2 Maccabees

It concludes with the defeat of the Seleucid Empire general Nicanor in 161 BC by Judas Maccabeus, the leader of the Maccabees.

2 Maccabees was originally written in Koine Greek by an unknown diaspora Jew living in Hellenistic Egypt.

[2] The work was possibly modified some after creation, but reached its final form in the Septuagint, the Greek Jewish scriptures.

[6][2][note 4] The Greek style of the writer is educated and erudite, and he is familiar with the forms of rhetoric and argument of the era.

All agree that the work has a moralistic tenor, showing the triumph of Judaism, the supremacy of God, and the just punishment of villains.

Some see it as a paean to Judas Maccabeus personally, describing the background of the Revolt to write a biography praising him; some see its focus as the Second Temple, showing its gradual corruption by Antiochus IV and how it was saved and purified;[9] others see the focus as the city of Jerusalem and how it was saved;[10] and others disagree with all of the above, seeing it as written strictly for literary and entertainment value.

Some events appear to be presented out of strict chronological order to make theological points, such as the occasional "flash forward" to a villain's later death.

Hellenistic Judaism slowly waned as many of its adherents either converted to Christianity or switched to other languages, and 2 Maccabees thus did not become part of the Jewish canon.

[15] Josephus, the most famous Jewish writer of the first century whose work was preserved, does not appear to have read 2 Maccabees, for example; neither does Philo of Alexandria.

[16] Neither book of the Maccabees were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Essenes, a Jewish sect hostile to the Hasmoneans and their memory.

The theory goes that 2 Maccabees praises Judas for saving the temple, but excludes mention of how his brothers and extended family later took the throne, and might have been written by a Pharisee from Judea writing in Egyptian exile.

The work's emphasis on adherence to the Law even on pain of martyrdom, keeping the Sabbath, and the promise of a future resurrection seem to fit with the Pharisees' ideology.

The persecution of Antiochus IV stood in direct contradiction to this tradition: the most faithful Jews were the ones who suffered the most, while those who abandoned Jewish practices became wealthy and powerful.

The author of 2 Maccabees attempts to make sense of this in several ways: he explains that the suffering was a swift and merciful corrective to set the Jews back on the right path.

While God had revoked his protection of the Temple in anger at the impious High Priests, his wrath turns to mercy upon seeing the suffering of the martyrs.

For those truly blameless, such as the martyrs, the author invokes life after death: that post-mortem rewards and punishments would accomplish what might have been lacking in the mortal world.

[24][25] These references to the resurrection of the dead despite suffering and torture were part of a new current in Judaism also seen in the Book of Daniel, a work the authors of 2 Maccabees were likely familiar with.

Pope Damasus I's Council of Rome in 382, if the 6th century Gelasian Decree is correctly associated with it, issued a biblical canon which included both 1 and 2 Maccabees, but neither 3 nor 4.

[28] A cult to the Maccabean martyrs flourished in Antioch, the former capital of the Seleucids; Augustine of Hippo found it ironic and fitting that the city that named Antiochus IV now revered those he persecuted.

[39][40][37] 2 Maccabees was in a position of being an official part of the canon, but as a deuterocanonical work and thus subtly lesser than the older scriptures during the early 1500s.

[42][43] He also cited 2 Maccabees as support for prayers for the dead, the reverse case of the living praying for the salvation of souls suffering in purgatory.

He would eventually demote the deuterocanonical works to "apocrypha"; still useful to read and part of the 1534 version of the Luther Bible, but set aside in their own separate section and not accepted as a sound basis for Christian doctrine.

[60] The texts regarding the martyrdoms under Antiochus IV in 2 Maccabees are held in high esteem by the Anabaptists, who faced persecution in their history.

The Christian Epistle to the Hebrews possibly makes a reference to 2 Maccabees as well, or has similar knowledge of the Maccabean martyr tradition.

(For example, 2 Maccabees implausibly claims that there were 35,000 Syrian casualties at the Battle of Adasa, a number likely far larger than the entire Seleucid force.

By the 1930s, historians generally came to the conclusion that the historical documents present in 2 Maccabees – while seemingly out of chronological order – were likely legitimate and matched what would be expected of such Seleucid negotiations.

[73] Even to the extent that 2 Maccabees is still distrusted as history to a degree, the fact that it is a genuinely independent source is considered invaluable to historians.

[75] Additionally, other ancient fragments have been found, albeit with some attributed to Lucian of Antioch who is considered to have "improved" some of his renditions with unknown other material, leading to variant readings.