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The Christian theologian Ambrose of Milan quotes the description of Solomon’s temple dedication from 2 Maccabees, echoing Moses’ prayer and the fire that consumed the offerings, using it as an authoritative source for history and theology.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
2 Maccabees 2:11
Deuterocanon
9 and it was also declared that he, having wisdom, offered a sacrifice of dedication, and of the finishing of the temple. 10 As Moses prayed to the Lord and fire came down out of heaven and consumed the sacrifice, even so Solomon also prayed, and the fire came down and consumed the burnt offerings. 11 Moses said, ‘Because the sin offering had not been eaten, it was consumed in like manner.’ 12 Likewise Solomon kept the eight days.” 13 The same things were reported both in the public archives and in Nehemiah’s records, and also how he, founding a library, gathered together the books about the kings and prophets, and the writings of David, and letters of kings about sacred gifts.
Date: 160–63 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Early Christian
107 You are that victim. Contemplate in silence each single point. The breath of the Holy Spirit descends on you, He seems to burn you when He consumes your sins. The sacrifice which was consumed in the time of Moses was a sacrifice for sin, wherefore Moses said, as is written in the book of the Maccabees: Because the sacrifice for sin was not to be eaten, it was consumed. Does it not seem to be consumed for you when in the sacrament of baptism the whole outer man perishes? Our old man is crucified, the Apostle exclaims. Herein, as the example of the fathers teaches us, the Egyptian is swallowed up — the Hebrew arises renewed by the Holy Spirit, as he also crossed the Red Sea dryshod — where our fathers were baptized in the cloud and in the sea.
Date: 390–395 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Not all the works that were excluded from the canon were deemed heretical. Some were merely 'of the second rank' or 'among the apocrypha' (works that were 'to be hidden away' because they were not to be read, at least not in the liturgy). For most church fathers, 'the apocrypha' was not a fixed selection but a fluid category for books of dubious status. In modern parlance, the phrase 'the Apocrypha' (or 'the Apocrypha of the Old Testament') is often used to designate those Jewish books (Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, etc.) that are included in the Greek or Latin Old Testament of the church but are absent from the Hebrew Tanak of the Jews ..."
Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 168.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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