Abstract
This essay proposes a new approach to an anonymous Greek-Jewish martyrology written during the period of the early Roman Empire in a city of the eastern provinces: the text known as the Fourth Book of Maccabees. Whose martyrology was 4 Maccabees? Diaspora Jews with a Greek education are reasonably mooted as the original core hearers/readers of this blend of Greek thought with the Torah, yet the work actually belongs in that ‘marketplace’ of religions and ideas that characterized the early second century ce. We should thus envisage 4 Maccabees as sitting between several cultural and religious groups, speaking from a mixed world and to a mixed world. This perspective also helps to explain the remarkable Nachleben of the text in the early Christian Church, including the emergence of the cult of the Maccabean martyrs at Antioch near Daphne, which clothed the fiction in reality.
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