Late Antique Bishops and Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs

Abstract

Late antique Christian bishops transformed earlier Christian memories of the Maccabean martyrs. As inheritors of these earlier traditions of the Maccabean martyrs, a number of bishops, primarily via sermons, sought to reframe their communities’ views of these martyrs. The bishops under consideration here include some of the most prominent figures of late antique Christianity—Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Pope Leo I, and Pope Gregory I. Their works on the Maccabean martyrs were written to their local communities and reflect concerns linked to the immediate context of these communities. At the same time, these bishops composed their sermons on the Maccabean martyrs during the period in which Christianity emerged as an imperial religion. All of these authors struggled over how to negotiate Christian identity within this new imperial context. Given that 2 and 4 Maccabees were also about the negotiation of an exclusive identity in an imperial context, these were useful texts for bishops to assert their understandings of Christian identity. But an important contrast must be noted. The earliest narratives of the Maccabean martyrs were explicitly about resisting an imperial culture whose agents sought to assimilate Judaism into Hellenism. However, the bishops considered in this chapter used the figure of the Maccabean martyrs as a means to argue for the triumph of a Catholic form of Christianity over rival forms of religious practice and belief in the late Roman Empire.