Holy Maccabees, Jewish Saints
Comparative commentary by Nerida Newbigin
Even though the Maccabean martyrs cannot officially be saints because they died before Christ was born, they have been regarded as worthy of emulation for their unswerving devotion to the ways of their fathers. The three images in this exhibition show a process of cultural appropriation as the Holy Maccabees are incorporated into the Christian tradition and become saint-like.
The story of the Hebrew widow and her seven sons, who choose martyrdom at the hands of Emperor Antiochus rather than breach their covenant with God by eating pork, comes from 2 Maccabees. It is retold, in an emotionally embellished version, in 4 Maccabees. Jerome included 2 Maccabees among the deuterocanonical works ‘for the edification of the people’, while 4 Maccabees had little presence in the Western Church (though it is now available in the NRSV).
The widow and her sons have served as archetypes in various ways. The widow who willingly sacrifices her sons in this world to preserve them for eternal life in the next is the archetype for all mothers in times of war, and (like Mary) she offers up her offspring for a higher good. The brutality of their martyrdom is the catalyst for political uprising in the Maccabean Revolt and the cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem. From the earliest Christian commentators, the widow and her sons were seen as archetypes of the Christian martyrs, born through death into eternal life. The sons, moreover, are behavioural models for children, adolescents, and young men: they obey the Law, and they exercise rational thought and eloquent argument in defiance of their emotions—above all fear of pain. Like Daniel, and like the three youths in the fiery furnace, the Maccabean Martyrs were examples of youthful faith and virtue.
The text of 2 Maccabees 7 presents in detail the reasoned response of the martyrs to the king’s order to eat meat. They reply ‘in their own tongue’ (v.8; see also vv.21, 27), and articulate their acceptance of death in the hope of eternal life. The text thus operates in three rhetorical ‘languages’: the visual spectacle of horror as a means of persuasion; the words of Antiochus, speaking in his language; and the words of the mother and her sons, in the language they share with God and with Moses.
The visual commentary offered here goes well beyond the text provided by 2 Maccabees 7, largely because that text itself entered immediately into a process of rewriting, re-interpreting, embellishment, and repurposing. The purpose of the images discussed here is to represent the Seven Maccabees, in as much narrative detail as possible, to fit a series of contexts.
The Maccabean martyrs were contested territory. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus made a counterclaim to the Jewish tradition that cast them as a collective symbol of Judaism itself, and accorded them the veneration traditionally awarded to Christian martyrs. In his commentary, they embody the triumph of reason over emotion (Vinson 2003: 72–84). The nine-panel illustration that precedes his homily embodies his thesis: it is a statement, enumeration, and conclusion of the story, focusing on its rational symmetry, and not on the emotive detail of each torment.
In fifteenth-century Florence, the nuns of Santa Felicita, who honoured their patron St Felicita on the feast day of the Maccabean Martyrs, commissioned an altarpiece that would consolidate the two into one, attributing to the Jewish martyrs all the qualities and powers of a Christian saint.
In the nineteenth century, at the height of Romanticism and growing Italian nationalism, Antonio Ciseri’s altarpiece of the Holy Maccabees, also in Santa Felicita, returns the martyrs to their pre-Christian origins. The focus is on the suffering mother, while the holiness of her steadfast sons is represented by the beauty of their dead bodies.
References
Vinson, Martha (trans.). 2003. ‘Oration 15: In Praise of the Maccabees’, in St Gregory of Nazianzus: Select Orations, Fathers of the Church (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 72–84
