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Uses material from Josephus (Antiquities xii), and 1 and 2 Maccabees to examine the changes in the high priesthood leading up to the Maccabean revolt, and the careers of the first two Maccabean leaders, Jonathan and Simon. Although Jonathan and Simon both became high priests as well as political rulers, their style of rule was monarchic, and they had already achieved political authority among their own people, by virtue of their military exploits, before they were made high priests. The high priesthood, of itself, did not therefore give them any new powers of governance.

This chapter identifies some of the earliest Christian texts to describe purgation as part of the Christian afterlife and examines the interpretation placed on them by patristic authors from Origen to Augustine. Bede’s definition of purgatory is presented. The chapter discusses traditional “proof texts” for purgatory including 2 Maccabees, 1 Corinthians 3:11–15, and the fate of Dinocrates in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. It discusses purgatorial fire, universal salvation, and how ideas about original sin intersected with an economy of pain that was thought to cross the barrier of death.

This chapter analyzes the dying forgiveness prayer of Stephen and the related prayer of the Lukan Jesus. By reading these prayers aside related bodies of literature including Maccabees and the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, it argues that these prayers are for Luke a Christian proprium. They are potentially more radical than Gospel teaching on enemy love, as Tertullian would have recognized, since the plea for forgiveness of undeserving persecutors, more so than enemy love, challenged the framework of cosmic justice, as Marcion would have affirmed. The prayer was frequently read intransitively, as idealizing the one who so prays, without having any effect on the prayer’s object, thereby functioning analogously to the Roman discourse of clemency. Those who read the prayer otherwise landed upon this radical challenge, which explains the prayer’s complicated reception history, including the scribal omission of Jesus’ forgiveness prayer (Luke 23.34a) from the Gospel of Luke.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the historians included in this book: Nicolaus, Memnon, Diodorus, Trogus, Posidonius, and the author of 1 Maccabees. They are, consciously or unconsciously, post-Polybian in their choice of subject matter and thematic approach. Although several of the historians in question wrote on diverse matters, even within their histories, their common element is a treatment of contemporary history from 146 BC onwards. Moreover, they all address the role of Rome in the wider Mediterranean.

In the contemporary histories of the Late Republic written by non-Romans, we can find preserved the attitudes of those dispossessed of their power by the establishment of Roman hegemony. The historical texts themselves, like any intellectual product, have a distinctive form. The genre employed by each author and the structural choices made reflect the nature of the historian's objectives and political position. Choices regarding the integration of Rome into the narrative structure are of particular significance. Two categories have been recognized in Hellenistic historical writing: universal history and local chronicles.

The authors at the core of this analysis — Nicolaus, Memnon, Diodorus, Trogus, Posidonius, and the author of 1 Maccabees — are from geographically diverse origins on the periphery of the Roman world. Nevertheless, scrutiny of their texts has brought to light significant thematic cohesion: all accept Roman rule. This open and clear acknowledgement of Roman hegemony throughout the Mediterranean basin may not seem surprising given the political and military realities of the day. However, in contrast to the scholarly trends towards identifying this type of literature as hostile to the new ruling power, the clear acceptance of Roman rule as the foremost conclusion of the preceding analysis is emphasized.

An introduction and translation of Third Maccabees. It was not canonized as part of the Hebrew Bible or the Catholic Old Testament Apocrypha, but was contained in the Eastern Orthodox Old Testament. This satire of the Dionysos cult recounts an incidence of persecution of the Jews in Egypt, but pushes the limits of history; their escape comes through a series of miracles. It includes the motifs of prayer and the competition of ethnic groups.

Chapter one sets up the cultural context for the study of early Christian texts by examining traditions in which the living helped the dead in Greek religion, Roman religion, and ancient Judaism. The archaeology of burial sites, epitaphs, other inscriptions, and textual sources are adduced as evidence for this purpose. The chapter concludes with a discussion of salvation after death in the Greek religious movement called Orphism, as well as in the Jewish texts 2 Maccabees and 4 Ezra.

The military victory of the Jewish Maccabees against the idolatrous Seleucid Greeks and their Hellenised Jewish allies during the period of the Second Temple was understood by its protagonists to have been successful by virtue of divine providence. Descriptions of this are not found in the Hebrew Bible but appear in the non-canonical Books of Maccabees. The triumph of Jewish heroes against the Greeks was acknowledged by Jews as a celebration of divinely wrought military success. Josephus acknowledges God’s hand in victory, and the festival of Hanukkah originally developed a celebration of military victory. Later, however, as observed from canonical rabbinic literature, Hanukkah takes on an entirely different meaning that plays down the military aspect of the occasion it celebrates.

The unusual historical distortions that abound in Jewish fictions are in no way random but are deliberately employed for rhetorical purposes. Third Maccabees has often been misunderstood. Because it recounts a persecution (albeit one miraculously averted at the last moment), it has been seen primarily as a confrontational text rejecting assimilation and interaction with gentiles. The principal subject of Third Maccabees is a persecution of the Jews of Alexandria that apparently took place under Ptolemy IV Philopator not long after the battle of Raphia in 217 bce However, it has long been recognized that the text as it stands cannot possibly have been composed before the end of the second century bce, nearly a century after the events it purports to describe. The terminus post quem is fixed by a clear allusion in Third Maccabees to the Greek translation of Daniel together with the additions now considered apocryphal.

Judea gained political independence under the Hasmonean dynasty for the first time since the deportation to Babylon. Reflections on the accomplishments of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers set the tone for messianic expectations to come, even when these expectations arose in reaction against the later Hasmonean and early Herodian rulers. The Psalms of Solomon provide an exceptionally clear snapshot of these expectations. The piety, ethics, and eschatology of these texts are explored, with an eye to their impact upon Jesus' teaching and degree of conformity to popular messianic paradigms.

Reflection on the deaths of the Maccabean martyrs such as one finds in 2 Maccabees 6–7 and 4 Maccabees, together with the development of traditions concerning the violent deaths of the major prophets, provides a sufficient basis for Jesus' expectation, and articulation of this expectation during his lifetime, of a violent death as the outcome of his witness. Jewish martyrology also provides sufficient basis for his expectation both of vindication through resurrection and his expectation that his obedience to God to the point of suffering death with bring benefits to the Jewish nation, or at least his followers, within the framework of the covenant (or the inauguration of the new covenant).

Greek literature from ancient Judaism reflects many of the same strategies and assumptions surrounding food and proper formation found in Greek paideia and Roman family values. Indeed, certain Jewish authors (including the author of 2 Maccabees, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul) worked with the prominent notion that food carries an essence in order to think through the very characteristics of their “Jewishness.” In so doing, they devised similar gastronomic regimes out of milk and solid food. Yet something was also different in how food functioned in this literature as the material basis of a deeper religious bond. The three sets of Jewish texts examined in this chapter indicate how the idioms, values, and embodied politics of Roman rule could be repurposed within a specific provincial culture. And they do so in such a way that emphasizes their own scriptural and philosophical commitments.

An important period for our understanding of the formation of the Jewish canon is the second century bce. Scholars have looked to the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira and 2. Maccabees to back up the view that the canon was determined, if not already closed. This chapter examines the texts to see just how far the evidence can take us. It is argued that the Prologue of Sira does not have in view the closed canon. In its conception, the collection of authoritative scriptures consisted of the law, the prophets, and the other ancestral books, but this is not a bipartite or tripartite canon. The chapter also argues that for 2. Maccabees, the comparison between Nehemiah and Judas should be understood in a general way.

This chapter covers the descriptions of martyrdoms in the Sinai according to the Sinai Martyr Narratives by Ammonius and Pseudo-Nilus. Once Christianity was legalized in 313, the number of martyrs quickly dwindled, except in a few regions of the Roman Empire, such as in the Sinai. Christians there employed previously existing rhetoric about martyrs, such in as the books of the Maccabees, to describe nomadic attacks on the monks. The description of these attacks in the Sinai Martyr Narratives helped create a pejorative image of the nomads by depicting them as a threat to the monks and pilgrims in the region.

In Derrida’s Monolinguism of the Other, Or the Prosthesis of Origin, a theory about the universal and constitutive alienation of the speaking subject from language finds its exemplary grounding in Derrida’s own experience as an Algerian Jew, one whose relationship to the French language is both totalizing and exiled: “I have only one language, it is not mine.” He equates speaking not only with contingent citizenship and a divestment of what one never really had in the first place, but also with the extreme experiences of torture, threat, and physical violence. He indeed uses the words “passion” and “martyr” to describe his experience. This chapter reads Derrida “backwards,” and against the universalizing move Derrida and those following him make, in order to suggest a way of reading some scenes of so-called martyrdom as scenes about diasporic cultural divestment. The chapter argues that the last words of martyrs can be read as archives of the inescapable expenses of entering dominant cultural “languages.” In a renegotiation of the linguistic turn with regard to describing real experiences that appear off dominant grids, this chapter stakes a claim for the cultural materiality of speech.