How They Died: Martyrdom of the Apostles, by Brad Miner

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? …