Themes and Canon

The purpose of Third Maccabees is plainly consolation and exhortation: it assures a diaspora community that God protects his faithful people even in a foreign land, that apostasy is a betrayal to be resisted, and that deliverance comes to those who hold fast and pray. It shares this theme, and its taste for dramatic reversal and divine rescue, with books such as Esther and Daniel, and it includes a long penitential prayer that became part of its appeal.

In canon it stands among the Eastern Orthodox deuterocanonical books, printed in the Greek and Slavonic Bibles, but it was not received by the Latin West: it is absent from the Vulgate and from the Roman Catholic canon, and Protestant Bibles omit it or relegate it to the further reaches of the Apocrypha. It is thus one of the books that marks the difference between the broader Orthodox canon and the narrower Western ones. Scholars value Third Maccabees as a window onto the situation and self-understanding of Egyptian Judaism in the Hellenistic period, and onto the literary forms (dramatic, providential, martyrological), through which that community expressed its hope and its identity.