4 Maccabees

Introduction to the Fourth Book of Maccabees

§ 1. Short Account of the Book.

THE Fourth Book of Maccabees is couched in the form of a discourse or treatise, taking for its subject the power of ὁ εὐσεβὴς λογισμός, the Inspired Reason, to control the passions. It has been suggested by Freudenthal that the work may be a specimen of synagogue preaching, and Ewald appears to agree with him in this, but other commentators reply that in the Diaspora the regular synagogue practice was always to take a passage from the Bible as a text for the sermon. Now Fourth Maccabees has no text, and the rules of Jewish services are seldom departed from, so it is probable that this work was given as a lecture rather than a sermon. But the best authorities doubt whether we know enough about Judaeo-Hellenistic practice nearly two thousand years a go to justify a positive conclusion about the matter. At all events the author of this work, be it lecture or sermon, is unquestionably an orthodox Jew, and his object is to fire the hearts of his co-religionists with such an enthusiastic devotion to their faith that they will be ready to face the last extremity of suffering in its behalf. A student of Greek philosophy himself, speaking to people who were evidently familiar with its terminology, he enlists the Stoic virtues in the cause of Jewish orthodoxy. Adopting the Stoic definition of the four cardinal virtues, judgement and justice, and courage and temperance, he insists that these are best attained by men being born and brought up under the Law of Moses. He leaves on one side the discussion of the methods by which Greek philosophy proposed to attain virtue. He has naturally no inspired anticipation of the Christian doctrine of God’s grace whereby sinners may be led into the way of truth; for we shall find reason to think that he wrote before any such thing as a Christian document had even come into existence. But he not only adopts the Stoic virtues, he also takes the Stoic view of sin, that to offend in one point is to be guilty of all, when he makes his protomartyr, Eleazar. say, ‘Think it not then a small sin for us to eat the unclean thing; for the transgression of the Law, be it in small things or in great, is equally heinous.’ Yet his acceptance of the Stoic position is not indiscriminating, as, although he uses their philosophical definition of the virtues, he refrains from specifically adopting their classification of the primary passions under the four heads of delight, grief, pain, and fear. The Stoics held that the passions were not grounded in nature but were due to wrong thinking, and could and should be extirpated. The author, on the contrary, holds that the passions were implanted in man by God and are not to be extirpated but controlled. ‘Reason’, he says, ‘is not the extirpator of the passions, but their antagonist.’ And this power of Reason he illustrates, not, as his Stoic friends would have done, from Greek sources, but from the Jews’ own Bible story, from the lives of Joseph and Jacob, of Moses and David. Then he passes to the subject of the terrible tyrant of Syria, Antiochus, whom some styled Epiphanes, The Brilliant, and some Epimanes, The Madman, and describes his odious oppressions: and so comes presently to the martyrs, Eleazar, and the Seven Brethren, and the Mother. He relates their defiance of the tyrant and enlarges on their sufferings with an even greater wealth of dreadful detail than the writer of Second Maccabees, whether the additions are due to his own invention or are drawn from a common original, the lost work of Jason of Cyrene. He recounts insistently the martyrs’ triumphant victory over their sufferings, won by the aid of their Reason, their unconquerable fidelity to the Law of Moses, and their assured hope of a blessed immortality in the company of the patriarchs. That immortality is their reward in heaven, while they enjoy on earth the honour of being held the saviours of their country, which noble title he would inscribe as their epitaph. His impassioned eulogy is intended to rouse the patriotic and religious feelings of his audience to the highest pitch and harden them to the point of following so glorious an example. If I were asked to suggest the most probable reason why this book was written I should incline to the opinion that it was in consequence of the deification of the Roman Emperors. It is true that that deification (which involved nothing particularly startling to the pagan world) was not taken very seriously by Augustus and Tiberius, and in consequence did not become a really crucial question with the Jews until the accession of Caligula, whom we might well call the Second Brilliant Madman. Mad he was and did verily take himself for a god and demand to be worshipped as such, and then all the horrors of the persecution of Epiphanes were repeated in Egypt on the bodies of the wretched Jews, the defiling and torture of their persons, the plunder of their holy things, and the erection of statues of the deified Emperor in their desecrated Synagogues. But though this persecution did not take place till A.D. 38-39, the future instrument through which Caligula’s madness was to work, namely the base passions of the dregs of the Egyptian, and especially the Alexandrian, populace, had become plainly visible long before. Every far-sighted man, such as the author of this book must have been, could not but recognize, even during the more clement days of Augustus and Tiberius, that as soon as ever Jews were required to offer public sacrifice at the imperial altars an impossible test would be imposed. Every true Jew knew that he must refuse, and it was not hard to foresee what would happen then, when once the passions of the vilest mob in the world were let loose. To meet and endure the coming persecution the sons of Israel would need all their courage, and how better could the Jewish-Hellenic philosopher steel the hearts of his brethren than by holding up to them the self-abnegating virtues of Stoicism and the sublime heroism of the Maccabean martyrs?

§ 2. Title.

The oldest form of title is simply Μακκαβαίων δ΄, under which it is found in three of the great uncial MSS., the Alexandrinus, the Sinaiticus, and the Venetus. But the book having been attributed to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, it also appears among his works with a title derived from the subject-matter, περὶ αὐτοκράτορος λογισμοῦ, On the Supremacy of Reason, and it is thus cited by Eusebius and Jerome. Another form of this title is περὶ σώφρονος λόγου, which appears in some editions of Josephus; and the former of the two is generally rendered in the Latin versions by de tmperatrice ratione, or else by de dominatu or de imperio rationis. Lastly, there is a third form of title, Ἰωσίππου εἰς τοὺς Μακκαβαίους βιβλίον, or εἰς τοὺς Μακκαβαίους λόγος.

§ 3-4. The MSS. and the Ancient Versions.

The book is found, as already mentioned, in three great uncials, A, 8, and V, but is unfortunately absent from the Codex Vaticanus. It was early translated into Syriac, and in 1895 Dr. Barnes brought out through the Cambridge Press a Syriac text prepared by the late Professor R. L. Bensly from a collation of nine MSS., of which he gives a description. The Syriac version was faithful enough to be of value for textual criticism, and Bensly found that as a rule it supports δὲ rather than A. Dr. Barnes, who edited Bensly’s notes, gives a list of some two hundred passages where the readings in the Syriac and the Greek MSS. are compared. As regards other ancient versions, ‘Nothing is known’, says Dr. Torrey, writing in the Ezcyclopaedia Biblica, of any old Latin version of Fourth Maccabees, or even of the sources used by Erasmus in making his Latin “paraphrase” which differs so widely from the Greek text.’ The book is not in the Vulgate, and accordingly is absent from the Apocrypha of the Roman Bible and from our own.

§ 5. Date.

The date of the original text is uncertain, but the author could never have spoken as he does of the Temple service had he been writing after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Also, if the date ot the book had been as late as the close of the first century A.D., its orthodox Judaism would probably have interfered with its acceptance among Christians, an acceptance which nevertheless it obtained. And if it was addressed, as it probably was, to an Alexandrian audience we must look at least thirty years further back than A.D. 70, for the author could not have spoken as he does to Alexandrian Jews after the occurrence of the Caligulan persecution, which took place in A.D. 38-39. This last date then becomes the inferior limit. Perhaps the superior limit may be taken as 63 B.C., when the High Priesthood passed from the Hasmonean House. For the author is at pains to explain that in the days of King Seleucus IV (175 B.C.) the High Priest, Onias, held that office for life, a tenure which ceased after the fall of the Hasmonean dynasty (Grimm). The date then probably falls between B.C. 63 and A.D. 38 or, roughly speaking, within two generations before or one generation after the Christian era.

§ 6. Integrity.

The book is of the nature of a sermon, whether actually delivered in a synagogue or not, and as a moral discourse it is thoroughly homogeneous. It opens with the philosophical discussion of the supremacy of Reason, and then illustrates the subject with a series of examples drawn from the constancy of the nine martyrs under their tortures. The point sought to be proved is repeated with an insistence that becomes rather tedious to modern ears, a matter in which, perhaps, we are less tolerant than the ancients. The details, too, of the successive tortures are elaborated in a way that shocks modern taste. We must consider, however, that very few among us to-day have either seen torture inflicted with our own eyes or dreaded to feel it in our own persons. We only know of it by reading of such horrors in other parts of the globe or in the history of the past. The author of Fourth Maccabees was addressing an audience to whom the sight of tortured men was as much a matter of course as the butcher’s shambles to us, and accordingly his treatment of this part of the subject is quite in keeping with his time and place. Though a Jew, and a highly orthodox Jew, he is completely master of the Greek language, which he writes with ease; his vocabulary is large, and he handles the idioms with variety and flexibility; his style is so ornate and copious that I am tempted to call it over-decorated. There is no sign of the Midrash method of treatment in his work, no reciting of scattered texts with disconnected expositions attached thereto. He keeps his main point before him, in good Greek form, illustrating it freely and well not only from the story of the martyrs but also from the heroes of old. The nearest he comes to writing in a Hebrew style is at the end, where he puts into the mouth of the Mother what may be described as a roll-call of Old Testament worthies. But as a Jew speaking to Jews nothing could be more natural or more effective than this Hebraic finale. Accordingly I see no reason why we should look in this last chapter for traces of another hand, though certain commentators have thought that the book originally ended at xviii. 2 with the words ‘O Israelites, children born of the seed of Abraham, obey this Law, and be righteous in all ways, recognizing that Inspired Reason is lord over the passions’. It is true that this close makes a neat Euclidean Q.E.D. to the demonstration of his proposition as enunciated at the beginning, namely that the Inspired Reason is supreme ruler over the passions. But considered as a peroration, from the rhetorical point of view, it is nothing less than an absolute bathos after the striking passage just before where he gives the epitaph that he would like to write for the martyrs. The main argument for the conjectural placing of the original conclusion at this point is that the Mother’s account of her early life, which occupies fourteen verses immediately after it, is of the nature of a digression. So it is, but the reason is not far to seek. The author, through the main part of the book, has dealt chiefly with men and the manly virtues, courage in particular. He gives the heroine of his story, the Mother, due praise for this virtue, but he also desires to insert in his work a fit encomium on the domestic virtues which as a Jew he considers to be most important for the women of his race. Courage he has already praised; now he lays stress on the woman’s more commonplace duty of stopping at home and attending to the house, of her father first and later of her husband. Above all, she must be very careful to run no risk of contamination by any deceiver, be he man or be he devil, inside or outside the house. So he makes the Mother say with pride in this last chapter, ‘I kept guard over the rib that was builded into Eve.’ Like Eve she was to be a helpmeet for man, but she was not, like Eve, to dally with the false beguiling serpent. Clearly the writer was determined to get in his point about female virtue, and he does it. Of course it is a digression even here, but if we look back to where he has the Mother in the front of the scene during the previous chapters there is no place where these verses would not have been ten times more out of keeping. He had far too much literary skill to spoil his effect by putting the passage in the wrong place, and he reserved this piece about her early days till he could use it as a relief to the tension of the tortures, and so lead up to the final roll-call of the heroes. He throws a true and honourable light on the religious influence of the Jewess in her home when he depicts her as recalling to her sons’ minds the words of their dead father and his manner of holding up the great men of old to their admiration. His setting of the passage in her mouth is far more effective than if the author himself called the roll in his own person. For myself I am inclined to distrust those confident critics who on the evidence of style say dogmatically ‘the author wrote this, the author did not write that’. Even the great Bentley himself, a critic whose shield (were he alive) few knights of the pen would dare to touch by way of challenge, succeeded in persuading himself that Milton never closed the last book of Paradise Lost with such a distich as:

‘They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.’

No, these lines had been corrupted by the ‘editor’ whom Bentley’s own imagination invented to account for the faults he discovered in Milton. And this is what he offered as a substitute:

‘Then, hand in hand, with social steps their way
Through Eden took with heavenly comfort cheer’d.’

Where Bentley could so stumble which of us shall stand upright? The style of Fourth Maccabees shows no more variation than naturally follows on the changes from one branch of the subject to another. All through the author writes the vigorous, free, idiomatic Greek of one to whom it was a native language, so that we might say of him, as of the Jew whom Aristotle is represented as meeting in Asia, that he was “EAAnvixds οὐ τῇ διαλέκτῳ μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τῇ ψυχῆ. He likes to coin new words of the right Greek stamp. For instance, in the first sentence of his treatise he states that the question he will discuss is whether Inspired Reason is really αὐτοδέσποτος τῶν παθῶν, autocratic over the passions, where the word αὐτοδέσποτος is apparently a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον of his own minting. Later on he uses in the same sense the much commoner word αὐτοκράτωρ, and we can even find his very phrase αὐτοκράτωρ λογισμός in Thucydides, though the historian uses it in quite another sense, to mean ‘an arbitrary decision’. The author of Fourth Maccabees chooses αὐτοδέσποτος not in order to avoid confusion with Thucydides’ phrase but to strike the key-note of originality and intensity: he would have you note from the outset that he is an undoubted autocrat of language. So Ruskin in the first sentence of The Seven Lamps of Architecture uses the rare Miltonic ‘resplendence’ where another man would have chosen some more ordinary term. But Ruskin meant his work to be resplendent, and strikes the note of brilliancy at once. Not a few more of these vigorous compounds does the author coin: ἐθνόπληθος = ‘the nation-mass’, ἑπταμήτωρ = ‘the mother of seven children’, κοσμοπληθής = ‘world-whelming’, κοσμοφορῶν = ‘world-freighted’, μαλακυψυχεῖν = ‘to be weak-spirited’, παθοκρατεῖσθαι = ‘to be mastered by the passions’. These words are neither obscure nor far-fetched; their meaning is obvious enough, but they are fresh. We have but to turn over a few pages of Carlyle’s French Revolution at haphazard to find parallels; Danton is ‘the Minister of Moloch-Justice’, the while ‘France is dancing its desert-waltz’; ‘Louis Capet was only called Inviolable by a figure of rhetoric; but at bottom was perfectly violable, friable’; or again, when the King’s sentence is being settled, constitution-monger Sieyes votes ‘La mort sans phrase, Death without phrases, and fares onward and downward. Most spectral, pandemonial’. A good word ‘pandemonial’ (which I have not found in Dri Murray’s dictionary) for horrors whether of the French Revolution or of torture under the Brilliant Madman. Some of the author’s new coinage passed into circulation; he speaks of Eleazar’s Reason as a pilot, πηδαλιουχῶν, ‘rudderhandling’ or ‘rudder-ruling’ the ship of godliness, where the common expression would have been οἰακίζων, ‘steering’; and we find this new word of his, πηδαλιουχεῖν, used by later writers, not of handling the helm of a real ship, but in the very same metaphorical sense we have here. We may note the author's love of double-barrelled prepositional compounds, as where he speaks of parents as ἐναποσφραγίζοντες, stamping their seal on the child; and of prepositions used intensively in composition, as in ἐπιρρωγολογούμενος, another of his coinages, to express the skinflint’s extra-gleaning of his grapes. Indeed his love of the ornate is such that he will invent a three-barrelled prepositional compound, if the fancy strikes him; as when, in the case of the torture of the first of the seven brethren, in order to describe the horrid ingenuity of the torturers, he says, τὸν τροχὸν προσεπικατέτεινον, ‘they extra-overstrained against him the wheel’, or as the Syriac version has it, ‘they made the wheel more cruel by artifice against him.’ I find no cause to suspect that this book is not the work of a single hand.

§ 7. Authorship.

The authorship of Fourth Maccabees must be considered doubtful. It was attributed to Flavius Josephus by Eusebius, the learned bishop of Caesarea, who lived more than two centuries later than Josephus, or between A.D. 270 and 340. The words of Eusebius are (//ist. Eccl. iii. 10, see page 76 in E. Burton’s Oxford Ed., 1856): πεπόνηται δὲ καὶ ἄλλο οὐκ ἀγεννὲς σπούδασμα τῷ ἀνδρὶ περὶ αὐτοκράτορος λογισμοῦ, 6 τινες Μακκαβαϊκὸν ἐνέγραψαν, τῷ τοὺς ἀγῶνας τῶν ἐν τοῖς οὕτω καλουμένοις Μακκαβαϊκοῖς συγγράμμασιν ὑπὲρ τῆς εἰς τὸ θεῖον εὐσεβείας ἀνδρισαμένων “Ἑβραίων περιέχειν. ‘The man (Josephus) has also produced another work of a lofty character on the Supremacy of Reason, to which some have given the title of Maccabean, because it includes the struggles of the Hebrews who in the books known as Maccabean strove valiantly for the sake of righteousness before God.’ Jerome, writing in A.D. 492, follows Eusebius in naming Josephus as the author, and in consequence of this attribution, which was generally accepted in ancient times, we find the book frequently printed among Josephus'’s works. Internal evidence, however, points strongly the other way. For example, the statement made in Fourth Maccabees xvii. 24, that Antiochus publicly held up the example of the martyrs to his men to inspire them with courage, ‘so that he conquered all his enemies and laid waste their cities,’ is a singular one to have been made by Josephus, who himself has chronicled the notorious failure of Antiochus before Elymais and discusses the question whether that failure was not the immediate cause of his death. Again, Josephus (Azz. xii. 4) correctly states that Antiochus Epiphanes was the brother of SeleucusIV. But in Fourth Maccabees iv. 15 the writer makes the blunder of calling him his son. Also the writer says in Fourth Maccabees xiv. 7, ‘we now shudder when we hear of the sufferings of those youths,’ thus presupposing that his hearers enjoy peace and safety. Such words would be hardly natural in the mouth of Josephus, who was actually present at the fall of Jerusalem and wrote the history of the fatal Jewish War. It is also worth noting that Josephus in his historical works uses the Greek equivalents of Biblical names, whereas the author of Fourth Maccabees uses the Hebrew indeclinable forms except in the cases of “Ιεροσόλυμα and ᾿Ελεάζαροςς Indeed the whole form and style of Fourth Maccabees are so unlike any of Josephus’s other works that, if he did write it, he must have done so when very young, and then have completely changed his style later. He would seem to have changed his views also, for the ideal purpose of Fourth Maccabees is to glorify the heroes who sacrifice everything for the sake of religion. But the personal ideals of Josephus were of a very different nature, for we learn from his own pen that his heroism took quite another shape. After fighting against Rome on behalf of his country till victory declared for Rome, he then surrendered and fought against his brethren; he took the Roman name of Flavius in compliment to the Flavian Caesar, and married a Gentile wife, contrary to Moses’ Law, to oblige Vespasian. As every single one of these acts would have been anathema to the author of Fourth Maccabees, we may fairly conclude that the writer was not Flavius Josephus. It has indeed been suggested, by Ewald among others, that the ascription may have arisen from the author's actual name having been Josephus, and that he thus became confused later on with the more famous historian, which of course is possible but does seem somewhat futile. Whatever his name was, it is more likely that he lived in Alexandria than in Palestine. The implication, noticed above, that he and his hearers are living in the enjoyment of peace and safety suits Jerusalem less well than Alexandria, at least for any period prior to the Caligulan persecution. And not only is the writer’s style but his sentiment more Alexandrian than Palestinian. He shows indeed a proper orthodox horror of the Hellenizing Jason’s action in setting up a gymnasium on the Holy Mount, but so far from condemning the Greek games in themselves, he does not shrink from comparing the struggle between the martyrs and the tyrant to an athletic contest. Indeed, he elaborates the likeness; the competitors are Antiochus and the martyrs; the spectators are the whole world; and the prize of victory is immortality. He showsa similar tolerance towards Greek art, when he suggests that ‘if it were allowable for us’ the art of painting would best bring before the mind the idea of the martyrdoms. Surely some Niobe or Medea or other heroine of Greek tragedy was familiar to the sight of his hearers and of himself when he said this; and when he added ‘as might some artist’ (if that be the correct reading) he was alluding to some painter whom they all knew. In cosmopolitan Alexandria such an allusion could hardly hurt his reputation for orthodoxy, but it would have been a hazardous thing to publish such a phrase in Jerusalem, where the very sight of Pilate’s eagles raised a fury that was only quenched in blood. Moreover, the main object of his discourse, which is to show how Greek philosophy can help an orthodox Jew to keep the Law, is one more likely to be addressed to Jews living in the great Greek city of Alexandria than to those at the sacred centre of Judaism itself. The general conclusion is that the author was not Flavius Josephus, and that there is evidence to show that he was a Jew, living in Egypt, most probably in Alexandria, within a few years of the Christian era.

§ 8. Influence.

The direct influence of this book on Jewish literature does not seem to have been great; there is, however, a mediaeval work, written in Biblical Hebrew, by Joseph ben Gorion, commonly known as Yosippon, which shows traces of Fourth Maccabees. Yosippon’s work is a history of his people from the destruction of Babylon to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. He is sometimes called the ‘Hebrew’ Josephus to distinguish him from his namesake, the well-known historian of the Antiquities and the Jewish War, who wrote in Greek. Yosippon, indeed, in the text of his book now current, claims to be the great historian himself, but this is certainly false. It is now generally held that his writings have absolutely no historical value, and that, so far from being the real Flavius Josephus, he was a Jew of Southern Italy who lived as late as the ninth or tenth century. But his work became exceedingly popular among the Jews of the Middle Ages and it was translated into many languages and widely circulated. One modern authority, Trieber, would assign him a date as early as the fourth century, and thinks he had the original work of Jason of Cyrene before him, but this question is still debated. At any rate Yosippon recounts the story of the martyrdoms much as we have it in Fourth Maccabees, but with additions and variations of his own. The first martyr, Eleazar, is represented as having formerly been the guest of Ptolemy in Egypt, where he acted as one of the LXX, and as having won at Jerusalem the favour of Philippus, by which name is intended the general to whom Antiochus entrusted the business of persecuting the Jews. This Philip takes Eleazar apart and begs him to eat, before all the people, some of the meat of a Jewish sacrifice, but to do so in such a way that he may be supposed to be eating meat sacrificed to the king’s image. For the rest of the story of Eleazar the author does little more than expand Maccabees. He then brings the Mother, whom he calls Hannah, with her seven sons, before Antiochus himself, ‘who had not gone far from Jerusalem’; and their several martyrdoms follow. I note a few points differing from Maccabees. While the first martyr is suffering the others quote the Song of Moses, ‘The Lord will judge his people and have mercy on his servants, &c. The fifth brother tells the king that it is vain for him to hope to establish the worship of his own image by their torture. The Mother makes a long speech to the youngest son, who promises her that ‘he will keep the Law which Moses our teacher, may he rest in peace¹ gave to the Holy People of Israel’. And the boy calls Antiochus an insane dotard of seventy, and tells him ‘it had been better for thee never to have been born from the impure womb of the foolish mother who bore thee, thou fatuous fool that hast brought woe upon thyself’. ‘There is no mention either of the seventh son or the Mother casting themselves into the fire; but Hannah begins her dying speech, ‘My heart has rejoiced in the Lord and my horn is exalted in my God. After the martyrdoms Antiochus goes off to Macedonia (?) and the Maccabean rising follows. As we might expect, the Stoic philosophy of Fourth Maccabees finds no place here.

Neither can I discover any trace of this Stoicism surviving in the Chanukah services which to this day commemorate the Maccabean purification. If one may imitate St. Paul’s simile of the wild olive tree, Stoicism was a graft that throve but ill when set in the stem of the ‘good’ olive of Judaism. The Chanukah festival lasts for eight days, beginning on the famous twenty-fifth of Chisleu (December), when it was instituted by Judas Maccabaeus, his brothers, and the elders, to be celebrated annually in memory of the dedication of the restored altar on the occasion of the purification of the Sanctuary at Jerusalem. The popular name, according to Josephus (the true Josephus, not Yosippon). was ¢éra, ‘Lights’, because it was and is still celebrated by a grand general illumination. The eight-day continuance of it is said to come from the story that the priests found one single cruse of holy oil that had remained unpolluted all through the desecration under Antiochus, and by a miracle this was made to last for eight days until the priests could prepare new oil for the lamps of the holy candlestick.

In later times the Pharisaic party haggled over the legitimacy of the claims of the family of Mattathias to the hereditary High-priesthood which was assumed by the Maccabees in 153 B.C. Strict Jews held that the Maccabeans, though they had proved themselves national heroes, were in a sense irregular as occupants of the sacred office. As an explanation of this it is stated by Morris J. Raphall, Rabbi-preacher of the Greene Street synagogue, New York, who published in 1854 a Post-Liblical History of the Fews, that the Chasidim condemned Judas Maccabaeus because he allied himself with the Parthians and sent an embassy to Rome. He quotes from a Midrash Chanukah, which he describes as an ancient Codex in the City Library of Leipzig, these words as personally directed against Judas by the leader of the Chasidim: ‘Cursed be the man who placeth his dependence on flesh while from the Lord his heart departeth.’ But Rabbi Raphall thinks that Mattathias was probably regarded as High-Priest, or Cohen-Gadol, by his own followers, and describes him as a priest of the order of Joarib, the first of the twenty-four appointed by David by lot, and descended from the elder branch of the family of Aaron. The father of Mattathias was Johanan, and his father Asmoneus. In the service for Chanukah, in the official Jewish prayer-book, there is a special prayer set out in the morning service for the day which runs thus: ‘In the days of the Hasmonean, Mattathias, son of Johanan the High-Priest, and his sons, when the iniquitous power of Greece rose up against thy people Israel, to make them forgetful of thy Law and to force them to transgress the statutes of thy will, then didst thou in thine abundant mercy rise up for them in the time of their trouble ... and for thy people Israel thou didst work a great deliverance and redemption as at this day. And thereupon thy children came into the oracle of thy house, cleansed thy temple, purified thy Sanctuary, kindled light in thy holy courts, and appointed these eight days of Chanukah in order to give thanks and praises unto thy great name. But I can find nothing that specially recalls Fourth Maccabees in the whole service.

If the Jews themselves have somewhat neglected the book, the Christian Fathers have not done so. The Maccabeans are lauded by the Western as well as by the Eastern Church; they are commemorated in panegyrics by St. Augustine and Leo the Great, and they find a place in the calendars of Carthage as well as in those of the Syrians and Arabians. But the Eastern Church naturally glorified them first, and I can find no better specimen of the influence of Fourth Maccabees on Christian literature than the oration of Gregory Nazianzen on the Martyrs. ‘What of the Maccabeans?’ he begins, ‘for to-day (Aug. 1) is their anniversary; though by many they be not honoured because their ἄθλησις, their “contest”, was not after Christ, yet are they worthy to be honoured by all, in that their endurance was in behalf of the Law of their fathers. And what would men who were martyred before Christ’s passion have achieved if they had been persecuted after Christ and had His death on our behalf to imitate? For would not they who without His great example showed such virtue have appeared nobler still in hazarding themselves after that example? Mystical and ineffable is the saying, and one very persuasive to me and to all that love God, that none of those who were made perfect! before Christ reached that point outside of the Christian faith. Weare reminded of that noble benediction ‘abi in pacem anime naturaliter Christiana’. It has been finely said that if Judaism as a religion had perished under Antiochus, the seed-bed of Christianity would have been lacking; and thus the blood of the Maccabean martyrs, who saved Judaism, ultimately became the seed of the Church. Therefore as not only Christendom but also Islam derive their monotheism from a Jewish source, it may well be that the world to-day owes the very existence of monotheism both in the East and in the West to the Maccabees.

This then is the key-note of Gregory’s paean in their honour, delivered in the latter half of the fourth century, and he strikes the note again further on where he repeats that ‘the Maccabeans are not to be despised because they were before the Cross, but they are to be praised and held in honour for having lived according to the Cross’. His oration is really a paraphrase of Fourth Maccabees, to which he clearly alludes in the following sentence: ‘For who they were and whence, these men, and from what fount of education and training they advanced to such a pitch of virtue and glory that they are honoured by these yearly feasts and celebrations, and beyond these visible things have enshrined themselves in the hearts of all men, all this those who love labour and learning will find made clear in the book, which philosophizes about the Reason being supreme over the passions and holding the balance between two, that is to say, between virtue and vice.’ A great sentence in more senses than one. Gregory, then, describes Eleazar as the first-fruits of those who suffered before Christ, as Stephen was the first-fruits of those after him. He takes not a few phrases straight from Eleazar’s mouth, as where the martyr prays that he and his fellow mattyrs may be accepted as a purification for the whole people; but when Gregory makes Eleazar speak of the youths as his sons, he clearly must do so in a spiritual sense, for in Fourth Maccabees it is very distinctly stated that Eleazar was not their father, and what they owed him was not their birth but their teaching; and Gregory knows his original perfectly. Gregory, however, likes playing such variations on his theme. Thus he makes the youths boldly demand the torture for themselves, their only fear being lest any should be denied the crown of martyrdom; but when he comes to describe the sufferings of the Mother, the Christian introduces a touch unknown to the Jewish writer. Like him he dwells at length on her agony over her sons’ agonies, but the Christian recognizes there a true foretype of the Mother of Sorrows at the crucifixion of Christ, and he gives her the palm for courage and devotion. Like the author of Fourth Maccabees he delights in his own eloquence. If, as some think, two chapters of Second Maccabees have been expanded into the Fourth, Gregory in his turn now expands the Fourth by introducing numerous variations of his own, as where he makes the youths whet one another’s spirits, ὡς συῶν ὀδόντες ἀλλήλους Onéavres, ‘like boar’s tusks whetting each other. He takes the Maccabean author’s simile of the mother-bird fluttering round her young ones, threatened by the snake, and applying it more directly to the Mother represents her as gathering up their broken bodies and—a curious touch this—adoring their relics; προσεκύνει τὰ λείψανα he says; unless indeed we simply render προσεκύνει ‘she kissed them’. He fills her mouth with phrases clearly befitting the Mother of God. ‘Yet a little while, she proclaims, ‘and blessed shall I be among women.’ When she has done speaking he makes her run to the pyre as to her bride-bed, ὡς ἐπὶ νυμφῶνα τὴν πυρκαϊὰν δραμοῦσα, not waiting for her executioners ‘in order that no impure person should touch her pure and honourable body’. Gregory makes the tyrant rejoice within himself that she had not borne more sons, for then he must have come off even more defeated and worse disgraced. Antiochus plays the part of the devil in this drama, and the fate of the Hebrew race is ὡς ἐπὶ ξυροῦ, on a razor’s edge, and the martyrs are the conquerors. ‘So, says Gregory to his flock, ‘imitate these noble sufferers and do battle bravely with our daily Antiochus, πρὸς τὸν καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ᾿Αντίοχον γενναίως ἀνδριζόμενοι; and so dismisses them with his blessing in the name of Christ, ‘to whom be the glory for ever. Amen,’

Commenting on this oration, Nicetas declares that Gregory opens by maintaining that the Maccabeans were truly pre-Christian martyrs ‘because some averred that these martyrs suffered not for Christ but in defence of the Law and of abstinence from swine’s flesh’, and quotes other Fathers in defence of Gregory’s position. Further on there is a highly exalted passage where Gregory makes the youths say to Antiochus, ‘Our country is the heavenly Jerusalem which no Antiochus can besiege, and our kinship is the spirit with which we are inspired by having been born unto virtue.’ Gregory's word for ‘the spirit with which we are inspired’ is ἔμπνευσις, and Nicetas finely illustrates this from the passage in Genesis where God breathes into man’s nostrils the breath of life.

In a strain of equal exaltation Gregory’s great contemporary, Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, begins his panegyric on the Holy Maccabeans and their Mother. ‘How bright and joyous is our city, and sunnier this day than all the year! Not that to-day the sun pours his beams more splendid than of wont upon the earth, but that the light of the holy martyrs flashes brighter than lightning over all our city.’ He follows the author of Fourth Maccabees in choosing to compare the martyrs’ struggle to the athletic contests of the games, and the martyr’s crown to that of the victor in the contest. He appeals to Christ in the character of one who ‘produces the games’, as the phrase went. τί ποτε τοῦτο dpa, δέσποτα; ‘What in the world is this, Master? Bringest thou feeble age into the contests on the arena? Who ever heard of a woman being entered for a contest at such an age? None ever heard of it.’ And Christ answers that it is not bodily strength on which they rely, but that He lends His strength to His athletes. Further on Chrysostom sets forth eloquently the force of maternal devotion, quite in the vein of Fourth Maccabees but with instances of his own. ‘Often,’ he says, ‘a mother seeing her child burning with fever—advra ἂν ἕλοιτο tabetyv—would choose to take all the pain to herself so as to transfer the fire of the distemper from the child’s body to hers,’ It is interesting to observe how Chrysostom can always find something new to say. Fourth Maccabees has a beautiful simile of birds defending their young. He alters it by introducing the idea of their love of offspring being turned into a snare for themselves. ‘Many wild animals hard to catch are thus taken, when, disregarding their own safety in their affection for their young, they fall into the hands of the hunters.’ He is very ingenious in these variations, and doubtless intended them to remind those among his hearers who, in Gregory’s words, loved labour and learning, of a book so well worth knowing, and he contrives to freshen their interest by novel applications. Finally, in his stirring close he, like Gregory, lends his powerful support to the claim that these were true martyrs before Christ. ‘Who is there, man or woman, old or young, who would not contend for the martyr’s crown, when a woman did so—zpo τῆς χάριτος dywvicayévy—contending before the days of grace?’ And, lastly, we find him using a phrase that seems to me a probable allusion to Fourth Maccabees xvii. 7, where the author suggests the art of painting as well fitted to commemorate the martyrdoms. ‘You should all,’ says Chrysostom to his hearers, ‘engrave their contests and their struggles on your hearts as it were on a tablet,’ τοὺς ἀγῶνας καὶ τὰ παλαίσματα ὥσπερ ἐπὶ πίνακός τινος τῆς καρδίας ὑμῶν ἀπογράψαντες. This may primarily refer to St. Paul’s ‘not on tables of stone but on fleshly tables of the heart’, but it also seems distinctly to point to the conjectural reading ὥσπερ ἐπὶ πίνακός τινος in the passage in Maccabees. In this connexion we have to consider that the early Church by no means favoured the representation of the agonies of martyrdom by the graphic arts. On the contrary, the Church then desired to see the martyrs depicted only as blessed and glorified. The physical details of their cruel sufferings were not a popular subject until the Dark Ages, and it is quite possible that Chrysostom may be deprecating here the outward representation of such sufferings when he tells his hearers to engrave them on their hearts.

There is yet another speech of his, lauding the Maccabean martyrs, in which he selects the last and youngest of the sons for his special panegyric. Here, too, he introduces quaint touches of his own, as that the tyrant was looking at the braziers, but the youth was looking at the hell into which the tyrant was going to cast himself. Also that the youth leapt into the braziers ‘as they had been fountains of cool waters, reckoning them a divine font and baptism’. Then the preacher once more lauds the Mother, recounting her many sorrows, and borrowing from Fourth Maccabees the comparison of her to the Three Children in the burning fiery furnace, which he embellishes thus: ‘The fuel of their furnace was naphtha and pitch, tow and brushwood; the fuel of hers was nature and birth-pangs and maternal love and the sweet voice of her children.’ The words φύσις καὶ ὠδῖνες καὶ φιλοστοργία καὶ παίδων συμφωνία seem to flow from his mouth as fresh as if he had just prepared himself by reading over the story. He borrows direct the simile of the brave Eleazar, like a beetling sea-cliff standing fast against the tempest of the passions, and applies it to the Mother, who, like a sea-cliff taking the assaults of the waves, remains unmoved while they spend themselves in spume. And lastly, ‘She saw in the flames not a form of torment but a nuptial torch, γαμήλιον λαμπάδα, a fancy which he shares with Gregory.

There is yet a third discourse on the subject by Chrysostom, but space forbids me to enlarge further. The orations are all well worth looking at. They may be found in T. B. Prunaeus’s Gregory Naztanzen, Paris, 1609, page 397, and in Fronto Ducaeus’s Fokn Chrysostom, Paris, 1609, pages 581 and 622 ff., as well as in later editions.

To come down to more modern times, I can find nothing so interesting as the book of Erasmus on the Maccabean martyrs. He felt a personal interest in the matter, for in the early sixteenth century which saw the beginnings of the Reformation a man who had the courage of his opinions had also a right good chance of martyrdom. It was in 1517 that Luther nailed his denunciation of Indulgences to the doors of the church at Wittenberg, and in that same year Erasmus seems to have compiled his little work for the benefit of his friend Elias Marcaeus, ‘moderator of the most honourable college of the Maccabeans’ at Cologne. Martyrdom was a thing of which the great leader of the humanists had a very real dread. ‘We have not all strength for martyrdom, and I fear if trouble comes I shall do like Peter, he wrote in 1521, and he had reason to quake when his works were actually submitted to the Spanish Inquisition six years later. Martyrdoms have a cruel interest for a man who dreads the torture, and it is no wonder that he made a book for his friends at Cologne out of all that antiquity had said about their martyr-saints. The earliest edition of his work that I can hear of was printed by E. Cervicornus at Cologne, Feb. 1, 1524, fol., with the title—‘Opera Iosephi interprete Ruffino presbytero. De insigni machabaeorum martyrio, castigatus ab Erasmo. nunquam ante praedictis additus, &c., &c. The book was several times reprinted in the sixteenth century, e.g. at Basle, 1524, 1534, and 1540, and the Bodleian has a copy of another edition from the Cologne press, which is undated but was probably printed in 1534 or later, and has the title really preferred by Erasmus, ‘περὶ αὐτοκράτορος λογισμοῦ, de imperatrice ratione.’ In his prefatory letter Erasmus says that he has worked from a Latin text, not having a Greek MS. at hand (the Greek text appears not to have been printed till 1526); and that, conjecturing the Greek original from the Latin, he has changed some things, but not very much. He shows his literary art in the way in which he compliments both the college and the city of Cologne, alluding elegantly to the eleven thousand virgins martyred there, and so proceeds to his translation. After the translation he gives selections from antiquity, including the following from Jerome: ‘The seven Maccabean brothers were born of one mother, by name Maccabee; they kept the Law of their own tradition; they did not eat the flesh of swine. For this cause they by the most cruel king Antiochus were crowned with the glory of martyrdom, in Antioch, together with their pious mother, and there they remain buried with great veneration.

‘So far St. Jerome,’ says Erasmus; ‘but’, he continues, ‘it is certain that the relics of these Maccabean brothers were by the blessed Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, brought to Byzantium, and thence by the president Eustorgius to Mediolanum (Milan), and lastly by the act of Reginold bishop of Cologne transferred from Mediolanum to Cologne in the year 1164, where now they are held in great veneration in the college of the glorious name of the Maccabeans themselves.’ Their removal to Cologne in 1164 was celebrated by a special feast, ‘which’, observes Erasmus, ‘is now marked off by our very reverend father and lord in Christ, Hermann de Hassia, archbishop of Cologne, in the year 1506, as having been transferred to the feast of St. Cuthbert, archbishop and confessor.’ However, to return to his translation of Fourth Maccabees, or rather to his paraphrase, for such it 15. He completely rewrites the argument about Reason and the passions, nor do I find any allusion to the Stoic classification of the passions, though he agrees with the author of Fourth Maccabees that Reason does not extirpate passion but checks it, and he quotes the cases there cited of Joseph, Moses, Jacob, and David. In David’s case he has a curious variant. David would not quench his thirst with the water which ran by his tent because he had sworn not to drink till the enemy’s camp was taken, thinking thus to stimulate the valour of his troops. When we come to the Hellenizing cainpaign of Antiochus and the tyrant’s persecutions, Erasmus follows his author more closely, but I note various changes. Jason builds baths, not a gymnasium, near the temple. The women who circumcise their sons fling themselves off the rocks voluntarily, ‘quippe quae vitantes longiora tormenta celerem halitum ingestae mortis optarent.’ When Antiochus counsels Eleazar to eat the swine’s flesh, he says, ‘It is a mark of superstition and cowardice to make a law for oneself and call one’s choice Reason’; and Eleazar replies, ‘Our law condemns your philosophy, wherein the less a man understands the more he thinks he understands.’ Erasmus was thinking of some theologians more distinguished for bigotry than learning when he wrote these words. Nor is he at any pains to keep a Jewish atmosphere: on the contrary, he puts into the mouth of Eleazar, when he is asking God to accept him as an atonement, such a characteristically Christian phrase as ‘Receive me for them all, and give them all to me’.

The martyrdom of Eleazar appears to take place in Jerusalem, but the seven brethren and the Mother are brought to Antioch, ‘atrociter de eorum castello Sufandro.’ The Mother is called Solomona. The eldest son is Maccabeus, the others are Aber, Machir, Judas, Aches, Areth, Jacob. Erasmus describes their tortures at length, and the curious may compare his long Latin list of devilish engines with the Greek. When he comes to xii. 7 he transfers thither the speech of the Mother which the author had reserved for a later place, and in the same connexion he largely expands both the tortures and the speeches of the seventh son. Finally he describes the Mother as herself being stripped, scourged, and grievously tormented by Antiochus, until at last she is brought to the brazier, ‘ac oratione protensis surrectisque manibus pro gravidis matribus fuse coelibem effudit spiritum’, There he introduces a very mediaeval touch, as also when he shows Antiochus terror-stricken at the very moment of her death by a flash of lightning. Again, later on, he makes the tyrant become so impressed by the martyrs’ courage that he enlists whole legions of Hebrew soldiers in his service and wins battles with them. Yet death is not to be staved off; for he shows the king at last dying miserably of a disgusting disease, as told in the Second but not in the Fourth Book of Maccabees.

It will be seen that Erasmus gave himself a perfectly free hand. A century and a half later Combefin fell upon him with severity for it. The French scholar calls him such unkind names as ‘ineptus Paraphrastes (veriusque temerator) Erasmus’. He says that Erasmus put the kingdom of heaven for τὰ τῆς ἀρετῆς ἄθλα, and eternal fire for eternal death,—‘est hoc παραχαράττειν non mapappacew, ‘this is to adulterate a monument of antiquity. Ifa monk had taken such liberties with the work of Josephus and the words of the Maccabees, how the man would have laughed at him.’ Then he ridicules Erasmus for giving to the martyrs names drawn either from some apocryphal writings or invented out of his own head. And again Combefin calls an expression of the Paraphrastes ‘inanis mihi verborum pompa et phalerae’,and casts scorn upon him for expending so many rhetorical exaggerations over the tortured Mother, to which the critic would prefer the simplicity of the Greek account. I do not know if it was odiwm theologicum or odium scholasticum which prompted this assault, but if Erasmus could have awaked from his long century’s sleep we might have had a literary quarrel, the echoes of which would be ringing yet in our ears. The French scholar would have had a backer on this side of the Channel in Dr. Wm. Cave of Oxford, who wrote that he would like to know why Erasmus put a quantity of stuff into his work of which there is no trace in the Greek. ‘Others may solve the question, says Cave, ‘Quin id pro ingenii sui pruritu fecerit Erasmus dubitari nequit.’

But if one could picture such a ghostly battle of the books as taking place, I am not sure that Erasmus might not find on his side the shade of another Oxford scholar, John Lloyd, who translated Fourth Maccabees just two years after the defeat of the Great Armada, and decidedly did not love Rome. He does indeed criticize Erasmus’s work, though he avoids, intentionally it may be, the mention of his name, but he keeps the vials of his wrath for certain Roman theologians, who endeavoured to make out that Fourth Maccabees was to be received as canonical, on evidence which they claimed to be that of Josephus, and cited Gregory in support of their thesis. Whom our Lloyd laughs to scorn, winding up with ‘O dignos Romana meretrice mangones!’

Lloyd’s text, based on the Strassburg edition of 1526, like those of Hudson and all the other printed texts I have seen (except Swete’s), has the reading ὥσπερ ἐπί τινος πίνακος in xvii. 7 where the MSS. give ὥσπερ τινός οἵ ws ἐπί τινος, and this conjectural emendation of πίνακος is reproduced in the Latin of Erasmus and others. The conjecture, though unsupported, is natural enough, as the author of Fourth Maccabees undoubtedly is referring here to a picture. Erasmus, however, tacks on to it quite a new idea, and turns this suggested figure of the martyred Mother from an ideal work of art into a sort of charm or amulet: ‘if a sculptor were to put this piteous figure on a tomb or set it up on a house, he would be free from every dreadful plague and would surely enjoy eternal bliss.’ The idea of the picture appears to have commended itself to the printer of a later edition of the book, for the Bodleian copy has fourteen rude woodcuts of the martyrdoms where no dreadful detail is spared. In their crude horror they remind one of the grim ghastliness of the Macabre pictures, so popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whose very name shows how the word Maccabean ultimately came to indicate death in its most detested forms. And this survives to-day in the argot of Paris, where the body of a murdered victim is still mockingly termed a ‘macabé’.

§ 9. Theology.

When Paul was brought before the Jewish Council at Jerusalem, in order to divide his opponents he exclaimed: ‘I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question.’ And we read that the two parties in the Council proceeded to fall out on the instant, ‘for the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit; but the Pharisees confess both.’ This account exhibits very clearly the strongly contrasted beliefs of the two great parties among the Jews, as they existed (or were believed to exist) in Palestine about the middle of the first century A.D. In Alexandria, however, there was a third form of belief, approaching that of the Pharisees indeed, but with a difference; and this third form is the standpoint of the author of Fourth Maccabees. Briefly stated it is this. At death men meet with the reward or punishment due for their deeds. The righteous are received into bliss (see x. 15; xiii. 175 xvii. 4, 18; xviii. 23). The wicked are punished with eternal torture (see ix. 8, 32; xx. II, 15; xii. το; xiii. 153 xviii. 5,22. Apparently there is no resurrection of the body. Also, like the Pharisees, the author believes in angels (see iv. 10, and perhaps vii. 11), and in devils (see xviii. 8). For Jewish views of immortality see Oesterley and Box, Synagogue Religion and Worship, p. 224, and R. H. Charles, Z'schatology, Hebrew, &c., passim. Wow the Alexandrian school came to adopt the doctrine of the immortality of the soul but not of the resurrection of the body is too large a subject to enter upon here, but it is usually attributed to their having come under the influence of the philosophy of Plato and the neo-Pythagoreans. That the author was saturated with Greek philosophy is proved by his systematic adoption of its terminology, including the fourfold classification of the cardinal virtues which the Stoics copied from Plato. In his general thesis on the Supremacy of Reason, he follows exactly the Platonic classification of φρόνησις, judgement or self-control, ἀνδρεία, courage, δικαιοσύνη, justice, and σωφροσύνη, temperance. But when he comes to tell of the martyr facing the tortures he adds something new. ‘You scoff at our philosophy,’ says Eleazar to the king, ‘but the Law teaches us temperance, and courage, and justice,—so far the author goes with Plato; then comes the new word—‘and εὐσέβεια, righteousness, so that with due reverence we worship only the God who is.’ This is the key-note of his whole book. The Stoic ideal is right, and the Stoic path to it may be well enough, but the driving force is to be sought elsewhere, namely in the Law of Moses. It is the same thought that he puts into the mouth of the first to suffer of the seven Brethren. ‘Through all the torments I will show you... that the Sons of the Hebrews alone are unconquerable, the secret of the youth’s courage being that he has been trained in the Law of Moses. Similarly Philo, who accepted the Platonic idea of the soul as a divine emanation, chose the Stoic ethics for the groundwork of his system, and made Greek philosophy ‘a means of defending and justifying Jewish religious truths. These he regarded as fixed and determinate, and philosophy was merely an aid to truth and a means of arriving at it’ (Fewsh Encyclopaedia, art. Philo). No better description could be given of the position of the author of Fourth Maccabees. But the position was one that the Pharisaic party, which was ultimately successful, could never bring themselves to accept, and the school of Philo and of our author, after exerting considerable authority for a time, died away in the end.

Of direct Christian influence on the book there is naturally no trace, but I. Abrahams, writing in the Fewsh Encyclopaedia, thinks that as it stands there may possibly be some Christian interpolation in such passages as vii. 14, xiii. 17, and xvi. 25, which declare that the patriarchs are not dead, but live unto God. In the second of these, where we read, ‘Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall receive us, Swete’s text omits the phrase εἰς τοὺς κόλπους αὐτῶν, which is not in the uncials and appears only in MSS. of secondary importance; these particular words may perhaps be a later insertion made by some one familiar with the New Testament who wished to allude to Luke xvi. 23, but it is difficult to see why the general statement that the Jewish patriarchs live with God should be due to a Christian hand. Christian phraseology, however, does certainly find a remarkable echo, or rather anticipation, in the prayer of Eleazar, vi. 28, ‘Be merciful unto thy people, and let our punishment be a satisfaction in their behalf. Make my blood their purification, and take my soul to ransom their souls.’ This idea is repeated in xvii. 21,22, where the author says that the martyrs ‘became a ransom for our nation’s sin; and through the blood of these righteous men and the propitiation of their death, the divine providence delivered Israel that before was evil entreated’. The phrases fall with a familiar sound on our ears, but nevertheless the idea of an atonement is not more distinctively Christian than itis Jewish. The whole Jewish system of sacrifices was based on the idea of the death of an animal being substituted for that of a man as an atonement for sin. Under the ancient law the scape-goat upon whom the lot for the Lord fell, in the service for the Day of Atonement, was sacrificed, and his blood was taken within the Holy Place, while the one for Azazel was turned out in the wilderness. The substitution of the goat for the people in the greatest ceremony of the year was thoroughly typical of the sacrificial principle. In later times the idea of the propitiatory sacrifice was extended from earth to heaven. In the Testament of Levi (czrca 107 B.C.) we have ‘In [the sixth heaven] are the archangels, who minister and make propitiation to the Lord for all the sins of the righteous; offering to the Lord a sweet-smelling savour, a reasonable and a bloodless offering’. Charles’s note on this (Zest. Twelve Patr. Levi, iii. 5) gives the explanation that since the earthly altar and tabernacle of Exodus and Numbers were made after heavenly patterns the idea of a sacrificial service in heaven must long have been familiar to Jews. Michael ‘the merciful and longsuffering’ is one of these archangels who pray and offer sacrifice for Israel. So we see that there is nothing specifically Christian in the suggestion of the sufferings of the righteous making atonement for the people.

To go back to ancient times, the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter (though not an atonement) is by no means the only instance in the history of Judaism showing that the idea that a human being might be accepted as a sacrifice was quite conceivable. Did not Moses thus offer himself (Exod. ΧΧΧΙΪ. 32) when he found the people worshipping the golden calf, and prayed to the Lord, ‘Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin —; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book’? David also, when Israel was smitten because of his having numbered the people, cried to the Lord, ‘It is I that have sinned and done evil indeed; but as for these sheep, what have they done? let thine hand, I pray thee, O Lord God, be upon me and on my father’s house; but not on thy people that they should be plagued’ (see 2 Sam. xxiv. 17). Indeed the whole Jewish theory of national religion was based on redemption by substitution. The first-born son of every family was due to Yahveh and had to be redeemed, just as every first-born of any unclean animal, such as an ass, had to be redeemed by the substitution of a calfora lamb. The author recurs again as he approaches his peroration to this thought of the martyrs’ deaths being an atonement, in xvii. 21-22, where he says, ‘they having as it were become a ransom for our nation’s sin (apostasy); and through the blood of these righteous men and the propitiation of their death, the divine providence delivered Israel that before was evil entreated.’ As for the pagan world, we find the idea everywhere: to take a single instance, I may quote the self-sacrifice of Curtius’s leap into the chasm to appease the gods of Rome. Inthe New Testament, of course, we have numerous parallels; to take one only, we read in Hebrews ix. 28, ‘So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many.’

It is not only in the idea of atonement that we find thoughts familiar to Christians suggested in Fourth Maccabees. The word ‘faith’ also occurs, in a distinctively religious sense. For example, in xvi. 22 the Mother, after having spoken of Abraham and Isaac and Daniel and the Three Children, says to her sons, ‘And ye also, having the same faith unto God, be not troubled.” Here πίστις must mean religious faith, and in the very next verse the Mother speaks of the young men as ‘knowing religion’. In xv. 24 the author speaks of the Mother’s own faith: ‘she willingly surrendered them through faith in God’; and again in xvii. 2 he describes her as giving ‘an example of the nobleness of faith’. In this religious sense πίστις belongs not to Stoic, nor even to Greek thought, but to that devotional side of the Hebrew mind which was to be more fully expressed in Christianity. Here, however, as Maldwyn Hughes says (Ethics of Fewish Apocr. Lit. p. 112), ‘It is rather trust in an external Providence than an inner dependence arising from an inward relationship. Faith is not a renewing and life-giving power, but confidence in the providential order.’

On the ethical question the author of Fourth Maccabees relies absolutely on the Mosaic Law. The Inspired Reason, i.e. the Reason guided by the Law, is autocratic over the passions, while depending on the Law for knowledge as to what to do and what to avoid. The author does not want the passions extirpated; he upholds the Stoic virtues, though not the Stoic ἀπαθεία; but he wants the passions to be brought under rigid control, and he shows how this has been and can be done by many examples from the Old Testament, giving as instances Joseph, David, and the rest. He does accept the Stoic doctrine about sin, that all sins are alike in being breaches of the law, when he makes Eleazar say (v. 20), ‘for the transgression of the Law, be it in small things or in great, is equally heinous; for in either case equally the Law is despised.’ He never doubts that the Law is supreme (v. 16): ‘We, O Antiochus, having accepted the Divine Law as the Law of our country, do not believe that any stronger necessity is laid upon us than that of our obedience to the Law.’ He is a Jew to the core, and his conclusion is peremptory; for him the Law is the last word.

I will close this section with another quotation from Maldwyn Hughes (οὐ. céz., p. 111): ‘The great purpose of the book is to stimulate faithfulness to the Law, and to show that the Greek ideal of virtue can be realized only by Judaism. The writer’s heroes are not the Maccabean patriots, to whom he makes no reference, but the martyrs of Maccabean times. His silence as to the former is a significant hint that he did not sympathize with the political ideals which expressed themselves in active resistance to the Gentile powers, but that he preferred the Quietistic method of vindicating the Law, by absolute and unswerving faithfulness to it, at whatever pain and cost. The emergence of political ideals had resulted in the secularization of Judaism.’

§ 10. Bibliography.

So far as I can learn the text of Fourth Maccabees was first printed in 1526 in the Greek Bible published at

Strassburg by Vuolphius (Wolfgang) Cephalaeus, of which there is a good copy in the Bodleian Library. In this

edition it appears as Ἰωσίππου eis τοὺς Μακκαβαίους βιβλίον. Professor Torrey, whose bibliographical account of the

book in the Excyclopaedia Biblica is the fullest I have seen and to whom I am indebted for some of the following

information, quotes Freudenthal’s statement that this text was based on a very poor MS. Once it was in type,

however, it found general acceptance and was frequently reprinted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not

only in Greek Bibles but also in various editions of Josephus; of the latter we may name the Basle text of 1544, and

that of John Lloyd (Luidus), Oxford, 1590. Lloyd says that he collated the Strassburg text with an ancient MS.

at New College. This text was also used for the Greek Bible printed at Frankfort in 1597, with the same title of

the Book of Josippus on the Maccabees, and it was likewise used by Hudson, Oxford, 1720, and by others who

followed him, e.g. Dindorf, 1845-7, and Bekker, 1856, the latter work being a decided advance on its precursors.

In 1709, however, a different text, based on the Codex Alexandrinus in the British Museum and edited by J. E. Grabe,

was printed at Oxford, and after his death it was printed there again in 1719. It was also used by Apol, Agocr. V. T,,

1837. Still later another text, based on Codex A, was edited by F. Field, Oxford, 1859, in beautiful type. Dr. Field,

who was of Trinity College, Cambridge, a Tyrrhitt’s Hebrew scholar, and one of the O.T. Revisers, pillories the anony-

mous editor of a certain text which appeared at Oxford in 1817. The culprit had thought to get a neat transcript of

the original MS. by rejecting every small-type reading in Grabe and putting back the marginal one. Whereby he not

only restored many obvious errors in the Codex, but also repeated, in his ignorance, whatever misprints occurred in

Grabe’s text; these numbered six in the first chapter alone, ‘cetera per totum libellum innumera!” says Dr. Field

with crushing severity. Since then the book has appeared in Bagster’s Apocrypha, Greek and English, 1882, and in

Fritzsche’s Lzbri Apocr. V. T., in which the commentary is excellent but the text differs considerably from that in

Swete’s LX.X, Cambridge, 1894-9, which gives Codex A with variants of δὲ and V. The piesent translation is made

from Swete’s text, the cases where different readings are used being noted at the foot of the page. There is a florid

paraphrase in English by that prolific seventeenth-century writer Sir Roger L’Estrange, and there are modern English

translations in Cotton, /zve Looks of the Maccabees, 1832, in Bagster’s Apocrypha already mentioned, and in Churton’s

Uncanonical and Apocryphal Scriptures, 1884. The ancient Syriac version of which I have spoken was published in

1895 by the Cambridge Press from the text of R. L. Bensly; and there is a modern Hebrew translation in Fraenkel,

Kethubim acharonim, sive Hagiographa posteriora, Leipzig, 1830. Of Latin translations there are several. Erasmus

made a very free paraphrase, as already described in § 8, in the early sixteenth century, which was reprinted by

Peter de la Rouiére at Geneva in 1611 with the Greek text. The Bodleian Library has two copies of this edition. in

one of which there is a marginal collation of the New College MS. of Fourth Maccabees. This copy is catalogued

C. 9. 5. Arvt., and has opposite the title a marginal note written ὁ Ἰωσήπου περὶ σώφρονος λογισμοῦ. MS. in Collegio

Novo’, while the printed title has ‘a Des. Erasmo Rot. in sermonem Latinum παραφραστικῶς translatus’. Lloyd

in 1590 brought out at Oxford an edition of the Greek text (in wretched print alas!) collated with the New College

MS. and accompanied by a Latin version that seems to be well done; this last may be said also of the Latin

version by Fr. Combefin, Paris, 1672, whose work is praised by W. Cave in his Scriptores Eccl., Oxford, 1688-1740,

where he attacks Erasmus so severely. The best German translation is that of Deissmann in Kautzsch’s Afocr. uz.

Pseudepigr., Leipzig, 1899, and there are good German commentaries by Grimm, Handbuch zu den Apocryphen,

Libri apocr. V. T., 1871, and by Deissmann (in Kautzsch) as mentioned above. The two last named have been

those chiefly used in preparing the present translation. Other German works that may be consulted, according to

translations we have Schurer’s Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, iii. 244 ff, and Ewald’s History of Israel,

5. 484 ff. For the ethical and theological side of the book I know nothing so good as Maldwyn Hughes, Evhics of

Jewish Apocr. Lit, (date not given). Last but not least I would name Edwyn Bevan’s House of Seleucus, 1902, as

giving the best account of Antiochus Epiphanes and his attempts forcibly to Hellenize the Jews, and the reader may

wisely consult his Jerusalem under the High Priests. Appended is a comparison of the historical statements of 2 and 4 Macc. abridged from Bensly. 2 Macc. lil. I—Vvil. 41. 4 Macc. lil. 20—xvil. 1.

1. Deep peace. ill. 1. 1. Do. in. 20.

2. Seleucus, king of Asia, acts as patron of the 2. Do. iii. 20. Temple. 11. 3.

3. Simon at variance with Onias. 11]. 4. 3. Do. iv. 1.

4. Tells Apollonius of the Temple treasures. 11. 6. 4. Do. iv. 3.

5. Heliodorus enters the Temple. 11. 14. 5. Apollonius, do. iv. 8.

6. Under the new king Antiochus, Jason buys the 6. Do. iv. 17. priesthood. iv. 7.

7. Jason builds a gymnasium, iv. 12. 7. Do. iv. 20.

8. Menelaus outbids Jason. iv. 24. 8. Not mentioned.

9. On report of Antiochus’s death in Egypt Jason 9. On report of Antiochus’s death in Egypt the Jews surprises Jerusalem. v. 5. rejoice. iv. 22.

ro, Antiochus storms Jerusalem and massacres. v.11. 10. Antiochus returns and lays the Jews waste. iv. 23.

11. King sends an Athenian to change the Jewish 11. King decrees death to those who follow their customs. vi. 1. fathers’ religion. iv. 23.

12. Philip the Phrygian persecutes in Jerusalem. v.22. 12. Antiochus himself orders the Hebrews to be brought before him, v. 2.

13. Eleazar, a scribe of ninety, is beaten to death. 13. Eleazar, priest and lawyer, an old man, is beaten vi. 23-31. and tortured to death with hot irons after a speech addressed to Antiochus. v. 16-V1. 30.

14~19. The brothers are variously tortured. vii. 14-19. Do. do. (different order). viii to xiv.

20. Antiochus touched with compassion for Brother VII 20. Do. xii. 2-6. promises him riches and friendship in exchange for obedience. vii. 24.

21. The Mother implores Brother VII to have com- 21. The Mother advises VII in Hebrew in words of passion on her pains and care as a mother and given at once, ΧΙ. 7.

Notes

1. Compare Heb. xi. 40. to resist. vii. 27-20. 22. The Mother died last. vii. 41. 22. The Mother, certain guards say, flung herself into the frying-pan. xvii. 1.

By R. B. Townshend