In his recently-published Sign and Sacrifice, Rowan Williams notes the continuity between the post-Maccabean theology of martyrdom and the death of Jesus. For intertestamental Jews, as for Romans, death could be noble and triumphant.
There’s a radical discontinuity too. For Jews (as for Romans), martyrs triumphed because they died in an effort to liberate their nation from their enemies. Not Jesus: “Jesus did not die defending the nation or the law against foreign oppression. He died because those who ruled his nation had collaborated with the oppressor.” This caught early Christians “in a sort of pincer movement: here was somebody condemned by the state and rejected by the religious authorities of his own people.”
