Gary Morrison, «The Composition of II Maccabees: Insights Provided by a Literary topos», Vol. 90 (2009) 564-572
II Maccabees is an unusual text, its composition and content are topics of extensive discussion. This paper identifies a literary construct that we attribute to the epitomiser. Its identification allows us to assign various parts of the text to the same hand giving us more insight into both the text’s composition and the epitomiser’s ability as an historian and writer. Furthermore, the identified literary topos suggests that recent attempts to minimise the extent to which II Maccabees represents any conflict between the Greeks and the Jews, Judaism and Hellenism may need to be reconsidered, some apparent instances of favourable relations between the Jews and other nations (in particular the Hellenes) are not what they seem.
572 Gary Morrison
of the letter in Chapter 9 almost certainly stands close in time to the events
themselves. If he is, as we labelled him, the epitomiser then this leaves little
time for Jason to write his five-volume history and our author to produce his
own version (26). On the positive we at least have an account put together only
a generation or so after the events themselves. (2) We also must have another
author, a potential fourth-hand, who would be responsible for working in the
letters of Chapter 11 and revising the text to be consistent with his
interpretation of those letters. Recently this work has been suggested as that
of the epitomiser, but the forger of the letter in Chapter 9 (who we have
suggested is the epitomiser) was not the same hand that reworked the letters
in Chapter 11: style and ability differ (27). If the author of Chapter 11 was not
Jason, then we have a complicating factor, but then the text and transmission
of II Maccabees has always been the subject of extensive debate. Importantly,
neither point detracts from our assessment of the literary construction that we
have identified or the relationship between the Jews and other peoples. They
simply raise further issues that need to be dealt with elsewhere.
Department of Classics Gary MORRISON
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand
SUMMARY
II Maccabees is an unusual text, its composition and content are topics of
extensive discussion. This paper identifies a literary construct that we attribute to
the epitomiser. Its identification allows us to assign various parts of the text to the
same hand giving us more insight into both the text’s composition and the
epitomiser’s ability as an historian and writer. Furthermore, the identified literary
topos suggests that recent attempts to minimise the extent to which II Maccabees
represents any conflict between the Greeks and the Jews, Judaism and Hellenism
may need to be reconsidered, some apparent instances of favourable relations
between the Jews and other nations (in particular the Hellenes) are not what they
seem.
(26) PARKER, Letters, 400-401.
(27) PARKER, Letters, 386-402.