In The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that Christ invited St. Peter “to the supreme followship of martyrdom for the Lord he had denied. . .thereby forgiving him all his sins. In the life of Peter, grace and discipleship are inseparable.” (p. 49)
In Bonhoeffer’s famous reckoning, this was a case of costly, as opposed to cheap, grace. Bonhoeffer, of course, would come to embody the former. On his way to be executed by the Nazis at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945, Bonhoeffer told a fellow prisoner, “This is the end – but for me it is the beginning of Life!”
That’s the attitude of all true martyrs when their time comes.
Bonhoeffer was hanged. The deaths of the original Twelve Apostles were often more excruciating.
So: how, when, and where did the Twelve meet their deaths? And how have artists imagined each man’s martyrdom?
To begin, we know that Christ’s betrayer died by his own hand (cf. Matthew 27:3-5 and Acts 1:18-19). Judas was a suicide, not a martyr.
We also know John (December 27 is his feast day) was not martyred. And he is the only one, according to tradition, not killed for preaching the
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