4 Maccabees

The Fourth Book of Maccabees is couched in the form of a discourse or treatise, taking for its subject the power of ὁ εὐσεβὴς λογισμός, the Inspired Reason, to control the passions. It has been suggested by Freudenthal that the work may be a specimen of synagogue preaching, and Ewald appears to agree with him in this, but other commentators reply that in the Diaspora the regular synagogue practice was always to take a passage from the Bible as a text for the sermon. Now Fourth Maccabees has no text, and the rules of Jewish services are seldom departed from, so it is probable that this work was given as a lecture rather than a sermon. But the best authorities doubt whether we know enough about Judaeo-Hellenistic practice nearly two thousand years ago to justify a positive conclusion about the matter. At all events the author of this work, be it lecture or sermon, is unquestionably an orthodox Jew, and his object is to fire the hearts of his co-religionists with such an enthusiastic devotion to their faith that they will be ready to face the last extremity of suffering in its behalf.

A student of Greek philosophy himself, speaking to people who were evidently familiar with its terminology, he enlists the Stoic virtues in the cause of Jewish orthodoxy. Adopting the Stoic definition of the four cardinal virtues, judgement and justice, and courage and temperance, he insists that these are best attained by men being born and brought up under the Law of Moses. He leaves on one side the discussion of the methods by which Greek philosophy proposed to attain virtue. He has naturally no inspired anticipation of the Christian doctrine of God's grace whereby sinners may be led into the way of truth; for we shall find reason to think that he wrote before any such thing as a Christian document had even come into existence. But he not only adopts the Stoic virtues, he also takes the Stoic view of sin, that to offend in one point is to be guilty of all, when he makes his protomartyr, Eleazar say, 'Think it not then a small sin for us to eat the unclean thing; for the transgression of the Law, be it in small things or in great, is equally heinous.' Yet his acceptance of the Stoic position is not indiscriminating, as, although he uses their philosophical definition of the virtues, he refrains from specifically adopting their classification of the primary passions under the four heads of delight, grief, pain, and fear. The Stoics held that the passions were not grounded in nature but were due to wrong thinking, and could and should be extirpated. The author, on the contrary, holds that the passions were implanted in man by God and are not to be extirpated but controlled.

'Reason', he says, 'is not the extirpator of the passions, but their antagonist.'

And this power of Reason he illustrates, not, as his Stoic friends would have done, from Greek sources, but from the Jews' own Bible story, from the lives of Joseph and Jacob, of Moses and David. Then he passes to the subject of the terrible tyrant of Syria, Antiochus, whom some styled Epiphanes, The Brilliant, and some Epimanes, The Madman, and describes his odious oppressions: and so comes presently to the martyrs, Eleazar, and the Seven Brethren, and the Mother. He relates their defiance of the tyrant and enlarges on their sufferings with an even greater wealth of dreadful detail than the writer of Second Maccabees, whether the additions are due to his own invention or are drawn from a common original, the lost work of Jason of Cyrene. He recounts insistently the martyrs' triumphant victory over their sufferings, won by the aid of their Reason, their unconquerable fidelity to the Law of Moses, and their assured hope of a blessed immortality in the company of the patriarchs. That immortality is their reward in heaven, while they enjoy on earth the honour of being held the saviours of their country, which noble title he would inscribe as their epitaph. His impassioned eulogy is intended to rouse the patriotic and religious feelings of his audience to the highest pitch and harden them to the point of following so glorious an example.

If I were asked to suggest the most probable reason why this book was written I should incline to the opinion that it was in consequence of the deification of the Roman Emperors. It is true that that deification (which involved nothing particularly startling to the pagan world) was not taken very seriously by Augustus and Tiberius, and in consequence did not become a really crucial question with the Jews until the accession of Caligula, whom we might well call the Second Brilliant Madman. Mad he was and did verily take himself for a god and demand to be worshipped as such, and then all the horrors of the persecution of Epiphanes were repeated in Egypt on the bodies of the wretched Jews, the defiling and torture of their persons, the plunder of their holy things, and the erection of statues of the deified Emperor in their desecrated Synagogues. But though this persecution did not take place till A.D. 38-39, the future instrument through which Caligula's madness was to work, namely the base passions of the dregs of the Egyptian and especially the Alexandrian populace, had become plainly visible long before. Every far-sighted man such as the author of this book must have been, could not but recognize, even during the more clement days of Augustus and Tiberius, that as soon as ever Jews were required to offer public sacrifice at the imperial altars an impossible test would be imposed. Every true Jew knew that he must refuse and it was not hard to foresee what would happen then, when once the passions of the vilest mob in the world were let loose. To meet and endure the coming persecution the sons of Israel would need all their courage, and how better could the Jewish-Hellenic philosopher steel the hearts of his brethren than by holding up to them the self-abnegating virtues of Stoicism and the sublime heroism of the Maccabean martyrs?