PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF REVERSAL: KERYGMATIC ...

The book of 4 Maccabees, clearly reminiscent of a Platonic evaluation of the passions,
presents an argument for the control of the desires for (firstly) sex and food, by reason. This
opening section sets up the theme of this philosophical treatise:
4 Maccabees 1:1, 3-4
Godly reason is master of the passions….
If therefore it is plain that reason can master those passions that hinder self-control,
gluttony and lust, then it will also become evident that it is able to rule those passions
that hold back justice, such as malice; and those passions that hold back courage, such
as suffering and fear and pain.
The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs present sexual immorality and greed as the chief
expressions of sin against God. These foundational vices are occasionally explicitly linked to
idolatry and impurity. It is largely agreed that the Testaments as we currently have them
evidence a degree of Christian influence. It is also largely agreed that they express continuity
with Jewish ethical argumentation, 95 and so it is interesting to see a continuation of a number
of the ethical traditions examined so far, including an emphasis on the fundamental depravity
of sexual immorality, idolatry and greed.
95 Johannes Thomas boldly states, “Also, it has the special feature of being, at least basically, a
Jewish book, and so one of the relatively few works of Hellenistic Judaism that everybody will
agree is (also) paraenetic. Discussion of this work as a specimen of paraenesis will therefore
add appreciably to our understanding of a genre for which our evidence is otherwise mainly
Greco-Roman and Christian”. Johannes Thomas, “The Paraenesis of the Testaments of the
Twelve Patriarchs: Between Torah and Jewish Wisdom,” in Early Christian Paraenesis in
Context (ed. James Starr and Troels Engberg-Pedersen; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 157-
190; 157. More conservatively, Harm W. Hollander asserts that “there is much to be said for
the assumption of a Jewish Hellenistic background and origin of the ethics of the Testaments.
But this conclusion by no means implies that the paraenesis either is Christian or cannot be
Christian. For we should be aware of the fact that Christianity adopted (nearly) all the
standard topics of Jewish paraenesis”. Harm W. Hollander, Joseph as an Ethical Model in the
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 12-13. Martinus de Jonge, who
strongly asserts that the Testaments are a Christian product, affirms that they evidence
continuity with Jewish ethical argumentation, which is exactly the point I am hoping to
demonstrate: “Many parallels simply illustrate the continuity in content and diction between
Hellenistic-Jewish and early Christian paraenesis”. M. De Jonge, Pseudepigrapha of the Old
Testament as Part of Christian Literature: The Case of the Testaments of the Twelve
Patriarchs and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 177.
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