Yes, Maccabees is, indeed, the inspired Word of God.
Maccabees, along with the Book of Sirach and the entire Old Testament, were a part of the Scriptures at the time of Christ. When Christ referred to the “Scriptures”, it included the entire recognized body of the Old Testament, including Maccabees.
In the second century, the Jews struck Macabees , Sirach, and four other books from their Old Testament, but by that time, Christianity had spread and the Church saw no reason to delete any books from their Old Testament. Indeed, at the Council of Rome in 385 A.D., when the Bible was compiled by the Catholic Church, Macabees was preserved and became a part of what is now known as the Bible.
Macabees is best known as the Book that references Purgatory, without calling it Purgatory. I don’t know why Luther deleted it and the other five books of the O.T. I understand that Luther also wanter to delete the Book of Hebrews and James’ epistle from the New Testament, but changed his mind.
It’s curious that so many fundamentalists stress “the Bible only” when the Protestant Bibles are incomplete. Furthermore, Jesus never said to read the Bible, period. He never said that—listening to fundamentalists, you would think that was Jesus’ first command–as in “Repent, and read your Bibles!”–but Jesus said nothing about reading the Bible and never wrote anything in His life–for real.
Jesus established His Church and commanded his apostles to preach the Good News to the ends of the earth. Of course, that involves the reading and interpretation of Sacred Scripture, but not only the reading and interpretation of Sacred Scripture.
