Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Interaction of Canon and History: Some Assumptions
- 2 The Changing Worlds of the Ten Rabbinic Martyrs
- 3 lsquo;Who Were the Maccabees?’: The Maccabean Martyrs and Performances on Christian Difference
- 4 Perpetual Contest
- 5 ‘Martyrs of Love’: Genesis, Development and Twentieth Century Political Application of a Sufi Concept
- 6 Commemorating World War I Soldiers as Martyrs
- 7 The Scarecrow Christ: The Murder of Matthew Shepard and the Making of an American Culture Wars Martyr
- 8 Icons of Revolutionary Upheaval: Arab Spring Martyrs
- 9 Yesterday's Heroes?: Canonisation of Anti-Apartheid Heroes in South Africa
- 10 The Martyrdom of the Seven Sleepers in Transformation: From Syriac Christianity to the Qur’ān and to the Dutch-Iranian Writer Kader Abdolah
- 11 ‘Female Martyrdom Operations’: Gender and Identity Politics in Palestine
- 12 Hollywood Action Hero Martyrs in ‘Mad Max Fury Road’
- List of Contributors
- Index
3 - lsquo;Who Were the Maccabees?’: The Maccabean Martyrs and Performances on Christian Difference
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Interaction of Canon and History: Some Assumptions
- 2 The Changing Worlds of the Ten Rabbinic Martyrs
- 3 lsquo;Who Were the Maccabees?’: The Maccabean Martyrs and Performances on Christian Difference
- 4 Perpetual Contest
- 5 ‘Martyrs of Love’: Genesis, Development and Twentieth Century Political Application of a Sufi Concept
- 6 Commemorating World War I Soldiers as Martyrs
- 7 The Scarecrow Christ: The Murder of Matthew Shepard and the Making of an American Culture Wars Martyr
- 8 Icons of Revolutionary Upheaval: Arab Spring Martyrs
- 9 Yesterday's Heroes?: Canonisation of Anti-Apartheid Heroes in South Africa
- 10 The Martyrdom of the Seven Sleepers in Transformation: From Syriac Christianity to the Qur’ān and to the Dutch-Iranian Writer Kader Abdolah
- 11 ‘Female Martyrdom Operations’: Gender and Identity Politics in Palestine
- 12 Hollywood Action Hero Martyrs in ‘Mad Max Fury Road’
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Jennifer Knust surveys the gradual canonisation of the Maccabean martyrs within a collection of Christian sacred texts. The eventual adoption of these martyrs as proto-Christian models of faith were clearly the result of a complex but now lost process of reconfiguration and appropriation. This march forward of a Christian Maccabean cult also coincides with a post-Julian consolidation of Christian ascendancy that began during Julian's reign and was then further advanced during the ramping up of Christianisation following his death. The introduction of the Christian cult of the Maccabean martyrs can be interpreted both as an anti-Jewish Christian response to changing circumstances under Julian and as evidence that the traditions associated with the Maccabees endured as a continuing site of Christian-Jewish interaction even as these same martyrs were spiritualised. The fourth-century re-signification of these martyrs as Christian participated in what Andrew Jacobs describes as the ‘historicisation’ of the Jew, a process that renders living Jews merely ‘historical’ by transferring the Jew or the Jew's remains into an embodied, living Christian past. Once the martyrs were detached from earlier commemorative contexts, they served to buttress particular, disputed formulations of Christian rather than Jewish identity. According to Knust, the reverberations of this process reach beyond their initial settings and Christian anti-Judaism, rhetorical or real, and have persisted within ongoing and contested histories of difference.
Keywords: canonisation of Maccabean books, Jewish antiquities, Christian-Jewish interaction, memory, performance
Preaching a sermon in Cappadocia in the mid-fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus asked, ‘Who were the Maccabees? The festival today (ἡ παροῦσα πανήγυρις) is indeed in their honour, though not many recognise them because their contest (ἀθƛήσις) antedates Christ (Or. 15.2).’ Gregory was the first but by no means the only fourth-century bishop interested in introducing a feast of the Maccabean martyrs amenable to Christian understanding; his sermon was followed soon after by panegyrics delivered by John Chrysostom and Ambrose of Milan, both of whom preached about the honours due to the seven brothers, their mother, and Eleazar the priest. Gregory's comments indicate that a feast was already known in Cappadocia: the Maccabees ‘are honoured annually and with these festal processions (ὥστϵ καὶ ταῖς ἑτησίοις ταύταις τιμᾶσθαι πομπαῖς τϵ καὶ πανηγύρϵσι),’ though, he claimed, some witnessing the processions did not perceive who the Maccabees truly were.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- MartyrdomCanonisation, Contestation and Afterlives, pp. 79 - 104Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020