Jason of Cyrene
Jason of Cyrene () was a Hellenistic Jew who lived around the middle of the second century BCE (fl. ~160–110 BCE?). He is the author of a five-volume history of the Maccabean Revolt and its preceding events (~178–160 BCE), which subsequently became a lost work. His history was preserved indirectly in an abridgment by an unknown Egyptian Jew, the book of 2 Maccabees, which was eventually included in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Jewish scriptures. 2 Maccabees was eventually recognized as a deuterocanonical book included in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian biblical canon. Life Jason of Cyrene is an unknown Hellenistic Jew. While Greek-speaking, he still favored the rebel Maccabees in their revolt against the Seleucid Empire; the rebels included both traditionalist Aramaic-speaking Jews as well as Greek-speaking Jews who opposed the anti-Jewish decrees of King Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Cyrene, Libya in the Hellenistic era was a province at the western edge of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, which also included Egypt and Cyprus. Diaspora Jews had spread through Ptolemaic lands in this era, so him being from Cyrene is plausible, and the long-standing Ptolemaic rivalry with the Seleucids that had resulted in the Syrian Wars would have meant that