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| Publications [#360585] of Jennifer W. Knust
Books
- Wright Knust, J. ‘Who Were the Maccabees?’ The Maccabean Martyrs and Performances of Christian Difference. edited by Willem van Henten, J; Saloul, I Amsterdam University Press,
January, 2020: 79-104. [doi]
Abstract:
Jennifer Knust surveys the gradual canonisation of the Maccabean martyrs
within a collection of Christian sacred texts. The eventual adoption of
these martyrs as proto-Christian models of faith were clearly the result
of a complex but now lost process of reconfiguration and appropriation.
This march forward of a Christian Maccabean cult also coincides with
a post-Julian consolidation of Christian ascendancy that began during
Julian’s reign and was then further advanced during the ramping up of
Christianisation following his death. The introduction of the Christian
cult of the Maccabean martyrs can be interpreted both as an anti-Jewish
Christian response to changing circumstances under Julian and as
evidence that the traditions associated with the Maccabees endured
as a continuing site of Christian-Jewish interaction even as these same
martyrs were spiritualised. The fourth-century re-signification of these
martyrs as Christian participated in what Andrew Jacobs describes as
the ‘historicisation’ of the Jew, a process that renders living Jews merely
‘historical’ by transferring the Jew or the Jew’s remains into an embodied,
living Christian past. Once the martyrs were detached from earlier
commemorative contexts, they served to buttress particular, disputed
formulations of Christian rather than Jewish identity. According to Knust,
the reverberations of this process reach beyond their initial settings and
Christian anti-Judaism, rhetorical or real, and have persisted within
ongoing and contested histories of difference.
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