Before the Church · c. 124 BC
Second Maccabees
Abridged from Jason of Cyrene
What it is
A rhetorical history of the same revolt as First Maccabees, told for effect rather than for the record. Heliodorus is flogged by an apparition in the treasury; Eleazar refuses to pretend to eat pork; a mother watches seven sons die and tells the last that God made the world out of things that did not exist.
Why it lasted
The earliest unambiguous statement of resurrection of the body in Jewish literature, the earliest creation from nothing, and the earliest prayer and offering for the dead — the verse the Reformation argument over purgatory turned on.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
This work is in the public domain and can be read in full, free, at the archives below. The Library catalogues it; it does not host the text.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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