The prophet is engaged in a battle for language, in an effort to createa different epistemology out of which another community might emerge. The prophet is not addressing behavioral problems. He is not even pressingfor repentance. He has only the hope that the acheof God could penetrate the numbness of history.
—Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
Perhaps the ache was even deeper for the prophets whose language was rarely heard as they lived marginally in patriarchal Roman society and Church in the first five centuries of Christianity. We strain to hear female voices even today in textbooks and primary sources, their voices still scant and hushed, still silenced by lack of bold print. But the minority human voice, says Brueggemann, is one that while suffering and marginalized, prophetically reveals the transcendent voice of God. These voices penetrate the “numbness of history” with an honesty articulating the negativity of fear, shame, and pain through lament, and with a hopefulness punctuating the subversive yearning that refuses to accept the majority experience as reality. As we read stories from the margins we hear God’s voice of co-suffering love.
In this paper, I will accentuate the female voices of Perpetua and Felicitas as prophetic language of divine love in the context of their story of martyrdom. To do this, I will examine their voices as dissent in the liminal spaces their stories of spirituality occupied in the Greco-Roman context through the hagiographic literary work, The Acts of Perpetua and Felicitas.
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