and they are among the few pre-Christian figures to appear on the calendar of saints' days. A cult to the Maccabean martyrs flourished in Antioch, the former capital of the Seleucids; Augustine of Hippo found it ironic and fitting that the city that named Antiochus IV now revered those he persecuted. The one awkward aspect was that the martyrs had died upholding Jewish Law in an era when many Christians felt that the Law of Moses was not merely obsolete, but actively harmful. Christian authors generally downplayed the Jewishness of the martyrs, treating them as proto-Christians instead. Controversy in the Reformation era 2 Maccabees was in a position of being an official part of the canon, but as a deuterocanonical work and thus subtly lesser than the older scriptures during the early 1500s. Josse van Clichtove, in his work The Veneration of Saints, cited 2 Maccabees as support for the idea of dead saints interceding for the salvation of the living; in Chapter 15, during a dream vision, both the earlier high priest Onias III and the prophet Jeremiah are said to pray for whole of the people. He also cited 2 Maccabees as support for prayers for the dead, the reverse case of the living praying for the salvation of souls suffering in purgatory. The book became controversial due to opposition from Martin Luther and other reformers during the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s. Luther had a very high opinion of scripture, but precisely because of this, he wished for the canon to be strict. He would eventually demote the deuterocanonical works to "apocrypha"; still useful to read and part of the 1534 version of the Luther Bible, but set aside in their own separate section and not accepted as a sound basis for Christian doctrine. Luther had several complaints. One was that it was an abridgment of another work, rather than a single divinely inspired author. Another was a general preference for using the Hebrew Bible as the basis for the Old Testament, rather than the Latin Vulgate or the Greek Septuagint. Another was with the prevailing Catholic interpretation and use of one story: that of Judas making a "sin offering" of silver after some of his troops were slain and found with idols, so that the dead might be delivered from their sin. This passage was used as an example of the efficacy of monetary indulgences paid