Andrew,

you write, “To suggest that we now suffer according to the pattern of Christ in order to enter into his glory just seems patently absurd - if I have understood you correctly. We do not suffer according to the pattern of Christ’s sufferings, which is a pattern of suffering at the hands of a pagan enemy on account of his faithfulness to YHWH.”

Actually, Jesus suffered at the hands of his own people, and only through their rejection, he was handed over to the pagan Romans. If by ‘we’ you mean 20th - 21st century Western Christianity, I would agree that martyrdom for the faith is merely a memory (with important excpetions, e.g., Jim Eliot, et al.). But this is a very narrow slice of the Christian pie, isn’t it? Christians suffer a similar fate as their Lord all over the world, even as we speak. The problem is, as i see it, your metanarrative isn’t broad enough. You delimit the scope of the NT to the first 5 centuries or so of the Roman Empire (except, it would seem, for the eschatological hope of ‘new creation’ - which, for this reason, i would argue, entails the entire history and destiny of the church…)

You write, “John, however, in attempting to imagine something utterly different, an ultimate eschatological horizon, uses the language in a rather different way.”

And here i would argue that John is not re-imagining (if you don’t like ‘reforging’) the language of Isaiah, but sees in his vision the fulfillment of the prophet’s words - indeed, the fulfillment of all that the prophets had spoken (cf. Peter’s expectations, Ac.3:21).

You write:

“It doesn’t make sense to me to read Ezekiel 37 or Hosea 6:2 literally”

And yet the gospel writer employs Hosea 6:2 as a prophetic expectation of Messiah’s resurrection from the dead. It is no doubt metaphorical of Israel’s ‘resurrection’, and yet, precisely because of that perhaps (given the role and relationship of Messiah with regard to national Israel, esp. as evidenced in Isaiah), it points to a literal resurrection from the dead of Messiah. As we see in the messianic psalms, what is poetic w/regard to the psalmist’s experience often becomes the ‘literal’ with regard to the Christ (e.g., Ps.22:16).

You write: ” It seems to me likely that the experience of the Maccabean martyrs had something to do with the emergence of the hope of a personal victory over death.”

What of the faith of Job and the prophecy of Daniel? What of Jesus’ logic against the Sadduccess? Were these all engendered by the Maccabean revolt? What of the posthumous hope of the psalmists and the absolute claims regarding the fate of the righteous in the proverbs? It seems arbitrary to me to nail this hope upon the experiences of the Maccabean martyrs…