The Maccabean Memory

When the modern Christian reads about Stephen being stoned in Acts 7, or about Paul being prepared to “die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus” in Acts 21, or about the souls of the slain crying out from under the altar in Revelation 6, she usually reads it as part of a new thing — the cost of following Christ, the price of the gospel, the suffering that began with the cross and rippled outward into the lives of the apostles and the early church. The vocabulary of faithful death often feels in modern reading like something that started in Jerusalem in the year 30, that was made possible by Easter, and that took shape as the church spread.

This is half right and half not. What it misses is that by the time Stephen looks up into heaven and sees the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, a Jewish vocabulary for faithful death — refusal to renounce the faith, courage under torture, hope of bodily resurrection, vindication by God in the age to come — had already been forming for two hundred years. It had heroes. It had standard scenes. It had a theology. When Jesus spoke about disciples being flogged and dragged before councils, when Paul wrote about light and momentary troubles against an eternal weight of glory, when the author of Hebrews mentioned almost in passing that some had been tortured that they might gain an even better resurrection, none of this vocabulary was new. The categories were waiting in the language. The hope had been rehearsed.

a better resurrection — than what?

There’s a moment in Hebrews 11 that the modern Christian usually reads through without slowing down for. The author of Hebrews is running through the heroes of Israel’s faith — Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, the wilderness generation, the judges, the prophets — and the list begins to accelerate. Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection (Hebrews 11:35, NIV).

Read it again, slowly, and notice what the sentence is doing.

The first half is about resurrections that have already happened in the Old Testament — Elijah raising the widow of Zarephath’s son in 1 Kings 17, Elisha raising the Shunammite woman’s son in 2 Kings 4. Women received back their dead. That part fits cleanly inside the Protestant canon’s roster of stories.

The second half doesn’t. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Who were these others? When were they tortured? What story is the author of Hebrews assuming his readers already know? Better than what? Better than the resurrections Elijah and Elisha performed, presumably — but in what way? And how would the original readers of Hebrews have known what he was talking about?

The answer is that the author of Hebrews was writing to a community that had grown up on a story Protestants today usually don’t know. The story is in 2 Maccabees 7. It’s one of the most famous narratives in Second Temple Judaism. It was central to how first-century Jews thought about faithful death. And it’s the story the phrase a better resurrection is reaching toward.

the seven brothers and their mother

The standard scholarly treatment of this material is The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People, written by the Dutch scholar Jan Willem van Henten, Professor of New Testament, Early Christian, and Hellenistic Jewish Literature at the University of Amsterdam, and published by Brill in 1997 as volume 57 of the Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism. Van Henten’s book is the long, careful study of 2 and 4 Maccabees that established for current scholarship how the Maccabean martyrdom narratives functioned in Jewish self-understanding and how their language carried over into Christian texts. His central argument is that the heroes of these stories — the elderly Eleazar, the unnamed mother with her seven sons, the elder Razis — were understood by Second Temple Jews as saviours of the Jewish people, in the technical sense that their faithful deaths preserved the covenant community when the entire covenant was under threat of extinction. The vocabulary of their deaths shaped how the next two centuries of Jewish writers — and after them, the New Testament writers — talked about suffering for God.

The setting is the Maccabean crisis we met in chapter twenty-six. The Greek-speaking Seleucid king Antiochus IV has outlawed the practice of Judaism — circumcision, Sabbath, the dietary laws, the Hebrew scriptures themselves. Jews who refuse to comply are being arrested and tortured. The book of 2 Maccabees, which was written probably in the late second century BC by an unknown Jewish author and is preserved in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles as deuterocanonical scripture and in Protestant tradition as historically valuable apocrypha, narrates two of the most famous resistance stories.

The first, in 2 Maccabees 6, is the death of Eleazar — an elderly and respected scribe, one of the leading men in Jerusalem, who is brought before the king’s officers and ordered to eat pork. He refuses. The officers, who like him personally and want to spare him, offer a quiet compromise: he can bring his own meat — kosher meat — and appear to eat the pork in public. He could keep his conscience and save his life. Eleazar refuses even this. He won’t pretend, he says, because the young men who look up to him would see him eating, would believe their teacher had given in, and would themselves be drawn into apostasy. It would be unworthy of my old age, he says, to pretend. He chooses death. He dies under torture, saying that the Lord who has the holy knowledge knows that he could have saved himself but did not. The story ends by calling him an example of nobility and a memorial of courage to the nation.

The second, in 2 Maccabees 7, is the story that mattered most for what came next. A mother and her seven sons are arrested. The king, in person, tries to break them by torture. He starts with the eldest. They’re commanded to eat pork. They refuse. The eldest is tortured to death first — his tongue cut out, his hands and feet cut off, his body burned in a pan — while his mother and brothers watch. Then the second brother is brought forward. As he is dying, he tells the king that the king of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws. The third brother is next. He puts out his tongue when asked for it and stretches out his hands to be cut off, and then says — and this line has staggered readers for two thousand years — I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again. He’s talking about his hands. Hands that are about to be cut off. He’s saying that God will give them back. Resurrection, in 2 Maccabees 7, isn’t a metaphor for the survival of an immortal soul. It’s the resurrection of the body, including the parts that were cut off in martyrdom. God will reassemble what the empire dismembered.

The fourth brother says the same. As he is dying, he tells his torturers that he chooses to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. The fifth and sixth confess the same hope. Each son, before he dies, names his faith that God will raise him up. The seventh, the youngest, has the longest speech. He says he gives up body and life for the laws of his ancestors, appealing to God to show mercy soon to our nation. And then there is the mother. She had watched all seven of her sons tortured to death. The text says she encouraged each of them in their ancestral language — Hebrew — to be faithful. To the youngest she said I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws. The mother of the seven sons didn’t die bereft. She died expecting to see her sons again — raised, restored, bodily.

This story, told in the late second century BC by a Jewish author writing in Greek for diaspora Jews who needed courage, did three things at once. It crystallized a theology of faithful death — that refusing to renounce the covenant, even under torture, was itself a saving act. It crystallized a theology of bodily resurrection — that God would restore the bodies of the faithful, including the parts that were destroyed. And it crystallized a theology of vindication — that the present apparent victory of the empire wasn’t the final word. The age to come would set things right. The seven brothers and their mother became, for the next two centuries, the iconic Jewish martyrs. Their story was told and retold. 4 Maccabees — written probably in the first century AD, around the time of Paul — would devote its entire eighteen chapters to a philosophical reflection on these same martyrdoms, arguing that the rational faithful mind could master even the most extreme suffering for the sake of piety. By the first century, the Maccabean martyrs were the Jewish answer to the question can a person remain faithful unto death? And if she does, what happens to her? The answer was: yes, and God will raise her body.

This is the vocabulary the New Testament steps into.

three places the memory is audible

An even better resurrection. (Hebrews 11:35, NIV). The author of Hebrews has been listing Old Testament heroes, and in the same breath he reaches forward into the intertestamental period and names the Maccabean martyrs — without quite naming them. Anyone in his first audience who had grown up on synagogue readings would have recognized exactly what he was reaching for. Tortured, refusing to be released. That is Eleazar declining the compromise. That is the seven brothers under Antiochus’s officers. That they might gain an even better resurrection — better than the resurrections in Kings, better than mere return to mortal life, better because it would belong to the age to come and would never be undone. The first audience could hear that. They knew the story. They knew the theology. The author of Hebrews could allude to it the way a modern preacher might mention Bonhoeffer in the Flossenbürg cell or Polycarp at the stake — a one-line nod that, for a hearer steeped in the tradition, opens an entire memory.

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. (Mark 8:34, NIV). When Jesus called his disciples to a path that could end in execution, he wasn’t inventing a category. The faithful Jew who suffered death rather than abandon the covenant was already in the cultural air. The Maccabean martyrs had walked it. The synagogue prayers remembered them. The festival of Hanukkah, which Jesus attended (John 10:22), commemorated the crisis from which their story had emerged. When Jesus told his disciples in Mark 13 that they would be handed over to councils, flogged in synagogues, and brought before governors and kings as a witness (Mark 13:9), the disciples didn’t need to ask what kind of category he was placing them in. They had names for that category. The Maccabean martyrs were the names. Jesus was telling his disciples that the faithful death they had been taught to admire in the heroes of two centuries past would now belong to them as well — and that, like those heroes, they would be vindicated. Whoever endured to the end would be saved.

Our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. (2 Corinthians 4:17, NIV). When Paul wrote those words to the Corinthians, he was writing inside a theological grammar two centuries old. The Maccabean tradition had taught Jewish readers to weigh present suffering against the vindication of the age to come. 4 Maccabees, written in Paul’s lifetime or close to it, made exactly this contrast its central argument. The faithful sufferer wasn’t losing; she was investing. The empire’s torture wasn’t the verdict; God’s resurrection was. Paul didn’t need to teach the Corinthians that the present age and the age to come stood in a particular kind of relationship — that vocabulary was already present in the broader Jewish thought-world the early Christian communities inhabited. What he was teaching them was that this grammar now had a Christ-shaped center. The light and momentary troubles he meant were sufferings for Christ. The eternal glory he meant was being raised with Christ. The architecture was inherited. The center was new.

The recovery here isn’t that the New Testament borrowed Maccabean ideas. It’s that the categories were waiting in the language. When the early Christians proclaimed that Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead — that the empire’s torture and execution hadn’t been the final word, that God had vindicated his faithful one, that the age to come had broken in — they weren’t inventing a vocabulary from nothing. They were saying that the thing the Maccabean martyrs had died believing in had happened. The mother of the seven sons had told her youngest that the Creator would give him back his life and breath. Paul, generations later, told the Corinthians that Christ had been raised as the firstfruits of those who had fallen asleep (1 Corinthians 15:20). The grammar lines up. The hope lines up. The two-hundred-year rehearsal hadn’t been pointless. It had been preparing a language for what God was about to do.

This matters for how the modern Christian reads her own tradition’s resurrection texts. The bodily resurrection of Jesus isn’t a stand-alone miracle pulled from outside the world the gospel writers lived in. It’s the answer to a question the previous two centuries had been refining. The faithful would be vindicated. The body would be raised. The age to come would arrive. Has arrived, the apostles said, because of one specific empty tomb. The earliest Christians could speak this way without first explaining their categories because the categories belonged to the world they had grown up in. The Maccabean memory had been doing slow theological work for two hundred years. When the resurrection happened, the language was ready.

For the modern Christian, recovering this memory does what most of the recovery moves in this book do. It doesn’t reduce the resurrection to a derivative idea. It does the opposite. It places the resurrection in the precise grammar that was waiting to receive it — and lets the reader feel, for a moment, what it might have been like to belong to a people whose deepest theological hope had been rehearsed for two centuries, and who one Sunday morning learned that the rehearsal was over.