Pesahim 54a: “Seven things were created before the world: the Torah, Repentance, the Garden of Eden, Gehenom (hell), the Divine Throne, the Temple, and the Name of the Messiah.”
It is not uncommon for Unitarian apologists who reject the personal
pre-existence of Jesus to cite this source from the Babylonian Talmud to
provide evidence that Jesus’ “pre-existence” is to be understood notionally,
but not personally. One “biblical Unitarian” apologist wrote the following:
According to the Jewish
understanding of that time, several things “pre-existed” with God before
creation. These included Torah, Paradise, the name of Messiah, Gehenna, throne
of glory, the temple and repentance (Pesachim 54a.) Their pre-existence was understood
to be, not literal, but ideal or notional.
With respect to the temple, in various Jewish texts and traditions, there
was an actual heavenly temple, not merely existing notionally in the plan of
God, of which the earthly temple was mirrored. Consider the following:
A Talmudic story tells
that when God told Moses to build the Tabernacle, God announced that actually
he did not need the Tabernacle for himself, because his Temple in heaven had
already been built before the world was created. However, because of his love
for his people, God consented to leave his Upper Temple and come down to dwell
among them. A legend that expands on Exodus 25:9-40 relates that the plan of
the terrestrial Tabernacle was shown to Moses by God, and later, when the time
came to build the Temple, God showed its plan to David, who passed it on to
Solomon (1 Chronicles 28:11-21). Thus, the terrestrial Temples reflect the
celestial one. Isaiah 6:1-6, where the prophet described his encounter with
God, who was sitting on the throne surrounded by angels, supplies details of
either the terrestrial temple, as claimed by several sages, or the celestial
one, according to others. God’s high throne in Isaiah’s vistion is believed to
have been the celestial throne, placed exactly above God’s throne in the
terrestrial Temple, that is, above the Ark of the Covenants (Tanhuma Vayakhel
7). (Rivka Gonen, Contested Holiness: Jewish, Muslim and Christian
Perspectives on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem [Jersey City, N.J.: KTAV
Publishing House, Inc: 2003], 119-20).
Such should force one to be cautious to engage in an either-or mentality vis-à-vis
the nature of the Messiah’s pre-existence in ancient texts; it can be both
personal and notional, not just one or another, as seen with the “pre-existence”
of the temple.