Talk:2 Maccabees

Comment
Resurrection of the dead is a Jewish belief. I felt it pertient to alter this misinformation. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by The Diadem (talk • contribs).

date of 2 maccabees
There is obviously a problem with the date of writing given on this page - the wiki article for 1 Maccabees says ~100 bce and 2 Maccabees says ~124 bce!

The Oxford Annotated Bible (any edition) gives between 104 and 63 bce, which is much more likely, as it had to come after the 1st book.

I have no idea how to edit pages, but if someone could fix this, it would be great. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.230.210 (talk) 02:57, 6 March 2008 (UTC)


 * No, it didn't "have to come after the first book" -- 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees are fairly independent. In any case, the exact dating is rather uncertain... AnonMoos (talk) 23:21, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

The dating only appears to be a problem because the article describes 2 Maccabees as a revision of 1 Maccabees, but it is an independent work, not based on 1 Maccabees, as the previous commenter notes. They both narrate many of the same events, but from very different points of view. The previous commenter is also correct to note that the dating is uncertain, for both books. 124 is usually given as a terminus post quem for 2 Maccabees because the letter beginning in ch. 1 verse 1 dates to that year. 1 Maccabees is often dated around 100 BCE because it concludes with events from the reign of John Hyrcanus, who died in 104.```` —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.0.136.140 (talk) 23:19, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually, the article itself is inconsistent about dates because the opening section says "c 124 BC," while the Author section notes that the work claims to be an abridgement of a work by Jason, and that "Jason's work was apparently written sometime around 100 BC." It would be hard for an abridged edition to have been written more than two decades earlier than the original work! --Eliyahu S Talk 20:52, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Dating the composition
I have noticed a dating issue in this article. (It appears, from what I see above, that the dating issue was brought up years ago, but has yet to be resolved.) First, the article claims that the work was written circa 124 B. C. E., but it also claims that the work is an abridgment of another, lost work that was written 24-years later, in 100 B. C. E. So, obviously, that's not possible. One, if not both, of those dates must be wrong. Then, the article claims that scholars who happen to be Jewish date the work from 50&#8211;1 B. C. E., and that scholars who happen to be Catholic date the work from around 120&#8211;101 B. C. E. , while (A) providing no explanation for why scholars whose only distinguishing characteristic is their religions would happen to come to different conclusions regarding the composition's date of origin and (B) failing to tell us what date scholars regardless of religion give to the date of the composition's origin. Further, no explanation is provided for why scholars and this article itself differ on the date of origin for this composition. allixpeeke (talk) 09:18, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Dead link
During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!


 * http://www.episcopalian.org/pbs1928/articles/AnglicanTeaching/042.htm
 * In 1 Esdras on 2011-05-25 06:49:22, 404 Not Found
 * In 1 Esdras on 2011-06-09 12:24:39, 404 Not Found
 * In 2 Maccabees on 2011-06-19 06:03:06, 404 Not Found

--JeffGBot (talk) 06:03, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Purgatory
Is Purgatory in this book?174.89.102.7 (talk) 04:15, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata
Unless I am mistaken, the two items here should be moved here. Likewise, unless I am mistaken, the item here should be moved here. allixpeeke (talk) 07:46, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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Orphaned references in 2 Maccabees
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of 2 Maccabees's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Ehrman": From Codex Alexandrinus:  From Pastoral epistles:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 09:17, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Bulk revert
Hi. I most obviously do have some MO issue, but why revert something I've put some time & effort into? Your argument goes both ways, and I certainly didn't spoil anything. Also, apart from the 'harmless matters of editor preference', there were also a couple of more useful things, like placing the quite important "see also" tag above the arbitrarily chosen picture rather than underneath it, of placing an empty line between picture and text, removing useless "|language=English" bits where the title is obviously in English, placing the full details of a source at its first occurrence (helps editors look them up faster) - all elements of uniformity, which are pretty much standard on enWiki. What you did is bulk-reverting, which is not well accepted and not collegial. I would appreciate if you would let it be and re-revert: you lose nothing but an ego issue, and the article becomes more editor-friendly and conform to standards. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 19:48, 7 June 2022 (UTC)


 * First off, I appreciate you're acting in good faith here. Good work on removing "language=English" and I don't really care about the image placement vs. the header, so sure, I'll be happy to restore that.  Also, "MO issue?"  Not familiar with that term, sorry - checking the disambiguation page, maybe motivating operation?  Or did you mean something else?


 * For everything else: hmm, how to put this. Stuff like "language=English" wasn't put in there by me, but was probably put there by some good faith WikiGnome running a script.  And yet it didn't actually help, as we both agree.  Basically, not every Gnome-ish edit actually helps.  Let me attempt to convince you that you have better things to do than running around renaming references and changing spacing style.  None of that matters.  If you personally are doing major edits an article, go nuts, of course, and you should absolutely make such changes.  But it's strictly a matter of editor preference, not actual improvement for the reader, and you aren't the editor if you're doing it as a "passing through" edit.  I, the current major editor on this article, prefer reference names in quotes (it's easy to CTRL-F and see exactly where a reference is used), and I also use double spaces.  Why not let the major editor use the style they're comfortable with, if they're doing the work?  It's a similar principle as WP:ENGVAR which really is visible to the user - if the major editor on an article wants to use British English, or Australian English, or Canadian English, or whatever, just let them.  It's the style they know and are comfortable with.  Attempting to "standardize" it without a good reason (i.e. a strong national tie for the topic) will just annoy the editor who is doing the real work on the topic.  Anyway, please reconsider doing such edits.  It doesn't matter when a named reference is first used (and is often easier to read if it's placed at the end of a paragraph, not the middle), it doesn't matter if reference names have quotes, it doesn't matter if double spaces are used.  Just defer to the local major editors, at least if you don't plan on becoming a major editor yourself. SnowFire (talk) 20:27, 7 June 2022 (UTC)