First and Second Maccabees

These accounts of the Maccabean revolt, by which the sons of Mattathias reclaimed the temple of Jerusalem, tell an important story of the founding of the Jewish people. The books of First and Second Maccabees are also important for Christians, as in them is told how the Jewish people established the political and religious culture into which Jesus was born. The martyr stories in First and Second Maccabees inform the early Christian martyrdoms, and the books are written in Greek, the language in which the Jews of Jesus’ time read the Scriptures. As author Daniel J. Harrington notes, without the Maccabees “the fate of Judaism (and with it Christianity and Islam) was uncertain.”