From Pre- to Proto-Christians: The Late Antique Reception of the Maccabean Martyrs

Abstract: This study explores the complex reception of the Maccabean martyrs in late antique Christianity, focusing on the fourth to sixth centuries—a moment in which their commemorative status became the subject of intense contestation. As their commemoration entered Christian liturgical life, some voices resisted: How could those who died before Christ, and for a law that had since been renounced, be celebrated as saints? Their refusal to eat pork, a death for dietary laws, further unsettled the coherence of Christian identity. Through a close reading of key homilies and treatises from this period, the study examines a variety of Christian responses across a range of traditions, mobilizing exegetical, rhetorical, and mnemonic strategies to redefine these figures within a christological horizon. These negotiations reveal the extent to which Christian authors engaged in acts of narrative reconstitution, reshaping inherited memories to secure communal boundaries and assert theological coherence. Far from peripheral, the Maccabees emerge as a crucial site where anxieties over group belonging and historical legitimacy converged. By following the contestations over their memory, this study explores the mechanisms through which Christian communities authored the past, navigated competing claims, and forged collective identities in an era of shifting boundaries.