Do you reject their martyrdom as a sign of their faith...

Do you reject their martyrdom as a sign of their faith
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Is this what you are referring to?

In 64 C.E., Roman emperor Nero had made a scapegoat of the Christians, accusing them of burning the city, to counteract a rumor that he was the guilty one. The historian Tacitus reports: “They [Christians] died by methods of mockery; some were covered with the skins of wild beasts and then torn by dogs, some were [impaled], some were burned as torches to light at night.” A further wave of persecution under Emperor Domitian (81-96 C.E.) had resulted in John’s being exiled to the island of Patmos. As Jesus said: “If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you also.”—John 15:20; Matthew 10:22.
Jesus once told a parable of a man who sowed his field with good quality seeds of wheat. But “while men were sleeping,” an enemy sowed seeds that would produce weeds. Both types of seeds sprouted, and for a while the weeds hid the wheat from view. By this parable, Jesus showed that the fruitage of his work would be true Christians but that after his death, false Christians would infiltrate the congregation. Eventually, it would be difficult to distinguish the genuine from the false.—Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.
By the fourth century C.E., that old serpent, Satan the Devil, had brought forth his masterpiece of deception, the apostate religion of Christendom—a Babylonish system hidden under a “Christian” veneer. It is the principal part of the seed of the Serpent and has developed into a multitude of conflicting sects. In the fourth century, the Roman emperor Constantine adopted “Christianity” as the official religion of the Roman Empire. But the “Christianity” he knew was very different from the religion preached by Jesus. By now, the “weeds” were flourishing, just as Jesus had foretold.
It was in Constantine’s time that Christendom as we know it today began to take shape. From then on, the degenerate form of Christianity that had taken root was no longer just a religious organization. It was a part of the state, and its leaders played an important role in politics. Eventually, the apostate church used its political power in a way that was completely opposed to Bible Christianity, introducing another dangerous threat to the Bible.
When Latin died out as an everyday tongue, new translations of the Bible were needed. But the Catholic Church no longer favored this. In 1079 Vratislaus, who later became king of Bohemia, asked the permission of Pope Gregory VII to translate the Bible into the language of his subjects. The pope’s answer was no. He stated: “It is clear to those who reflect often upon it, that not without reason has it pleased Almighty God that holy scripture should be a secret in certain places, lest, if it were plainly apparent to all men, perchance it would be little esteemed and be subject to disrespect; or it might be falsely understood by those of mediocre learning, and lead to error."
The pope wanted the Bible to be kept in the now-dead tongue of Latin. Its contents were to be kept “secret,” not translated into the languages of the common people. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, produced in the 5th century to make the Bible accessible to all, now became a means of keeping it hidden.
These religious authorities were not trying to destroy the Bible. They were trying to fossilize it, keep it in a language that only a few could read. In this way, they hoped to prevent what they called heresy but what really amounted to challenges to their authority. If they had succeeded, the Bible could have become just an object of intellectual curiosity, with little or no influence in the lives of ordinary people.
Happily, though, many sincere people refused to follow these edicts. But such refusals were dangerous. Individuals suffered terribly for the “crime” of owning a Bible. Consider, as an example, the case of a Spaniard named Julián Hernández. According to Foxe’s History of Christian Martyrdom, Julián (or, Juliano) “undertook to convey from Germany into his own country a great number of Bibles, concealed in casks, and packed up like Rhenish wine.” He was betrayed and seized by the Roman Catholic Inquisition. Those for whom the Bibles were destined “were all indiscriminately tortured, and then most of them were sentenced to various punishments. Juliano was burnt, twenty were roasted upon spits, several imprisoned for life, some were publicly whipped, many sent to the galleys."
John Wycliffe (1330?-84) was a Catholic priest and a professor of theology at Oxford, England. Well aware of the abuses in the church, he wrote and preached against such matters as corruption in the monastic orders, papal taxation, the doctrine of transubstantiation (the claim that the bread and wine used in the Mass literally change into the body and blood of Jesus Christ), the confession, and church involvement in temporal affairs.
Strongly influenced by John Wycliffe was the Bohemian (Czech) Jan Hus (1369?-1415), also a Catholic priest and rector of the University of Prague. Like Wycliffe, Hus preached against the corruption of the Roman Church and stressed the importance of reading the Bible. This quickly brought the wrath of the hierarchy upon him. In 1403 the authorities ordered him to stop preaching the antipapal ideas of Wycliffe, whose books they also publicly burned. Hus, however, went on to write some of the most stinging indictments against the practices of the church, including the sale of indulgences. He was condemned and excommunicated in 1410.
Hus was uncompromising in his support for the Bible. “To rebel against an erring pope is to obey Christ,” he wrote. He also taught that the true church, far from being the pope and the Roman establishment, “is the number of all the elect and the mystical body of Christ, whose head Christ is; and the bride of Christ, whom of his great love he redeemed with his own blood.” (Compare Ephesians 1:22, 23; 5:25-27.) For all of this, he was tried at the Council of Constance and was condemned as a heretic. Declaring that “it is better to die well than to live ill,” he refused to recant and was burned to death at the stake in 1415. The same council also ordered that the bones of Wycliffe be dug up and burned even though he had been dead and buried for over 30 years!
Another early Reformer was the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98) of the San Marcos monastery in Florence, Italy. Swept along by the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, Savonarola spoke out against the corruption in both Church and State. Claiming as a basis Scripture, as well as visions and revelations that he said he had received, he sought to establish a Christian state, or theocratic order. In 1497 the pope excommunicated him. The following year, he was arrested, tortured, and hanged. His last words were: “My Lord died for my sins; shall not I gladly give this poor life for him?” His body was burned and the ashes thrown into the river Arno. Fittingly, Savonarola called himself “a forerunner and a sacrifice.” Just a few years later, the Reformation burst forth in full force all over Europe.
IN 1546, 14 men of Meaux, France, were found guilty of heresy and condemned to be burned alive. Their crimes? They met in private homes, prayed, sang psalms, observed the Lord’s Supper, and declared that they would never accept “Papistical idolatries.”
On execution day, the Roman Catholic teacher François Picard challenged the condemned men about their beliefs regarding the Lord’s Supper. They answered by questioning him about the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation, which claims that the bread and the wine used during that observance change miraculously into Jesus’ flesh and blood. ‘Does the bread,’ the condemned men asked, ‘taste like meat? Or the wine like blood?’
Despite the lack of response, the 14 were tied to stakes and burned alive. The ones who had not had their tongues removed sang psalms. Priests who stood around the execution site attempted to drown them out by singing louder than they did. The next day, on the same spot, Picard proclaimed that the 14 were condemned to hell forever.
Sorry for such a long post but there is a lot to be said about 'martyrdom as sign of their faith' that many would prefer was hidden.