Via the blog of Dr. Ben WItherington, a first-hand account of one of the funerals and a memorial service for the three Christian publisher employees killed last month in Turkey.

I have attended many funerals, but this was my first in Turkey. And it was also the first time I attended the funeral of a martyr. I have been teaching and writing about martyrs and martyrdom for many years. We live in biblical Smyrna noted as the place where Polycarp was martyred in the second century. But such martyrdoms are personally and historically distant.

Then on April 18 three believers-Necati Aydýn and Uður Yüksel (Turks) and Tilman Geske (German)-were tortured and murdered in the southeastern city of Malatya. Needless to say, this brutal act deeply shook the Christian community, both national and expatriate. Persecution in Turkey to this point had taken the form of harassment, intimidation, and imprisonment, but never death.