Martyrdom, Influence and Canon

Fourth Maccabees is important out of all proportion to its canonical standing for its developed theology of martyrdom. It presents the deaths of the righteous as vicarious and atoning, a "ransom" and "purification" by which the martyrs' blood benefits the whole nation, and it affirms their immortality, teaching that they pass at once to God and to a blessed life beyond death. These ideas exerted a strong influence on the early Christian cult of the martyrs and on Christian reflection about redemptive suffering, and the seven Maccabean brothers came to be venerated as saints in both Eastern and Western Christianity.

Canonically the book is nowhere fully authoritative: it appears in an appendix to the Greek Bible and is honoured in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, but it was not received into the Roman Catholic or Protestant canons and is placed among the Apocrypha at best. Scholars study Fourth Maccabees as a prime example of Hellenistic-Jewish philosophical rhetoric, as a key text for the history of ideas about martyrdom and the afterlife, and as important background to early Christian theology.