4 Maccabees: Reason, Fire and a Ransom

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown Jewish teacher who knew Greek philosophy well. Early Christian writers credited it to Josephus, wrongly.

When: Probably in the first century AD, in my own lifetime or a little after. Many scholars date it between about AD 19 and 72.

Where it fits: It retells the deaths of the old man Eleazar, seven brothers and their mother under King Antiochus IV, around 167 BC, from 2 Maccabees 6–7.

Which Bibles keep it: None as full scripture. Greek Orthodox Bibles print it in an appendix. It is in some of the oldest Greek Bibles, such as Codex Sinaiticus.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Its martyrs are almost certainly the ones Hebrews 11:35 means by others were tortured, not accepting their deliverance. Its idea of a death as ransom for a nation’s sin sits behind how my death was explained.

How close it stays to me: Close in refusing to strike back under torture. Far in a God who must be paid in blood, and in its curses.

If you only read three chapters: 4 Maccabees 1, 4 Maccabees 6 and 4 Maccabees 17.

Words to Know

Passions — the strong feelings and desires that push a person around: fear, pain, anger, hunger, grief, even love.

Stoic — a school of Greek philosophy that taught a wise person should be ruled by reason, not by feelings or circumstances.

Martyr — from the Greek word for witness: someone who dies rather than give up their faith.

Ransom — a price paid to set someone free.

Propitiation — something offered to turn away anger and make a god favorable again.

The Book in Brief

The writer announces his subject in the first line: religious reasoning is absolute master of the passions. Reason trained by God’s law can rule fear, desire, anger and pain. In chapters 1–3 he argues it with examples from the law and from the stories of Joseph, Moses and David.

Then he gives his proof. In chapters 4–7 King Antiochus orders the Jews to eat pork and food offered to idols or be tortured. An old priest named Eleazar refuses, argues with the king like a philosopher, and dies under torture, praying that his blood will purify his people.

In chapters 8–12 seven brothers are brought before the king. He offers them friendship and high posts if they eat. One by one they refuse, are tortured to death in terrible detail, and curse the king with God’s judgment as they die.

In chapters 13–17 the writer praises their mother above them all. She watched all seven die, encouraged them, and threw herself on the fire before the guards could touch her. In chapters 17–18 he says their deaths were a ransom for the nation’s sin, that God saved Israel by their blood, and that they now stand with Abraham, having received pure and immortal souls.

1 and 2 Maccabees tell history. 3 Maccabees tells a tale. 4 Maccabees makes an argument. Its writer is a philosopher speaking, probably at a memorial for the dead, and his subject is in his first sentence: religious reasoning is absolute master of the passions (4 Maccabees 1:1).¹

His proof is the story you met in 2 Maccabees: an old man, seven brothers and their mother, tortured to death by King Antiochus because they would not eat pork. He tells it at three times the length, slowly, with every instrument of torture described. If a mind ruled by God’s law could hold firm through that, he says, then reason can rule anything.

Debts cancelled in the seventh year

Before he reaches the tortures, he says something I want you to notice.

He gives examples of how God’s law trains a person to rule his own greed. A man, therefore, who regulates his course by the law, even if he be a lover of money, straightway puts force upon his own disposition; lending to the needy without interest, and cancelling the debt of the incoming Sabbath (4 Maccabees 2:8). The stingy man does not go back to glean his harvest or his vineyard, but leaves it for the poor. The law even forbids cutting down an enemy’s crops in war (4 Maccabees 2:9, 14).

That is the law I grew up with and the one I taught. Lend without interest. Forgive debts. Leave something in the field for the poor. Do not ruin your enemy’s fields. I taught my friends to pray forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.

This writer thinks of all of it as self-control: reason mastering greed. I would say it is love mastering fear. But we agree on what the law asks a person to do with money.

Go deeperA Jewish Stoic

The language of this book would have been familiar to any educated Greek. The Stoics taught that a wise man is ruled by reason, and that the passions, fear, desire, pleasure and grief, must be mastered. The four great virtues, they said, were good sense, justice, courage and self-control. 4 Maccabees uses the same terms and the same list (4 Maccabees 1:2–6, 18).¹

But the writer turns the philosophy around. For the Stoics, reason was something you trained yourself, by thinking. For him, the reason that rules the passions is religious reason, formed by obeying the law of Moses. The Jew who keeps the food laws and the Sabbath is the true philosopher. The old priest Eleazar, dying on the rack, is the wise man the Greek schools only talked about.

This was a bold claim in a Greek city. Educated Greeks often mocked the Jews for their strange customs: no pork, no work on the seventh day, no images. The writer answers that these customs are a school of virtue, and that the proof is that Jews will die for them while the king who mocks them cannot even rule his own anger.¹

Early Christian writers loved the book. Eusebius and Jerome both thought Josephus had written it, under the title On the Supremacy of Reason. Almost no scholar thinks so now.²

What the king offered

The test is set up like the one in 3 Maccabees. Antiochus orders his guards to seize every one of the Hebrews, and to compel them to taste swine’s flesh, and things offered to idols (4 Maccabees 5:2). Eat, and live. Refuse, and be tortured on the wheel.

He even makes it gentle at first. He smiles at the seven brothers, admires them, and offers them friendship and high positions in his government if they will only eat (4 Maccabees 8:3–7).

They refuse. And here is what I honor in this book above everything else: none of them strikes back. Not one picks up a weapon, not one runs, not one lies. They are not soldiers like Judas the Hammer and his brothers in 1 Maccabees. They stand there, with no power at all, and say no, until they are dead.

That is the kind of strength I taught. When they came to arrest me with swords and clubs, I told my friend to put his sword away. Refusing to bow to the empire and refusing to kill for God can be the same act.

Let my blood be a purification

Then the book says something that would shape how my own death was explained.

As the old priest Eleazar is dying in the fire, he prays: You know, O God, that when I might have been saved, I am slain for the sake of the law by tortures of fire. Be merciful to your people, and be satisfied with the punishment of me on their account. Let my blood be a purification for them, and take my life in recompense for theirs (4 Maccabees 6:27–29).

And at the end the writer says of all the martyrs: they became the ransom to the sin of the nation; and the Divine Providence saved Israel, aforetime afflicted, by the blood of those pious ones, and the propitiatory death (4 Maccabees 17:22).

A righteous person suffers. God accepts that suffering as payment for other people’s sins, and stops being angry.

You will recognize the idea. It is the way many of my followers came to explain my cross. I did say, the Son of Man also came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). I gave my life. I knew what it would cost to keep telling the truth about God’s kingdom in Jerusalem at Passover, and I did not run.

But notice what Eleazar asks: that God be satisfied with the punishment of him. I never said my Father needed to see someone punished before he could forgive. I forgave people before I ever went to the cross. I said to a paralyzed man, Son, your sins are forgiven you (Mark 2:5), and the scribes sitting there said in their hearts that I was speaking blasphemy, because only God can forgive sins. Another time, when the Pharisees complained that I ate with sinners, I told them to go and learn what God meant: I desire mercy, and not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13).

The father in my story did not wait to be paid. He saw his son far off and ran.

Go deeperThe martyrs of Antioch

There is an old tradition that the seven brothers and their mother were buried in Antioch, the great Greek city of Syria, not in Jerusalem, and that the Jews of Antioch honored their tomb. Some scholars think 4 Maccabees was first spoken there, at a memorial on the anniversary of their deaths.³

Antioch was also where my followers were first called Christians. In time the Christians of Antioch took over the shrine, and by the late 300s it was a church. The preacher John Chrysostom gave sermons there in honor of the Maccabean martyrs, and Augustine preached on them in North Africa. The Orthodox churches still keep a feast of the Holy Maccabees on August 1, and the Catholic Church still remembers them on that day.³

So the Jewish martyrs of 4 Maccabees became the first saints of the church, honored by people who did not keep the food laws they died for. The early Christian martyrs, facing the arena, read this book and saw themselves in it: a tyrant, a demand to offer to his gods, and a refusal to the death.

That is also where the language of ransom and propitiation traveled. The same ideas the writer used for the seven brothers were used by Christians to explain the meaning of my death.

Where 4 Maccabees and I part

I honor these martyrs. But two things in this book I cannot keep.

The first is how it ends its tortures. The brothers die cursing. The divine vengeance is reserving you for eternal fire and torments, which shall cling to you for all time, the youngest tells the king (4 Maccabees 12:12). The writer loves these speeches. They are the brothers’ last word.

When they nailed me to the wood, my last words for the men doing it were not a curse. Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing (Luke 23:34). I had told my followers, love your enemies, bless those who curse you … and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you (Matthew 5:44). The brothers did not strike back with their hands. They struck back with eternal fire. I asked for neither.

The second is the mother. The writer praises her above all, because religious reasoning … enabled her to forego, for the time, parental love (4 Maccabees 15:23). She watched seven sons die and urged them on, and he calls that reason’s greatest victory: a mother who mastered her love for her children.

I do not think love for your children is a passion to be mastered. My Father is not the God who asks a mother to stop loving her sons. He is the one who, like a mother hen, wants to gather her chicks under her wings. Her courage was real. But the triumph of this book is not what I would have praised.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 4 Maccabees 6:27–29 and 17:21–22.

You will find: a martyr’s blood as purification and ransom for the nation’s sin.

Then read Mark 2:1–12, sins forgiven with no sacrifice, and Luke 23:34.

The Short Version

• 4 Maccabees is a lecture, not a story: religious reasoning is absolute master of the passions. It is printed in an appendix in Greek Orthodox Bibles.
• Its proof is the martyrdom of Eleazar, seven brothers and their mother, retold from 2 Maccabees in long, terrible detail.
• It praises a law that cancels debts and lends without interest, and martyrs who refused to strike back.
• It says their deaths were a ransom and propitiation for the nation’s sin, the idea later used for my cross. I forgave sins before I died, and wanted mercy, not sacrifice.
• Its martyrs die cursing the king. I prayed, Father, forgive them.