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A person who is killed because of their witness to Jesus — the Greek word literally means "witness"
From Stephen in Acts 7 onward, Christian martyrdom became one of the church's defining marks. The early church saw martyrs not as failures but as triumphant witnesses whose deaths preached the resurrection more loudly than any sermon. Tertullian's line — "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church" — captured the paradox.