The Eclipse of Biblical Temporality: Absolute Chronology and Relative Time in 2 Maccabees and the Fourth Gospel

Abstract

Modern, post-Scaliger expectations for constructing an absolute chronology out of ancient biblical narratives introduce a fallacy of assumed time that distorts the reading of these narratives. While absolute chronology undergirds historical-critical interpretation from Spinoza and Reimarus to twentieth-century scholarship, the more recent “temporal turn” in philosophy, historiography, and literary theory aligns with a renewed attention to narrative time and ancient temporal consciousness. Focusing on 2 Maccabees and the Gospel of John as historiographical narratives reveals how both texts configure events through relative temporal devices—such as temporal markers and temporal process verbs—rather than through absolute calendrical dating, even when coordinates appear in 2 Maccabees’ embedded letters. Building on this comparison allows for a dimensional model of time that respects these configurational strategies and avoids obscuring how these texts construct theological and historical meaning within their own narrative worlds.

1. Introduction

Writing history is arguably no less challenging than making history. The first century bce historiographer Diodorus Siculus explains one of the hard decisions that ancient historiographers faced: either write a local history, a work that is simple enough that readers will appreciate, but with limited scope and value; or write a universal history (κοιναὶ ἱστορίαι), a work that is grand in scope that crosses ages and cultures, but with such complexity that it will be fraught with unlimited complications (Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist. 1.3.8). The tension between these two approaches rests on the difficulty the historiographer has to establish historical facts and portray historical significance from past events outside of their immediate knowledge. We presume that most historiographers write from a sincere desire to give an accurate account (e.g., Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist. 1.6.2–3; Luke 1:1–4), but this does not mean historiographers are infallible—the more difficult the work, the more the potential for errors.

Ever since writers first started to write history, later writers have taken it upon themselves to criticize these earlier historiographies for perceived inaccuracies, infelicitous style, and disordered events. Of particular difficulty for the historiographer is the organization of events. Here, the historiographer again faces a dilemma: either put events in the strict order in which they were believed to have occurred, or group the events into a more relatable shape but outside of their strict order of occurrence. The tension over how to organize and include events—which we today simply refer to as chronology—spills over into every aspect of historiography. From Herodotus (mid-5th century bce) forward, there are those such as Thucydides (ca. 460–404 bce), Polybius (ca. 200–118 bce), Pompeius Trogus (1st century bce), Virgil (1st century bce), Mark (1st century ce), and John (1st century ce) who wrote relatable historiographies untethered to the constraints of an annalistic straitjacket and those such as Diodorus Siculus, Tatian (120–173 ce), Dio Cassius (150–235 ce), and Jerome (347–420 ce) who come after attempting to “set the record straight,” for better or worse, putting events ἐν τοῖς οἰκείοις χρόνοις (“in the right time,” Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist. 1.69.1; cf. Titus 1:3). The desire to critique and “fix” histories is as old as the writing of history, but unfortunately for the critics, history is not a vine, with one discrete event tethered to the next, but a thicket, which cannot ever be fully unentangled (cf. Papaioannou 2022). What is new is that much later critics prescribe more accurate temporal coordinates (annual calendrical dates) in their own works, thereby expecting that other historiographers (whether ancient or modern) could have and should have been more “accurate” in their historiographical creations (e.g., Ashton 2022, p. 53). From late antiquity to the early modern era, this expectation gradually intensified, and with the Reformation in Western Europe coupled with the rise of the scientific method in historical studies, this perspective proliferated rapidly. In the study of biblical literature, these changes coincided with the demise of traditional biblical criticism and the dominance of the historical-critical method.

2. The Two Turns of Biblical Interpretation in the Modern Era

Hans Frei’s seminal work, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974), recounts the fundamental turn in the interpretation of biblical texts that occurred in Western civilization in the seventeenth thru nineteenth centuries.1 This turn was from a pre-critical, realistic interpretation to a modern, historical-critical interpretation, but it was also a turn from privileging meaning found in the text to privileging meaning found in external data.2 As Frei tells it, the earliest veer from pre-critical interpretation came in the late seventeenth century in the anonymous work of Baruch Spinoza (1634–1677), The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). Spinoza ruptured the unity between history and narrative, introducing the importance of an independent, comparative—but artificial—historical tradition. Frei also singles out, among others, the works of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669), a Dutch Reformed theologian who tried to correlate real world events with biblical history and prophecy. In the early seventeenth centuries, English Deist Anthony Collins (1676–1729) succeeded in steering the debates over biblical interpretation into one of historical reference. From there, the bend in the road became more pronounced in the mid to late eighteenth century. Noted proponents of the historical-critical method were Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826), and David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874). Early fruit of this turn was the posthumously published historical-critical arguments of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) on the historical Jesus, whose early positivistic arguments found the canonical gospels to be largely ahistorical. By the nineteenth century, the turn was largely complete, and the historical-critical method held pride of place among scholars, many of whom believed these events represented the dawning of a new age of clarity and precision in biblical studies.

This new hope lasted less than two centuries. Before long, the new direction encountered unforeseen hazards originating from unpredictable vectors such as world events. If Spinoza was the forerunner to the swerve away from a pre-modern, realistic interpretation, then Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) may be the forerunner to the swerve away from historical-critical interpretation.3 Auerbach, in his Mimesis (1946), emphasized the power of biblical stories to point to meaningful realities. Rather than making a deliberate and monolithic turn as occurred with historical criticism, biblical studies as it turned splintered along several different and competing trajectories. Perhaps the most important of these splinters was literary-critical interpretation. Dan Otto Via, Jr.’s work The Parables (1967) introduced scholarship to a literary analysis of biblical texts, and the publication of Via’s book was quickly followed by James Muilenburg’s 1968 presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, as well as a number of key books, including Norman Perrin’s Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (1976), Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981), and David M. Rhoads’ and Donald Michie’s, Mark as Story (1982). By the twenty-first century, the literary-critical interpretation splintered or expanded into other forms of criticism such as rhetorical criticism, social-scientific criticism, reader-response criticism, and various contextual criticisms. Today, all of these criticisms coexist—sometimes unhappily—within the larger ecosystem of biblical interpretation.

3. The Turn Before the First Turn

There is another story that needs to be told, one that is not well known, and one that begins a century before Spinoza. Prior to the rise of historical-critical scholarship, not only did readers employ a pre-critical, realistic interpretation to Scripture, they also understood Scripture in light of their own pre-critical, temporally relative understanding of time and history. Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) began to transform this pre-critical understanding of time with the publication of his Opus de emendatione tempore (1583) as well as his later Thesaurus temporum (1609). Although subtle, Scaliger’s works initiated a turn that was at least as dramatic as the historical-critical turn. In fact, without Scaliger’s turn, there might not be a later turn by Spinoza and Strauss.4 Prior to Scaliger, and those who followed him, people understood time differently than moderns do today (Grafton 1993, vol. 2, p. 261; Assman 2013, p. 43).5 This understanding extends to both those who lived, as well as those who recounted the histories of events and people, in pre-modern periods.

Time, its meaning and study, has always interested humans. The same is true of how humans understand and organize time—the Quartodeciman Controversy (ca. 190 ce) serves as an illustrative example. Long before the modern era, Greek historians such as Ephorus (ca. 400–330 bce), philosophers such as Timaeus of Tauromenium (ca. 350–264 bce) and Eratosthenes of Cyrene (ca. 276–194 bce), and Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 bce) wrestled with organizing time (Nothaft 2012, p. 5). However, their works were not mainstream—nor were they part of the consciousness of civilization at large. Many Graeco-Roman philosophers such as Empedocles (ca. 490–430 bce) and Lucretius (fl. 1st century bce) took a different route, emphasizing the subjective nature of time (e.g., Ashton 2022; Hutchins 2022). In the Christian era, early interpreters of the New Testament such as Tatian (120–173 ce) and Origen (185–254 ce) struggled to align biblical “dates” with external events. In these centuries, historiographers employed dates, people had calendars, and chroniclers could detail the passing of events (e.g., Phlegon of Tralles [2nd century ce]). Yet, this never led to a universal, unified, or invariable understanding of time: “In no concrete example that has been preserved from pagan antiquity did a historian try to establish a year on the basis of a previously known calendar date or use an actually observed and recorded eclipse to retrospectively date an event” (Nothaft 2012, p. 6; cf. Schiffman 2011, p. 6; Klein 2009, pp. 19, 43). While moderns understand “the past is fundamentally different from the present,” ancients did not (Schiffman 2011, p. 71). Thus, “ancient writers are not working with ‘dates’ under another guise, but with relative frames of time that are always being reconstructed in each project, even if many of the anchoring points stay constant” (Feeney 2008, p. 15, emphasis mine; see also Schiffman 2011, p. 71; and cf. Kratz 2015, pp. 12–13, 129; and an earlier ANE example, Charpin and Ziegler 2013).

Unlike modern people, ancients did not view time as a “thing,” and definitely not as a “line” or a “container.” They did not understand events attached to time; they understood time attached to events (Ariotti 1975, p. 70; Herrmann 1981, p. 142). They did not view the past as distinct from the present (Schiffman 2011, p. 71; Lowenthal 2015, pp. 358–59). We can see an example of how this worked with ancient genealogy—the lives of people are listed in a before and after sequence, relative to theirs’ and others’ lives lived, not absolute dates. This does not mean ancients did not have and utilize calendars and dates; but again, the calendars and dates were to help explain the events, not the events to help explain the calendars and dates in the manner we moderns perceive this today.6 The impetus to understand time better largely stemmed from the historical claims of Christianity; it was important to tie the history of the faith with global cultures (Nothaft 2012, pp. 11–13).

Scaliger, a philologist by trade and Huguenot by choice, envisioned a chronicon absolutissimum (absolute chronology) on which he could place every event in history.7 Although his effort built on the work of earlier chronologists (Schilt 2021, p. 30), he had the knack for self-promotion, and considered himself the man who “changed time” (from his 4 September 1851 letter to Chrestien in Grafton 1993, vol. 2, p. 109). It is likely his inflated view of himself catapulted his theories to the forward edge of historical science (Grafton 1975, p. 162). His work “eventually led to the common adoption of our current bc/ad-system of counting years on an abstract timeline that could be extended ad infinitum in both directions” (Nothaft 2012, p. 3; cf. Perovic 2013, p. 88).8 Scaliger accomplished this by formulating a “Julian Period,” an abstract and artificial calendrical device (Grafton 1975, p. 162; Nothaft 2012, p. 3; Schilt 2021, p. 29). Ultimately, Scaliger’s goal was to reverse the way people had used time throughout history—instead of using time to understand events, especially their historical or religious values, he used events to create a “purely numerical discipline” (Wilcox 1987, p. 197). Finally, Scaliger was pessimistic about inconsistencies he found in biblical literature using his chronological method (van Miert 2018, p. 24). His chronologies heavily influenced his interpretations, even to the point that he suspected the New Testament texts were corrupted and later doctored by the church fathers (van Miert 2018, pp. 38–39).

Contemporaries of Scaliger often praised his work, but scholars in his day did not immediately engage his chronology. Over time Scaliger’s arguments came to wider influence in disciplines outside of world history. Earlier, we noted that Frei argued that Baruch Spinoza (1634–1677) initiated the first veer from pre-critical to historical-critical interpretation of biblical texts. Spinoza, who was Dutch Reformed along with Scaliger, employed the latest chronological insights only to conclude that some of the biblical texts contained errors or contradictions, an argument that would come to the fore in his Tractatus (Touber 2018, p. 69). This, too, led to further pessimism about the validity of the biblical text (Touber 2018, p. 44).

Among earlier modern scholars, Frei also singled out the works of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669), a Dutch Reformed theologian working to establish the legitimacy of biblical history and prophecy—thus cutting against the grain of Scaliger and Spinoza. Cocceius was heavily influenced by Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), who published his own attempts at chronology starting with his De origine gentium Americanarum dissertatio altera (1643). Even as Grotius critiqued Scaliger, he still relied upon Scaliger’s work. Although there is no clear indication that Cocceius used Scaliger’s work explicitly, Scaliger’s work was already famous by Cocceius’ day. Further, Cocceius and Scaliger both were trained Hebraic philologists, both were Dutch Reformed, and both taught at Leiden University. Although Cocceius was unconcerned with world history (van Asselt 2001, p. 133), his works betray the temporal consciousness of an almost-modern scholar, as he viewed “Scripture as the record of an event, rather than a system of objective truths,” yet understood time as “an indication of the sequence of events in history” (van Asselt 2001, pp. 8, 164, 293).

Finally, we return to Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), the Deist whose posthumously published Wolfenbütteler Fragmente by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) a century after Cocceius shook German intellectualism (Fragmentenstreit). Scholars remember Reimarus today as one of the first questers of the historical Jesus, memorialized in the title of Albert Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1906).9 Although Schweitzer sees Reimarus as a brilliant thinker—a true “historical mind”—whose work is a “masterpiece,” he also recognizes that the rationalist Reimarus is driven to his criticism by a hatred of the “supernatural nimbus” that surrounds the Jesus of the canonical Gospels (Schweitzer [1906] 1968, pp. 4, 15). Schweitzer begins his discussion of Reimarus stating,

Before Reimarus, no one had attempted to form a historical conception of the life of Jesus. Luther had not so much as felt that he cared to gain a clear idea of the order of the recorded events. Speaking of the chronology of the cleansing of the Temple, which in John falls at the beginning, in the Synoptists near the close, of Jesus’ public life, he remarks: “The Gospels follow no order in recording the acts and miracles of Jesus, and the matter is not, after all, of much importance. If a difficulty arises in regard to the Holy Scripture and we cannot solve it, we must just let it alone.”

(Schweitzer [1906] 1968, p. 13, emphasis mine)

Reimarus (1972, vol. 1, p. 898) rails against die chronologische Unordnung of the prophetic texts of the Old Testament (cf. Klein 2009, p. 87). He considers Josephus’ story of the high priest showing Alexander the text of Daniel a total fabrication in part due to his inability to make the story fit chronologically (Reimarus 1972, vol. 1, p. 908), and (anachronistically) criticizes the compilers of the OT for failing to understand chronology (Reimarus 1972, vol. 1, p. 879). Reimarus (1972, vol. 2, p. 533) concludes that the Gospel writers felt emboldened “und alles nach seiner Weise vorzutragen und in Ordnung zu bringen” (“to present and arrange everything in their own way”), as if there existed an absolute chronology on which the Gospel writers could have aligned their narratives. Although Reimarus lamented the problems of establishing an accurate Zeit-Ordnung against the obvious Unordnung in the texts themselves (Reimarus 1972, vol. 1, p. 900), his complaints against the biblical texts are far more numerous and cannot be reduced to any one argument. It is possible Reimarus amplifies the attitude of his famous teacher, Johann Albert Fabricius (1668–1736), who followed the early historical-critical zeitgeist, and who himself endeavored to create an absolute chronology—his Bibliotheca Graeca—for all ancient Greek works (Klein 2009, pp. 18–19). Still, Schweitzer’s first inclination about Reimarus’ critique of history is his chronology. Chronology was an important tool in the historical critics’ arsenal (Touber 2018, p. 20), and the undergirding support that absolute chronology gave to the historical-critical turn is undeniable (de Jonge 1996, p. 177; see also de Jonge 1991). Joseph Scaliger’s boast was not completely empty—he was, in fact, the man who changed time.

The implications of applying an absolute chronology to a premodern text go far beyond what Scaliger, Reimarus, and Schweitzer imagined. It is not simply a question of whether scholars can correlate dates across many different calendrical systems, it is what these dates mean within the context of ancient time systems in texts. It is also the issue of how the historical method transformed the modern temporal consciousness. Modern ideas about time are peculiar when compared to understandings of temporality in the premodern world, rooted as they are in the Enlightenment’s reversal of metaphysics (Hammer 2011, pp. 11–12). Even as scholarship had turned from a pre-critical, realistic interpretation of the Bible, this turn was fueled by the turn from premodern temporalities to a modern temporality, so much so that Schweitzer cannot help but privilege chronology over every other issue when introducing Reimarus’ argument (cf. Hunter 1973, p. 5). One implication is that modern scholars have imbued dates with independent meaning that is absent and alien to ancient texts (Shaw 2003, p. 29). Another implication is that readers now expect ancient texts to conform chronologically to an “all-inclusive narrative” (Lowenthal 2015, p. 355; Feeney 2008, p. 194). And a third implication is that moderns are taught to view the past with skepticism (cf. Lowenthal 2015, p. 359). As a result, modern historians reading ancient texts applied an absolute grid onto these texts, thereby making major assumptions about temporality (Miller 1974, p. 459; Bevernage and Lorenz 2013, p. 17). So different was the temporal consciousness of ancients to moderns that it is virtually impossible for moderns to imagine premodern temporalities (Feeney 2008, p. 9).

4. The Narrative (Temporal) Turn

Although scholars continued to herald this new modern consciousness of time and chronology at the beginning of the twentieth century, awareness of its weaknesses and limitations were prominent by the end of it. One precipitative event was the work of philosopher John M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925), who reasoned for two distinct theories of time, tensed (A-series) and tenseless (B-series). McTaggart’s work exposed flaws in how we perceive time due to our simultaneously existing in time (McTaggart 1908). By mid-century, a number of works such as Cullmann’s (1946) Christus und die Zeit and Boman’s (1954) Das hebräische Denken im Vergleich mit dem Griechischen began to appear that raised doubts as to how modern scholars should appreciate temporality in ancient texts.

By the mid to late twentieth century, a “temporal turn” began in the study of philosophy, history, and literature. The scholars who contributed to this turn are numerous, but include Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Reinhart Koselleck, Louis Mink, David Lowenthal, and François Hartog, to name a few. Just as there was a partial turn from historical-critical interpretation to literary-critical interpretation in biblical studies, so too was there a slight turn from absolute chronology to narrative temporality (taking place underneath), where ancient narratives were considered less upon how they plugged into history but more how they told their own unique histories. Within the study of literature, Currie (2007, p. 1), among others, also speaks of the shift as a “temporal turn,” whereby readers of texts proactively consider the time of the text as opposed to coming into the text with faulty temporal assumptions (Estes 2008).

As literary treatments of biblical texts started to become more common in the 1980s, a few biblical scholars began to recognize that the timeframes of ancient narratives did not resemble the timeframes of modern histories, though they tended to remain close to the chronological line (e.g., Culpepper 1983, pp. 70–72; Breytenbach 1985; Stibbe 1994, p. 85; Frey 1998, p. 168). In time, however, scholars began to increasingly free themselves from these early shackles (e.g., Reinhartz 1992). The turn from historical-critical to literary-critical interpretation was not uniform, of course, as many scholars continued to work with historical-critical methods, and by the early twenty-first century, there are often mergers of the two methods.

Thus, the temporal turn in biblical studies describes an attitude toward ancient texts that originates in the wider world of philosophy, history, and literature in the late twentieth century, as well as a method that uses narrative tools to understand how the biblical writers created narratives temporally situated within their own ancient context. This temporal turn provides a more satisfactory response to certain intractable complications within biblical texts that, while observed in pre-critical interpretation, persisted in a new posture from Reimarus to Rudolf Bultmann.

After Bultmann, historical-critical approaches to biblical texts also fell under the influence of late twentieth century thought, which brough a fresh, more sensitive approach to reading ancient narrative within a historical-critical model (e.g., White 1973). However, when it comes to chronology, unexamined assumptions about time remain in biblical studies, impeding the speed of the turn (Estes 2008, p. 84). Modern chronological approaches to the temporality of ancient texts are often unhelpful or misleading due to their unstated assumptions about time. For example, in an otherwise stimulating essay, Alexander (2006, p. 15) admits that in the Gospels “individual episodes are loosely linked,” yet makes claims a few sentences later about the chronological “precision” of these narratives. These assumptions remain commonplace in contemporary historical approaches to biblical texts.

How can readers eliminate these assumptions? Solutions proposed like those of Boman are unsatisfactory as it is impossible for modern people to perceive time in the way ancients did (Wilcox 1987, p. 9; cf. Eliade 1957). Thus, the best scholars can do to better understand ancient texts is to possess awareness of their own temporal assumptions and selectively apply temporal paradigms with the expectation of modest goals (Estes 2008, p. 87; cf. Rajadell 2013). In this article, the paradigm will be that of a dimensional view of time applied to two biblical texts: 2 Maccabees and the Gospel of John. A dimensional view of time for ancient texts respects the relative time configuration that their writers employed to connect events in meaningful ways that are not necessarily chronological.

5. Beyond Chronology: 2 Maccabees and the Fourth Gospel

The Gospel of John and 2 Maccabees are historiographical texts that possess a number of configurational similarities that allow for useful comparison. To begin with, both texts are primarily narratives, composed in Hellenistic Greek, presumably by diaspora Jews. Both are historiographical, and claim to recount actual events (Wirklichkeitserzählung), but both acknowledge that their narrators shape their texts for rhetorical effect (2 Macc 15:39; John 20:31). Both texts demonstrate a certain narrative artistry, in that both contain plays on words or riddles; this artistry is part of the literary strategies that both texts use to authenticate the validity of their messages for audiences (Luther 2020, p. 72; and e.g., Estes 2022, 2023, 2024). Both also contain anonymous narrators who guide their audiences while remaining unafraid to boldly interrupt their storytelling (creating metalepsis) (cf. Estes 2025). In fact, both narrators interrupt enough at the beginning and end of their respective stories that these interruptions act as a type of framing narrative around the main narrative (resulting in two or more diegesis, or storyworlds).10 Both texts also include sections with divergent subgenres within their larger texts, such as a farewell discourse in John (John 13–17) and letters in 2 Maccabees (2 Macc 1:1–9; 1:10–2:18; 9:19–27; 11:16–21; 11:22–26; 11:27–33; and 11:34–38). Finally, both texts record events that seem out of sequence from complementary texts; for example, there is tension between 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees over the timing of the death of Antiochus IV (VanderKam 1987, p. 29), and there is tension between John’s Gospels and the Synoptic Gospels over the timing of the cleansing of the temple (Barrett 1978, pp. 194–202).11

There are also a few contrasts: While 2 Maccabees is a summary of a non-extant five-volume history by Jason of Cyrene (2 Macc 2:23), the Fourth Gospel claims to be an eyewitness account of the events that he records (John 19:35, 21:24; e.g., Estes 2026).12 The composition of 2 Maccabees dates to the mid- to early 2nd century bce (e.g., Schwartz 2008, pp. 11–14), possibly later (e.g., Goldstein 1983, p. 72), while the Fourth Gospel dates to the late 1st century ce—a two-hundred-year difference. Finally, while the Gospel of John contains no temporal coordinates, 2 Maccabees contains several (most within the epistolary sections, see below); yet, neither narrative is able to provide the necessary foundation for constructing an absolute chronology due to its relative temporal framework. This framework originates both in authorial intent and narrative design. Nevertheless, the similarities are sufficiently strong that we can make a general comparison of the narrative and historiographical qualities between the two texts, especially in the area of temporal configuration.

After the modern turn toward the historical-critical method, empowered by the expectations of an absolute chronology, scholars of both 2 Maccabees and John were quick to find both of these texts chronologically—and therefore historically—flawed and necessitating modern scholars trained in the tools of absolute chronology to transpose embedded events into a corrected, absolute chronological order. These attempts have led to a pyrrhic victory for chronologists, at the expense of the received meaning of recorded events and how they fit within the texts themselves. For example, VanderKam (1987, p. 31) believes the death of Antiochus is out of place in 2 Maccabees, while Habicht (1976, pp. 190–91) feels certain the external evidence suggests the death of Antiochus is placed accurately in 2 Maccabees. There is no agreement, and perhaps worse, less interest in how 2 Maccabees uses the death of Antiochus in its temporal location to persuade its audiences. Although 2 Maccabees has faced an “almost perverse skepticism” over its value since the early modern era (Goldstein 1983, p. 4), the text contains a wealth of authenticating information about the Seleucid era and the historical Maccabees (Habicht 1976, p. 190).13 This is not much different from the Fourth Gospel, a text that even more famously has faced “almost perverse skepticism” from scholars over its alleged chronological blunders (e.g., most notably, Bultmann 1971, though recently, von Wahlde 2010). Yet recent advances in scholarship also confirm that the Gospel of John contains “ausgezeichnete und präzise Kenntnis,” a wealth of valuable information about the first century and the historical Jesus (Anderson 2026; also van Kooten 2025). The greatest problem with 2 Maccabees and John may not be the configuration of the texts themselves, but the scholars who study them burdened with a fallacy of assumed time (Estes 2016, pp. 42–43). This fallacy leads modern readers to try to fit events within these texts to artificial, external timelines, in a manner unimaginable to the texts’ original creators and hearers.

Ancient writers, no matter how precise or particular, relied upon what we may think of as either a “partial” or “full” relative reckoning of time. A primary difference between these two reckonings is the inclusion or exclusion of temporal coordinates. A partial relative reckoning includes texts with one or more temporal coordinates (e.g., 2 Maccabees), while a full relative reckoning includes texts with no temporal coordinate (e.g., John). In both cases, however, 2 Maccabees and John primarily use relative temporal devices to configure their event structure. In neither case do coordinates presuppose the association of discrete events outside of the narrative structure (syuzhet). One common relative configurational device in ancient historiography is the temporal marker—phrases such as “at about the same time,” “after these things,” and “later that day”—that the narrator uses to move the story from one event to another. Ancient historiographers such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon (ca. 430–350 bce), Pompeius Trogus, Tacitus (56–120 ce), as well as the creators of 2 Maccabees, Mark, and John utilized these markers to configure the events in their stories according to a relative time reckoning. The Gospel of John uses these markers extensively; these markers are the device that the Fourth Evangelist consistently employs to structure his narrative and creates a dimensional sense of epic events that are linked by purpose and meaning (see

Table 1. Temporal Markers in John’s Gospel.

Temporal Markers in John’s Gospel
John 1:1	ἐν ἀρχῇ
John 1:29	τῇ ἐπαύριον
John 1:35	τῇ ἐπαύριον
John 1:43	τῇ ἐπαύριον
John 2:1	τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ τρίτῃ
John 2:12	μετὰ τοῦτο
John 3:22	μετὰ ταῦτα
John 4:43	μετὰ δὲ τὰς δύο ἡμέρας
John 5:1	μετὰ ταῦτα
John 5:14	μετὰ ταῦτα
John 6:1	μετὰ ταῦτα
John 6:22	τῇ ἐπαύριον
John 7:1	μετὰ ταῦτα
John 7:37	Ἐν δὲ τῇ ἐσχάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ
John 11:7	ἔπειτα μετὰ τοῦτο
John 11:11	μετὰ τοῦτο
John 12:12	τῇ ἐπαύριον
John 19:28	μετὰ τοῦτο
John 19:38	μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα
John 20:1	Τῇ δὲ μιᾷ τῶν σαββάτων
John 20:26	μεθʼ ἡμέρας ὀκτὼ
John 21:1	μετὰ ταῦτα

).

This primary reliance on temporal markers is what helps imbue John’s Gospel with its episodic feel. However, there are other narrative devices in addition to temporal markers that writers including John could marshal to show the passage of time. These include temporal coordinates (e.g., “in the reign of Demetrius, in the one hundred sixty-ninth year”), temporal process words (e.g., “it happened that,” and “and he left”), and temporal adverbs (weak temporal markers) that assist with narrative event substructure (e.g., “now,” and “soon”).14 Ancient writers, without an understanding of absolute chronology, selected from a variety of these devices to make history move in the ears of the hearers of their stories. Some relied more heavily on one device above others, such as John (Estes 2008) and Mark (Estes, forthcoming), but others mixed widely based on genre and narrative goals, such as 2 Maccabees.

Turning to 2 Maccabees, readers encounter a narrative with several configurational features. First, as expected, the creator of 2 Maccabees does use eight temporal markers in order to help configure his narrative (see

Table 2. Temporal Markers in 2 Maccabees.

Temporal Markers in 2 Maccabees
2 Macc 4:23	Μετὰ δὲ τριετῆ χρόνον
2 Macc 5:1	Περὶ δὲ τὸν καιρὸν τοῦτον
2 Macc 6:1	Μετʼ οὐ πολὺν δὲ χρόνον
2 Macc 9:1	Περὶ δὲ τὸν καιρὸν ἐκεῖνον
2 Macc 11:1	Μετʼ ὀλίγον δὲ παντελῶς χρονίσκον
2 Macc 12:32	Μετὰ δὲ τὴν λεγομένην πεντηκοστὴν
2 Macc 12:39	τῇ δὲ ἐχομένῃ
2 Macc 14:1	Μετὰ δὲ τριετῆ χρόνον

):

At first glance 2 Maccabees’ use of temporal markers does not seem to be the primary structuring device for the narrative, unlike John. Another configurational device is the verbal clause, “it came about” (συνέβη and συνέβαινεν) (2 Macc 3:2; 4:30; 5:2; 7:1; 9:2; 9:7; 10:5; 12:34; 13:7). Although this verb is a type of temporal process word—specifically a process verb—these two verbs function more as colligatory idioms, which strengthens their configurational abilities in the ears of the hearer, and creates an extraposition, pushing the emphasis of the clause to its end (Brown and Miller 2013).15 Note especially the narrator’s use of συνέβη in 2 Macc 7:1—this occurs at the beginning of two clearly distinct episodes (helped by a strong sense of closure in 2 Macc 6:31), a place where the hearer expects a temporal marker, not merely a process verb or colligatory idiom. The choice of συνέβη instead of a temporal marker could imply one of several possibilities; likely, to reveal how the story of the seven brothers builds on the martyrdom of Eleazar, both of which are coequal explications of the narrator’s aside on divine providence and the appropriate meaning and response to calamities (2 Macc 6:12–17; cf. Schwartz 2008, pp. 187–88). 2 Maccabees includes a number of other temporal process words, scattered throughout the text to assist with scene changes (e.g., strong: 2 Macc 1:20, 3:9, 3:14, 4:39, 4:44, 5:11, 5:25, 10:4, 12:1; weak: 2 Macc 2:1, 2:9, 3:33, 4:7, 8:5, 10:29, 14:15).16

Also, unlike John, 2 Maccabees contains several temporal coordinates (see

Table 3. Temporal Coordinates in 2 Maccabees.

Temporal Coordinates in 2 Maccabees
2 Macc 1:7	βασιλεύοντος Δημητρίου ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ ἑξηκοστοῦ ἐνάτου
2 Macc 1:9	τὰς ἡμέρας τῆς σκηνοπηγίας τοῦ Χασελευ μηνός. ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ ὀγδοηκοστοῦ καὶ ὀγδόου
2 Macc 11:21	ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ τεσσαρακοστοῦ ὀγδόου, Διὸς Κορινθίου τετράδι καὶ εἰκάδι
2 Macc 11:33	ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ τεσσαρακοστοῦ ὀγδόου, Ξανθικοῦ πεντεκαιδεκάτῃ
2 Macc 11:38	ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ τεσσαρακοστοῦ ὀγδόου, Ξανθικοῦ πεντεκαιδεκάτῃ
2 Macc 13:1	Τῷ δὲ ἐνάτῳ καὶ τεσσαρακοστῷ καὶ ἑκατοστῷ ἔτει
2 Macc 14:4	πρώτῳ καὶ πεντηκοστῷ καὶ ἑκατοστῷ ἔτει

):

The number of temporal coordinates in 2 Maccabees would at first glance appear to be a historical argosy for those wishing to construct an absolute chronology of the events. However, the text is an interesting case study as it is a narrative summary with seven discrete letters embedded within or attached to its story. While there are seven temporal coordinates in 2 Maccabees, five of the seven occur within the embedded epistles. In contrast, all eight of the temporal markers in 2 Maccabees are in the narrative sections; none are in the epistolary sections. This draws the potential for a sharp contrast between generic expectations of letters and narratives; even in the ancient world, including absolute calendrical dates on letters made sense but less so for the authentication of historical events.17 The temporal descriptors in 2 Maccabees that masquerade as temporal coordinates play a critical role in the narrative and theological development of the story (e.g., 2 Macc 1:18, 4:18, 6:7, 8:26, 10:5, 15:36); they tie events to moments without interfering with the configuration of the narrative. Thus, descriptors are “true” without concern for external verification (same as in John). This supports the theological purpose of the narrative; Trotter (2017, p. 120) observes “the main purpose of 2 Maccabees is to provide an account of the origins of these two festivals and thus to encourage readers to celebrate Hanukkah and Nicanor’s Day.” Festivals, and the liturgical cycle, are of course rooted in the ancient Judean temporal consciousness.

While the Gospel of John relies primarily on temporal markers to configure its narrative, 2 Maccabees does not possess any one device that it relies on more than others for the temporal configuration of its event structure. Instead, 2 Maccabees utilizes a variety of configurational devices that reinforce the amalgamated feel of the narrative. Even though the large number of temporal coordinates might appear to suggest a narrative from which an absolute chronology could be built, most of the coordinates are within embedded letters and are thus detached from direct correlation of the narrative world of the historiography except as indicators of terminus ante quem. However, even with two temporal coordinates embedded within the narrative of 2 Maccabees, the epitome’s use of temporal markers and other relative configurational devices prevents the necessary framework for the construction of an absolute chronology (thereby ensnaring modern readers in the fallacy of assumed time). Because 2 Maccabees uses more than a few relative temporal devices, the two events that contain the two temporal coordinates are discrete events, temporally segregated from the remainder of the narrative. While it may be possible for a modern reader to connect each of these two events to an absolute platform, it is not possible to connect these events absolutely—there is no straight line—with the other events in the narrative, each of which exists in their own relative temporal dimension.

6. Conclusions

The rise of historical criticism, empowered by absolute chronology, has had a mildly deleterious effect on the study of biblical texts such as 2 Maccabees and John in the modern era. In contrast to Diodorus Siculus’ beliefs about local and universal histories, all attempts at historiography are frustrated by temporal complexities—turning life occurrences into narrated events, and tying narrated events into serial stories. What modern readers perceive as discontinuities in biblical literature are often reasonable narrative progressions in relative time for ancient writers. Die chronologische Unordnung of these texts are a disorder imposed primarily by a modern chronological mindset, as neither of these texts possess a temporal configuration that could support an absolute chronological analysis. In light of this, we have considered how the creators of the Gospel of John and 2 Maccabees utilized narrative devices to create dimensions of relative time that exist within the narrative worlds of these texts. These relativistic devices—not absolute dates—are how these ancient writers configure their narratives and by which they authenticate the meanings of their full event structure (“story”), from creator to audience. Absolute chronology, while extremely useful in many ways, nevertheless fails to help modern readers understand and appreciate these ancient texts as they were heard and read by their first hearers and readers. The events in these ancient narratives are by necessity pulled from the life experiences of sources and creators, then truncated and tailored to fit only the story in which we today find them (cf. Trussler 1996, pp. 558–59). Questions raised by absolute chronology are ultimately foreign to the thinking and temporal consciousness of ancient people. Recognizing the sophistication with which ancient texts create a variety of configurational strategies in their historiographical creations points to a renewed possibility of interpreting these texts on their own terms, and in their own time.