by
Damien F. Mackey
“Antiochus Epiphanes thought nothing was
more certain than that he would annihilate the Jewish nation. Julian the
Apostate convinced himself that it was already in his power to uproot the
Christian religion”.
Herman J. Selderhuis (ed.)
This is a quote
from the book, Psalms 1-72 (p. 14).
If Julian ‘the
Apostate’ bears comparison, at least to some extent, with the emperor Hadrian:
Hadrian and Julian the Apostate
“… Julian … and Hadrian were both 'full of zeal for idolatry', 'superstitious
[…] astrologers wanting to
know everything, so constantly inquisitive as to be accused of magic'.”
then I might
expect, also, some useful comparisons of Julian with Hadrian’s alter ego, king Antiochus IV ‘Epiphanes,
as according to my:
Antiochus 'Epiphanes' and Emperor Hadrian. Part Two:
"Hadrian … a second Antiochus"
Collin Garbarino talks
about “an appropriation of the past” - {appropriation
being a word I have been much inclined to use for when I consider pagans to
have borrowed from the Hebrew scriptures but claimed the material as their own}
- by Christian writers of the Maccabean
period (“Resurrecting the martyrs: the role of the Cult of the Saints,
A.D. 370-430”, 2010). Though, according to my radical revision of the Maccabees
in relation to the Herodian era:
A New
Timetable for the Nativity of Jesus Christ
the Maccabean martyrs
at the time of Antiochus IV ‘Epiphanes’ fall right into the period of the
Infancy of Jesus Christ.
Garbarino writes (emphasis
added):
This
appropriation of the past could even reach back farther than the time of Christ
[sic]. During this expansion of the cult of martyrs in the fourth century,
bishops began venerating the Maccabeans who died in the Seleucid persecutions
of the 160s BC. The various books of Maccabees describe the deaths of faithful
Jews at the hands of Seleucid oppressors because of their refusal to abandon
the Torah. These stories contain many of
the same elements that later characterized Christian martyrologies: trials
designed to cause apostasy, tortures and promises given by the magistrate, and
a confession of continued faith in God. In
light of these commonalities, it is surprising that Christian communities
did not adopt these Jewish saints earlier. The earliest extant evidence of
Christians honoring the Maccabean martyrs is Gregory of Nazianzus’s Homily 15, On the Maccabees. …. Gregory
probably preached this sermon in 362, during the reign of Julian the Apostate. ….
He used the Maccabean situation to criticize in a veiled manner the
anti-Christian policies of the emperor. In the sermon, he explicitly says that
very few Christian communities honor these martyrs because their deaths
predated Christ. …. Gregory, however,
found their cult useful for promoting Christianization, and this sermon
acts as a turning point for the Maccabees. Martha Vinson writes, “Before this
sermon, the Maccabees are merely faces in a crowd of Old Testament exempla ...
while after it, as the homiletic literature from the last decades from the
fourth century attests, they have been singled out from the pack as the sole beneficiaries
not only of encomia but of a well-established cult.” …. By the year 400, the Maccabees were being honored as
Christian martyrs by preachers around the Mediterranean.
[End
of quote]
Barry
Phillips will write in a footnote (p. 129, n. 19) to his article “Antiochus IV, Epiphanes” (Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 29,
No. 2, 1910):
Dan. 11 st: " And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall
pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and
they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate." Cf. 8 12 9 27 12
11, 1 Macc. 1 54, 2 Macc. 6 2. Hoffman, Antiochus Epiphanes, p. 80, essays to
compare Antiochus and Julian. In so far as the ideas of both were out of
harmony with the spirit of the times, there is an apparent similarity between
the persecutions of Antiochus and of Julian, far less, however, than the
dissimilarity, owing to the fact that whereas Julian sought the extinction of
Christianity as an end, Antiochus sought the extinction of Judaism but as a
means to an end.
Antiochus ‘Epiphanes’ and Julian ‘the
Apostate’ are similarly likened to the Antichrist.
For instance, Stephen J. Vicchio tells of
Cardinal Newman’s view in Vicchio’s The Legend of the
Anti-Christ: A History, p. 314): “Newman goes on in the first advent sermon on the
Anti-Christ to argue that some of these historical figures have been Antiochus IV
Epiphanes and Julian, “who attempted to overthrow the Church by craft and
introduce paganism back again …”.
We shall conclude,
still on an antichrist type, the “666” of Revelation, with Reginald Rabett’s
comment (in GLateinos@; Lateinos; or, The only proper and
appellative name of the man, p. 138):
For example — If we were to speak of the Emperor Julian
who is proverbially and emphatically styled The
Apostate, yet it would be necessary to use the Name - Julian - because it is the Proper Name of this Man; for
were we to omit his Name, no one
would of a certainty
conclude that Julian the Apostate
was meant; but probably Antiochus Epiphanès
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