First, we have to recognize the reality that ancient documentary evidence is necessarily spotty. Blogs didn’t exist in 1st century Judea.
Second, we have to recognize that oral traditions are often accurate in cultures where written records and literacy are not widespread.
Third, there is considerable evidence of the persecutions of Christians that the Church claims happened at this time. It is not perfect evidence, but weighed with the first and second points above is solid evidence.
Fourth, it was the practice of the Roman Empire to seek peace and unity within its confines whenever possible. To this end, troublemakers and rabble-rousers were quite often given the chance to publicly renounce their beliefs, which had the salutory effect of undoing the damage to the public order they had caused while minimizing bloodshed which might result in open rebellion in the provinces.
Fifth, the religious norm in the Roman Empire was respect for all gods. The Romans did not take exception to the Christians worshipping God, but rather to Christians insisting that no other god be worshipped. It is consistent with this practice that Christians be requested to display their good citizenship by making some trivial gesture toward other gods.
Sixth, we do have extant accounts of some Apostles being martyred—St Stephen in Scripture, for example. Early Christians revered their martyrs, and so had an interest in preserving their stories.
Seventh, Scripture in particular and the Church in general maintains considerable evidence against interest. Think of the Scriptural account of St Peter denying Christ thrice—it is quite rare for an ancient text to preserve such information unless it was a screed written to defame someone for personal or political reasons. Romans guarded their reputations over generations. This should add to the credibility of Scriptural and Church accounts, all things considered.
The bottom line is that there is no such thing as perfect knowledge in historical matters. Eyewitness accounts to such events are rare, just as they are for the mass murders of the Holocaust, which had a far greater scale and is far closer to us in time. We can only know a fraction of what happened.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, however. Someone claiming that the Apostles were not martyred has to explain:
- Why the Church would want to claim that its founders were slaughtered by the very Empire to which its temporal power was tied (it would rather be in their interest to downplay mistreatment of Christians in the 1st century by the 4th century).
- Why the Church would emphasize the hazards of becoming Christian (how many of us REALLY want to be crucified?).
- What happened to the Apostles if they were not martyred (similar to the notion that William Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford—the problem is that the Earl died before the best dates for some of Shakespeare’s plays, a chronological impossibility).
- Why the Church has continued through the ages to revere martyrs (martyrdom is a most common path to sainthood—read “Butler’s Lives of the Saints”) in the Apostolic mode if the Apostles were not in fact martyred at all.
- How the Church came to dominate the religious affairs of the Roman Empire, completely at odds with centuries of Roman tradition, within a couple of centuries of Pentecost if Christians were NOT willing to die for their faith (by contrast, Islam swept through the world in a comparitively short time because so many Muslims were willing to fight and die to advance it.)
