The late antique Christianization of the so-called “Maccabees” – that is, the seven brothers, their teacher Eleazar, and their mother – is often presented in historical scholarship as an “extremely interesting case of Christian appropriation of Jewish culture.” Scholars have suggested that in the second half of the fourth century, Christian homilies on the Maccabees were composed for the feast of the Maccabees in order to justify the Christian veneration of these “Maccabean martyrs [who] were not Christians but […] extremely self-conscious Jews.” The Christianization of the Maccabees shows how “early Christian scriptural exegesis was a double-edged sword that could be used to induce violence against others as well as to validate its results ideologically once such violence had taken place.”

But how remarkable is it that late antique Christians tolerated – and some even adored – these Maccabees? This article questions the commonly accepted assumption underlying the scholarly reconstructions of the Christianization of the Maccabees in late antiquity, which presents Eleazar, the seven brothers, and their mother prior to their Christian appropriation as unattractive to Christians due to their Jewishness. I argue instead that these Maccabees become increasingly, though not entirely, “Jewish” in the process of their “Christianization” in late antiquity.

I build my argument primarily on three homilies that are straightforward apologies for the Maccabees’ martyrdom. I contend that these homilies do not reflect intolerance of Jews or Judaism as much as they bear witness to the making of a difference between being Christian and being Jewish: their notions of being Christian and being Jewish are not necessarily binary, nor are they mutually exclusive, and the distinction between the two groups is far more blurred than the prevailing scholarly view assumes.