians 1:8; 1 Thessalonians 2:5, 10), appeals to the one who sees what no human court can.
An eyewitness of Jesus' resurrection. This is the dominant sense in Luke and Acts. "Ye are witnesses of these things" (Luke 24:48); "ye shall be my witnesses" (Acts 1:8); "a witness with us of his resurrection" (Acts 1:22); "whereof we all are witnesses" (Acts 2:32; compare 3:15; 5:32; 10:39, 41; 13:31). Paul is told he will be a witness of what he has seen (Acts 22:15; 26:16), and Peter calls himself "a witness of the sufferings of Christ" (1 Peter 5:1).
A witness who sealed the testimony with blood. Paul recalls "the blood of Stephen thy witness" (Acts 22:20); the risen Christ honors "Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you" (Revelation 2:13); the harlot is "drunken... with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (Revelation 17:6). The word still means "witness," but the witness and the death have become inseparable.
Christ himself, the faithful witness. Jesus Christ is "the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead" (Revelation 1:5) and "the Amen, the faithful and true witness" (Revelation 3:14). The two witnesses of Revelation 11:3 prophesy and are killed.
A crowd of witnesses. "So great a cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1) refers back to the faithful of Hebrews 11. Whether they are pictured mainly as spectators of the race or as those who have borne testimony is debated; the second fits the word's normal force better.

See this page's graph and discover linked topics

Theological force

From witness to martyr

The English word martyr is this Greek word. Within the New Testament it never simply means "one who dies"; it means "one who testifies," and Acts 22:20 and Revelation 2:13 show the testimony being given at the cost of life. By the middle of the second century the narrower sense is established: the Martyrdom of Polycarp uses the word family of Polycarp's death, and Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History 5.2) records that the confessors of Lyons and Vienne in AD 177, already tortured, refused the title "martyr" and reserved it for Christ, "the faithful and true witness," and for those who had already died. Justin Martyr, executed at Rome around 165, carries the narrowed sense as part of his name.

Witness to an event

The apostolic martys is not a person with strong religious opinions. He is someone who was there. When the apostles replace Judas, the qualification is to have accompanied them "all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto the day that he was received up from us," so that he may "become a witness with us of his resurrection" (Acts 1:21-22, ASV). That is why the apostolic testimony stands or falls with the resurrection as an event, and why the deaths of the apostles carry evidential weight: they died for a claim about what they personally saw. See Historical Evidence for the Martyrs and Minimal Facts Argument. Allison A. Trites, The New Testament Concept of Witness (1977), traces the legal and Isaianic background of the word through the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation.

The Isaianic background

The Hebrew counterpart is ʿēd, witness. In Isaiah 43:10, 43:12, and 44:8, God tells Israel, "Ye are my witnesses," in the same chapters where he declares that before him no God was formed and that there is no God beside him. When the risen Jesus says "ye shall be my witnesses" (Acts 1:8), he steps into the role the God of Israel claimed in Isaiah and makes himself the object of the testimony. See Isaiah 44.6 and Great Commission.

Notable verses

Luke 24:48, "Ye are witnesses of these things." The disciples' role is defined by what they have seen.
Acts 1:8, "ye shall be my witnesses... unto the uttermost part of the earth." The future indicative esesthe is a promise that assigns a role; see Great Commission.
Acts 1:22, the apostolic qualification: a witness of the resurrection.
Acts 22:20, Stephen as Christ's martys at the shedding of his blood.
Revelation 2:13, Antipas, "my witness, my faithful one, who was killed."
Revelation 1:5; 3:14, Christ the faithful and true witness.

Apologetic load

Use it for what it is. The word ties the Christian claim to testimony about events, which is the kind of claim historians can test. Acts presents the resurrection as something its witnesses saw, not something they inferred.
Do not overload it. Martyres in Acts 1:8 does not by itself mean the apostles would die, and the word's later meaning should not be read back into the verse. The strong point is the historical one: many of the witnesses did suffer and some were killed, and the word's narrowing records that experience.
It answers "a story invented later." A movement that defined its leaders as eyewitnesses, and replaced a lost apostle only with someone who had been present from the baptism of John, made its claim falsifiable in its own generation.

martyreō (G3140), to bear witness, frequent in John (John 1:34; 5:31-39)
martyria (G3141), testimony, the act or content of witness
G0386 - anastasis, resurrection, the event the apostolic witness attests
G0845 - autoptes, eyewitness (Luke 1:2), the closest synonym for the apostolic sense
G3670 - homologeo, to confess, the speech-act that often accompanies testimony under pressure

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

Alison A. Trites, The New Testament Concept of Witness (Cambridge University Press, 1977). doi:10.1017/cbo9780511520471