Between 167 and 160 BC, Judas Maccabeus and his brothers led a revolt against the Greek tyrant who desecrated the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Miraculously victorious, the Jews rededicated the Temple in a festival of lights that became the first Hannukah. A bloody tale of oppression, war, and ancient diplomacy, these books (Maccabees 1 and 2) are a bridge between the Old and New Testaments and are the first places that the Jewish Bible speaks of life after death, intercessory prayer, and purgatory.
Matthew and Leeanne Thomas edited and annotated these texts for the Ignatius Study Bible. Matthew is a theologian and professor at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California. He and Leeanne are both scholars of Biblical Hebrew; they met in graduate school and got married. She had also once been a candidate for ordination in the Anglican Church in Canada before becoming a Catholic. Today, the couple live in Berkeley with their four beautiful children.


The First and Second Books of the Maccabees, edited by Matthew and Leeanne Thomas, Ignatius Catholic Study Bible.

Matthew Thomas’s faculty webpage at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology.

Matthew Thomas on Almost Good Catholics, episode 02: Who Wrote the Bible? Sorting out the History of the Bible We Have.

Matthew Thomas on Almost Good Catholics, episode 03: The Gospels in the Early Church: Evidence for the Chronology and Transmission of the Christian Scriptures.


Matthew Thomas on Almost Good Catholics, episode 22: Better Call Paul How Did the Early Jewish Christians Understand “Works of the Law”?



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