High priest
Jason
He obtained the high priesthood by bribing Antiochus IV, founded a gymnasium in Jerusalem and sought to turn the city into a polis called Antioch.
What the sources say
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4 statements
The most powerful office in Judean society was that of high priest, which seems to have been restricted to the Oniad family. A priest named Jason ousted Onias III by bribing Antiochus; years later, Menelaus offered a bribe of his own, paid out of the Temple treasury, which outraged the population of Jerusalem.
Jason founded a gymnasium in Jerusalem, a Greek institution where young men were trained in body and mind. According to 2 Maccabees, the young men began wearing Greek hats. That they trained naked is an inference by historians, since the sources do not say so; 1 Maccabees mentions epispasm, a technique for concealing circumcision.
Jason wanted to turn Jerusalem into a polis, with all the privileges that status brought (rights for its male inhabitants, the minting of coins), and even wished to give it the name Antioch, after Antiochus.
Contested interpretation
When Jason and Menelaus brought in Greek institutions, they may not have been abandoning tradition, as 1 and 2 Maccabees allege, or pursuing an aggressive religious reform, as Bickerman argued. They may simply have been trying, for practical reasons, to raise Jerusalem's status in a Hellenized world.