Scriptures & Texts
4 Maccabees
Non-canonical Texts
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
A philosophical discourse rather than a history, arguing that devout reason is master of the passions and proving the thesis by dwelling on the martyrdoms of the priest Eleazar and of the seven brothers and their mother under Antiochus IV, episodes taken from 2 Maccabees and retold in the idiom of the Stoic diatribe. Written in polished Greek in the first century CE, it fuses Greek philosophy with Jewish devotion more completely than any other book of the period. No tradition holds it canonical: it appears as an appendix in some Greek manuscripts and printed Bibles and in the Georgian tradition, and it once circulated among Christians under the name of Josephus. Judaism does not receive it. Its portrait of the mother of the seven sons had a long afterlife in Christian martyr devotion.
Facts
Origins
Era of Composition Attributed Author / CompilerA Hellenistic Jewish philosophical work, c. 1st c. CE (critical) 1 Attributed Author / CompilerAnonymous (once ascribed to Josephus) 1 Structure
StructureA Stoic-Jewish discourse on the supremacy of pious reason, retelling the Maccabean martyrs 1 Status
Canonical StatusNon-canonical 1Tradition: Judaism Canonical StatusSourced to the subject's own accountNon-canonical 2Tradition: Eastern Orthodoxy Text
Literary Form Learn More
Reason as Master of the Passions
Fourth Maccabees is a Jewish work in Greek that is less a history than a philosophical discourse, cast in the form of a diatribe or sermon. Its announced thesis is that devout reason is sovereign over the passions, that piety, informed by God's law, can master fear, pain and desire. To prove it, the author retells at length the story, drawn from 2 Maccabees, of the martyrs of the Seleucid persecution under Antiochus IV: the aged scribe Eleazar, and the seven brothers and their mother, who chose torture and death rather than violate the Jewish law by eating pork. Their steadfastness under appalling suffering is offered as the supreme demonstration that reason, strengthened by faith, can conquer the strongest passions.
The book is deeply marked by Stoic philosophical vocabulary and by the conventions of Greek rhetoric, which it weds to an intense devotion to the Torah, making it a striking example of the fusion of Hellenistic thought and Jewish piety. It was probably written in the first century CE, perhaps at Antioch or Alexandria.
Martyrdom, Influence and Canon
Fourth Maccabees is important out of all proportion to its canonical standing for its developed theology of martyrdom. It presents the deaths of the righteous as vicarious and atoning, a "ransom" and "purification" by which the martyrs' blood benefits the whole nation, and it affirms their immortality, teaching that they pass at once to God and to a blessed life beyond death. These ideas exerted a strong influence on the early Christian cult of the martyrs and on Christian reflection about redemptive suffering, and the seven Maccabean brothers came to be venerated as saints in both Eastern and Western Christianity.
Canonically the book is nowhere fully authoritative: it appears in an appendix to the Greek Bible and is honoured in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, but it was not received into the Roman Catholic or Protestant canons and is placed among the Apocrypha at best. Scholars study Fourth Maccabees as a prime example of Hellenistic-Jewish philosophical rhetoric, as a key text for the history of ideas about martyrdom and the afterlife, and as important background to early Christian theology.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
4 Maccabees dwells on the martyrdoms carried out under Antiochus IV as its central philosophical example.
Belongs to Tradition
Excluded from Canon
Anabaptism, Denominations This tradition holds the standard thirty-nine-book Protestant Old Testament and does not canonize 4 Maccabees, following the confessional consensus among Protestant bodies against the wider Trent and Synod of Jerusalem deuterocanon.
Baptist, Denominations This tradition holds the standard thirty-nine-book Protestant Old Testament and does not canonize 4 Maccabees, following the confessional consensus among Protestant bodies against the wider Trent and Synod of Jerusalem deuterocanon.
This tradition holds the standard thirty-nine-book Protestant Old Testament and does not canonize 4 Maccabees, following the confessional consensus among Protestant bodies against the wider Trent and Synod of Jerusalem deuterocanon.
This tradition holds the standard thirty-nine-book Protestant Old Testament and does not canonize 4 Maccabees, following the confessional consensus among Protestant bodies against the wider Trent and Synod of Jerusalem deuterocanon.
This tradition holds the standard thirty-nine-book Protestant Old Testament and does not canonize 4 Maccabees, following the confessional consensus among Protestant bodies against the wider Trent and Synod of Jerusalem deuterocanon.
Protestantism, Denominations The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize 4 Maccabees, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.
This tradition holds the standard thirty-nine-book Protestant Old Testament and does not canonize 4 Maccabees, following the confessional consensus among Protestant bodies against the wider Trent and Synod of Jerusalem deuterocanon.
This tradition holds the standard thirty-nine-book Protestant Old Testament and does not canonize 4 Maccabees, following the confessional consensus among Protestant bodies against the wider Trent and Synod of Jerusalem deuterocanon.
Sources
1. An Introduction to the Apocrypha
Bruce M. Metzger, Oxford University Press, 1957The chapter on 4 Maccabees and its Stoic argument on reason and the passionsView the Source 2. The Confession of Dositheus (Synod of Jerusalem, 1672)
Synod of Jerusalem, Eastern Orthodox Church, 1672printed as an appendix to the Greek Biblethe holders' own accountView the Source The Belgic Confession
The Westminster Confession of Faith
The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority
Lee Martin McDonald, Hendrickson, 2007On 4 Maccabees as a Greek and Georgian appendix, canonical nowhereView the Source Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.