The Maccabees and the New Testament: Martyrdom, Resurrection, and Hebrews 11:35

Part 9 of 10 — Deuterocanonical Studies Series

The Maccabees and the New Testament: Martyrdom, Resurrection, and Hebrews 11:35

Hebrews 11 is sometimes called the “Hall of Faith.” It is one of the most celebrated chapters in the New Testament—a roll call of those who endured impossible things because they trusted God. Abel. Enoch. Noah. Abraham and Sarah. Moses. Rahab. Gideon, Barak, Samson, David, Samuel, and the prophets. Name after name, story after story, the chapter builds in momentum like a crescendo.

And then, in verse 35, something changes.

“Women received their dead raised to life again. Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection.”

— Hebrews 11:35 (NKJV)

The first half of that verse is familiar enough—Elijah raised the widow’s son, Elisha raised the Shunammite’s son. But the second half? People who were tortured, who could have been delivered but refused deliverance, who chose death because they believed in “a better resurrection”? Search the entire Protestant Old Testament. You will not find this story. It is not in Genesis, not in Kings, not in the Psalms, not in the Prophets.

It is in 2 Maccabees 7. And it is one of the most harrowing and beautiful passages in all of ancient literature.

Seven Brothers, One Mother, One Tyrant

The year is approximately 167 BC. The Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes has launched a campaign to Hellenize Judea by force. Jewish worship has been outlawed. The Temple has been desecrated. Torah scrolls are being burned. And now the king has turned to a more personal form of cruelty: he is compelling Jews, under penalty of death, to eat pork—a direct violation of the Law of Moses.

Seven brothers and their mother are brought before the king. The demand is simple: eat the swine flesh or die. The escape route is right there. One bite and they walk away alive.

None of them take it.

The first brother speaks for all of them: they would rather die than transgress the laws of their ancestors. Antiochus is enraged. He orders the first brother’s tongue cut out, his hands and feet cut off, and then, while still breathing, has him fried alive in a large pan while his mother and six brothers are forced to watch.

What happens next is what makes this passage unforgettable. As each brother is brought forward, mutilated, and killed, each one speaks. And what they speak about is not revenge, not defiance for its own sake, but resurrection.

The second brother, at his last breath:

“You dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.”

— 2 Maccabees 7:9

The third brother, holding out his hands to be cut off:

“I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.”

— 2 Maccabees 7:11

Even Antiochus is reportedly astonished by this one—by the young man’s complete disregard for his own suffering. And then the fourth brother, looking the tyrant directly in the face:

“One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you, there will be no resurrection to life.”

— 2 Maccabees 7:14

Read that again. The boy who is being tortured to death tells the king who is killing him: I will be raised. You will not. This is not passive endurance. This is a man who believes he holds the better hand, even as his body is being destroyed.

One by one, through the fifth, sixth, and seventh brothers, the pattern holds. Each refuses deliverance. Each speaks of resurrection. And the text tells us the king grows more and more furious, not because the brothers are resisting his political authority, but because they are treating his power as irrelevant.

The Mother

And then there is the mother. She watches all seven of her sons tortured and killed in a single day. The text says she “bore it with good courage because of her hope in the Lord.” She encourages her youngest son in their native language, and her words contain a theology of creation and resurrection that would not be out of place in a Christian creed:

“I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws.”

— 2 Maccabees 7:22–23

She speaks last. She dies last. And she dies knowing exactly what she believes: that the God who created her sons from nothing can raise them from death.

“A Better Resurrection”

Now go back to Hebrews 11:35. “Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection.”

The phrase “better resurrection”—kreittona anastasin in Greek—appears nowhere else in the New Testament. It is a unique phrase describing a unique concept: people who had a way out, who could have escaped death, but who chose to die because they believed the resurrection God offered was superior to the temporary deliverance a tyrant could grant.

This is exactly—precisely, specifically—what happens in 2 Maccabees 7. The brothers could have eaten the pork. They could have walked away. The “deliverance” was on the table. They refused it. And the reason they refused it, stated in their own words, was that God would raise them to something better.

The fourth brother even articulates the contrast that the word “better” implies: we will be raised; you will not. Their resurrection is better than mere survival because it is permanent, given by God, and denied to the wicked. No other text in Second Temple Judaism combines these elements—the refused deliverance, the chosen martyrdom, the explicit hope of a superior resurrection—in this way. The author of Hebrews appears to be summarizing a story he expects his readers to already know.

Jesus at Hanukkah

The story of the Maccabees does not end with martyrdom. It also produced one of the most important Jewish holidays in history—one that Jesus himself observed.

After the Maccabean revolt succeeded in overthrowing Seleucid control of the Temple, Judas Maccabeus led the rededication of the altar in approximately 164 BC. 1 Maccabees 4:36–59 describes the purification and the eight-day celebration that followed. This is the origin of Hanukkah—the Feast of Dedication.

Now turn to the Gospel of John:

“Now it was the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple, in Solomon’s porch.”

— John 10:22–23 (NKJV)

Jesus is at the Temple during Hanukkah. The feast exists only because of the events recorded in the Maccabees. Without 1 Maccabees, there is no rededication. Without the rededication, there is no Feast of Dedication. Without the Feast of Dedication, there is no setting for this scene in John 10. The New Testament presupposes the Maccabean history as a simple matter of fact.

The Abomination of Desolation

The connections run deeper still. In Matthew 24:15, Jesus warns his disciples: “When you see the ‘abomination of desolation,’ spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place… then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.” Mark records the same warning in Mark 13:14.

Jesus is referencing Daniel 11:31: “And forces shall be mustered by him, and they shall defile the sanctuary fortress; then they shall take away the daily sacrifices, and place there the abomination of desolation.” Most scholars identify this as a description of what Antiochus IV did in 167 BC—an event recorded in detail in 1 Maccabees 1:54: “Now on the fifteenth day of Chislev, in the one hundred forty-fifth year, they erected a desolating sacrilege on the altar of burnt offering.”

Follow the chain: the events are in Maccabees. The prophecy is in Daniel. The application is from Jesus. All three links are needed to understand what Jesus is saying. Remove Maccabees from the picture, and the historical anchor of the “abomination of desolation” disappears.

Resurrection Before Christianity

We sometimes speak of bodily resurrection as though it were a distinctly Christian idea. It is not. 2 Maccabees 7 contains one of the clearest, most explicit expressions of bodily resurrection in all of pre-Christian Jewish literature. The brothers do not speak of their souls ascending to some ethereal plane. The third brother holds out his physical hands and says he expects to receive them back. The mother speaks of God restoring “life and breath.”

This is bodily, material, concrete resurrection—and it is articulated a century and a half before the Gospels were written.

Later in the same book, in 2 Maccabees 12:43–46 , Judas Maccabeus discovers that some of his fallen soldiers had been carrying forbidden idols. He takes up a collection and sends it to Jerusalem as a sin offering on their behalf. The text says he did this because “he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness.” He prayed for the dead. He believed his prayers could benefit those who had already died.

Whatever we make of this theologically, it is a window into what at least some Jews believed in the second century BC—and it shaped the conversation about death, prayer, and the afterlife that the earliest Christians inherited.

The Early Church Remembered

The early Christians did not forget the Maccabean martyrs. They embraced them.

By the first century BC or AD, the book we call 4 Maccabees had been written—a philosophical retelling of the same story, filtered through Stoic categories of reason, virtue, and the mastery of the passions. It takes the raw horror of 2 Maccabees 7 and transforms it into a meditation on what it means for faith to triumph over the body’s suffering. Early Christians read it as a prefiguration of their own martyrdoms.

And they honored the Maccabean martyrs explicitly. Origen cited them as examples of faithfulness under persecution. Cyprian of Carthage, writing during the Decian persecution in the mid-third century, held up the mother and her seven sons as models for Christians facing the same choice: apostatize or die.

Augustine, preaching on August 1—the feast day of the Holy Maccabean Martyrs in some liturgical traditions—called them Christian martyrs before Christ, arguing that their faith in resurrection made them witnesses to the same truth the apostles proclaimed.

That last detail deserves emphasis. The Maccabean martyrs are among the only pre-Christian figures given a feast day in certain Christian calendars. Not Abraham. Not Moses. Not David. The seven brothers and their mother. The early church saw something in their story that transcended the old covenant—a faith that looked forward to exactly what Christians believed had arrived in Jesus.

What the Author of Hebrews Expected

Here is the question we keep coming back to in this series: what did the New Testament authors expect their readers to know?

The reference in Hebrews 11:35 is not vague. It is not a general statement about suffering. It describes a specific scenario—people tortured, offered release, refusing it, choosing death for the sake of a resurrection they considered superior to mere survival. That is the plot of 2 Maccabees 7, and it is not the plot of anything else. The language is too precise to be coincidence and too compressed to be self-explanatory.

The author of Hebrews seems to assume his audience will recognize the reference instantly, the way we might say “the road to Damascus” and expect people to know we mean Paul’s conversion.

If that assumption is correct—and the specificity of the text strongly suggests it is—then the first readers of Hebrews were people for whom 2 Maccabees was a familiar text. Not an obscure apocryphal book. Not a controversial source. A book so well-known that the author could allude to its most dramatic scene in a single clause and trust that the entire story would unfold in the reader’s mind.

As we explored with the Wisdom of Solomon, the boundaries between “biblical” and “non-biblical” were not nearly as rigid in the first century as they became later. The New Testament writers read widely, and they wrote for readers who read widely too.

Read the Sources

These are among the most powerful texts in ancient literature. Go read them yourself.

Read 2 Maccabees 7 — the full account of the seven brothers, their mother, and the speeches that shaped a theology of resurrection.

Read Hebrews 11 — the “Hall of Faith,” and see how verse 35 fits into the larger argument.

Read John 10 — Jesus at the Feast of Dedication, the holiday born from the Maccabean revolt.

Use our cross-references tool to trace the connections between Daniel, Maccabees, and the Gospels. And if you are following this series from the beginning, revisit The Book of Enoch and the Bible and Wisdom of Solomon and the New Testament to see the broader pattern: the New Testament is in constant conversation with texts that many Christians no longer read.

The seven brothers chose death because they believed in something stronger than death. The author of Hebrews honored them for it. Perhaps we should know their names—or at least their story.