and sought allies where they could be found. Reliability as history 1 Maccabees is the most extensive source of information on events in Judea from 175 to 135. It has traditionally been considered highly trustworthy, although it is to some extent the "official" version of history according to the Hasmoneans and from the Maccabean point of view. Bezalel Bar-Kochva praises it as among the better military historiography of the period. He argues that the author was likely an eyewitness to at least some of the battles described given his great accuracy and plausibility in describing terrain and troop movements, and was able to obtain firsthand accounts from others in interviews. He also cites the fact that it makes various "admissions against interest" such as openly describing rebel military defeats, unlike 2 Maccabees which obscures or omits such matters. Jonathan A. Goldstein argues that the book was not imitative of older scriptures merely in linguistic style, but also in content; that is, the author adjusted or invented events to make them fit Biblical parallels better. Canonicity Pope Damasus I's Council of Rome in 382, if the Gelasian Decree is correctly associated with it, issued a biblical canon identical with the list given at Trent including the two books of Maccabees. Origen of Alexandria (253), Augustine of Hippo (), Pope Innocent I (405), Synod of Hippo (393), the Council of Carthage (397), the Council of Carthage (419), the Apostolic Canons, the Council of Florence (1442) and the Council of Trent (1546) listed the first two books of Maccabees as canonical. During the Protestant Reformation, the book (along with other books in the Catholic deuterocanon) was classed as biblical apocrypha in Protestantism, material useful for background but not canonical. The 1643 Westminster Confession says that the books "are of no authority in the Church of God, not to be any otherwise approved", for example. The book was never included in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh and is not canonical in Judaism. Later Jewish leaders thought poorly of the rule of the Hasmonean dynasty for several reasons, and a document so openly celebratory of them was problematic. Even in stories set during the Maccabean period, references to Judas by name were explicitly removed to avoid hero-worship of the Hasmonean line. Influence The Jewish historian Josephus of the 1st century AD almost certainly read 1 Maccabees. He extensively uses the first thirteen chapters of it