File:Reading the Maccabean Literature By the Light of the Stake.pdf

Summary

Considered authoritative and useful by the sixteenth century Anabaptists, 1 and 2 Maccabees played an important role in scripting the performance of defenseless resistance to their Protestant and Catholic persecutors. In particular, the defenseless resistance of Eleazar and of the woman and her seven sons in 2 Maccabees 6 and 7 provided encouragement to sustain Anabaptists who were being tortured and executed in the name of Christ.1 The performative reenactment of 1 and 2 Maccabees empowered 16th-century Anabaptists as attested in the hymnody and martyrologies of 16th and 17th-century Anabaptism.