On August 1 according to the Julian calendar, August 14 in the civil calendar this year, the Byzantine Churches celebrate an unusual conjunction. The Precious and Life-Giving Cross is brought forth – ἡ Πρόοδος τοῦ Τιμίου καὶ Ζωοποιοῦ Σταυροῦ – while the Church commemorates the seven Maccabean martyrs, their mother Solomonia and their teacher, the elder Eleazar.

The proximity deserves attention. The Cross is brought forth into the life of the city and of the faithful. Beside it stand people who lived and died long before Jesus of Nazareth: Jews who accepted torture and death rather than abandon the commandments of the Torah and the Oral Tradition.

This is not a marginal survival in an overloaded calendar. Gregory of Nazianzus devoted his fifteenth Oration to the Maccabees, while John Chrysostom preached homilies in their honor. Raphaëlle Ziadé has studied precisely this remarkable passage of De l’histoire juive au culte chrétien: Jewish martyrs killed defending the Law entered Christian martyrology. The difficulty was already apparent in the fourth century. How could Christians venerate people who had died before Christ, precisely for their fidelity to the ancestral Jewish Law?

The answer preserved by the Church should not be softened into vague language about “shared values.” Eleazar did not die for an abstract principle of religious liberty. He refused to eat forbidden food. Solomonia and her seven sons preferred death to apostasy. Food, body, Covenant and obedience belonged together.

The historical distinction is equally important. The Maccabees were not fighting Greek language, philosophy or civilization as such. They resisted pagan coercion: an imperial attempt to impose idolatry and suppress their distinctive fidelity to the One God. There is a profound irony here. Greek subsequently became one of the principal languages through which their resistance was preserved: the Books of Maccabees, the preaching of Greek Fathers and Byzantine hymnography transmitted the memory of Jews who had resisted coercive Hellenization.

The Church therefore inherited something more demanding than an inspiring ancient story. It glorified people whose sanctity consisted precisely in refusing to renounce their Jewish fidelity.

This became unexpectedly concrete in Jerusalem in 2003. Members of my Rum Orthodox community asked to meet the late Greek Orthodox Patriarch Irenaios. Some had been born Jews; others had Jewish parents, children or relatives who had remained Jewish. They continued to meet their families at Pesach or Rosh Hashanah and encountered Jewish dietary and family practices as living realities. These were not theoretical questions about Judaism. They concerned families sitting around the same table.

The request initially surprised the Patriarch and those around him. Yet Orthodox tradition already contained something capable of making the question recognizable.

The Maccabees were already saints.

This does not........

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