ABSTRACT
Returning to the questions about violence raised by Ruth Stein's psychoanalytic analysis of the 9/11 bombers, the question remains of whether Second Maccabees encodes some lesson about violence and specific theologies. Revising his earlier explanation of monotheism as the theological source of religious violence, Jan Assmann has recently posited that the Maccabean wars were the origin of "zealotry". Religious stories and practices, like all cultural practices, can be either regressive or progressive, depending on the interaction between cultural norms and high idiosyncratic personal mental states. Martyrdom stories deny the displacement of older traditions, but once the intra-religious competition begins, it is hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Modern scholars accept the story of the martyrdom of Stephen in Acts in part because of a general sentiment in favor of the dead, as Shelly Matthews points out. The discourse of martyrdom, as we have seen, cannot be used to reconstruct the motivations of civic rulers.
