We thought we knew what “martyr” meant, and then websites and videos started using it to mean “suicide bomber”. How did that happen?

“Martyr” came into English unchanged from Latin, but originally it is a Greek word with its Indo-European roots in the areas of trouble and anxiety. It was used in the Greek New Testament, but also in secular contexts, to mean “witness”. In Greek use, “martyrs” did not always die for speaking up for their faith; that came later.

Early Christians regarded Christ as the first martyr. Later the word was applied to people who tended to fit certain common criteria. According to New Zealand theologians Wallace and Rusk, martyrs were devoted to an admirable cause; they faced opposition; they knew the risk they were taking and took it anyway; they died for the cause; and they were subsequently venerated.

“Martyr” is found first in English in a partial Anglo-Saxon translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People from the late ninth century. The reference is to St Anastasia, who died in Sirmium (in modern Serbia) at the hands of the Romans. The word appears in the King James Bible only three times, twice in the Book of Revelation (referring to Antipas, and the collective “martyrs of Jesus”) and once in Acts, in the passage where Paul describes his Damascene conversion and the wrongful life he had led before.