Sunday, December 10, 2023

Matthew Patrick Barber on the Attitude of John, Paul, and the Epistle to the Hebrews towards the Temple

  

The Gospel of John contains a number of passages that have been read as portraying Jesus’s negative attitude toward the temple. The sense of Jesus’s temple action in John 2 is perhaps the most discussed. The statement “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19 has led many to believe that John depicts Jesus as renouncing the temple’s legitimacy. Ernst Haenchen writes of the scene: “Jesus rejects . . . the delusion that man can buy God’s favor with sacrifices.” Other passages in the Gospel would seem to confirm John’s anti-cultic bent.

 

For example, John 4 has Jesus tell the Samarian woman that true worship will take place “in spirit and truth,” occurring neither at Jerusalem nor at the place reverenced by Samaritans at Gerizim (John 4:23). Andreas Köstenberg claims that this means, “no longer must worshippers come to God by sacrificing in the temple; they can simply approach God through prayer in Jesus’s name.” Others hold that John presents Jesus as celebrating Passover in accord with the Essene calendar, thereby rejecting the Jerusalem cult. These readings, however, are not convincing.

 

Jesus’s statement equating the temple with his body in John 2 is explicitly interpreted by the narrator as referring to his own resurrection (John 2:21-22). According to the evangelist, the saying is not about the destruction of the Jerusalem sanctuary. More significantly, nowhere in the account does Jesus explicitly renounce the temple’s validity. On the contrary, his approval of the temple is implied Jesus refers to it as “my Father’s house [ton oikon tou patros mou]” (John 2:16). His disciples even attribute his actions to his “zeal” [zēlos]” for the temple (John 2:17). If anything, this suggests that Jesus’s action was remembered as expressing his devotion to the sanctuary.

 

The other supposed anti-cultic passages in John should also be reconsidered. While the statement in John 4 speaks of a coming day involving worship in spirit and in truth. Jesus does not declare that worshipping in Jerusalem is itself wrong or illegitimate. Rather, Jesus explains that, unlike the Samaritans who worship at Gerizim, the Jews do not worship in ignorance: “You worship what you do know. We worship what we know, because salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22). This cannot be used to support the position that Jesus maintains that the Jerusalem cult is invalid.

 

In short, there is no unambiguous evidence in John that Jesus opposed the worship in the temple or departed from the calendar followed by the priests. Jesus repeatedly goes to Jerusalem to participate in cultic celebrations of the Jewish festivals at the same time the masses do (e.g., John 2:14; 7:10, 14; 10:22). John, therefore, cannot be sued to prove that Jesus opposed the temple worship. (Michael Patrick Barber, The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology, and the Gospel of Matthew [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023], 48-49)

 

 

To be sure, some have used statements by Paul to argue that he thought the Jewish calendar had been abrogated. For example, in Galatians 4, Paul says those who “carefully observe days and months and seasons and years” are in “bondage” (cf. Gal 4:9-10). Yet if Paul is writing to gentile believers, this may reflect his understanding of their particular relationship to the Torah. It might be significant to note that Acts says Paul did not bring a gentile into the temple (Acts 21:29). IN addition, even if Pual believed that obligatory calendar observance had been lifted by the Messiah’s coming, it would not necessarily follow that he taught that all of the temple’s functions had ceased to be valid. Acts 21 would certainly not lend itself to that idea. Furthermore, since elsewhere we discover that Paul oriented his plans around the Jewish calendar (cf. 1 Cor 16:8; cf. Acts 18:21; 20:6), it is difficult to believe he had renounced it altogether. In fact, whether Galatians 4 is speaking of the Jewish calendar is debated. A stronger case for abrogation of the Jewish calendar might be made from Colossians, where the author talks of “questions about food and drink, or with regard to a feast or a new moon or a Sabbath” (Col 2:16). Yet there are difficulties here as well. Paul’s authorship of the letter is famously disputed. In addition, it is debated whether the passage is condemning the notion of keeping Jewish observances or whether it is condemning rigorist ascetics who believe Jewish celebrations are inappropriate (cf. Col 2:18). In short, there is no clear-cut evidence that Paul renounced the temple’s holiness. (Michael Patrick Barber, The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology, and the Gospel of Matthew [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023], 54)

 

 

. . . the epistle to the Hebrews unambiguously affirms that Jesus’s death entails the abrogation of the Levitical cult. Admittedly, this may seem to represent a weakness for my argument. Nonetheless, had Jesus himself articulated the idea that his death would involve the nullification of the Jerusalem cult, it is difficult to explain the reports of the early community’s participation in the temple’s worship. What is more, Hebrews never claims to represent the message of the historical Jesus, but, rather, it presents itself as a post-Easter theological reflection on the significance of the Christ even that goes beyond “the elementary message of Christ” [arches tou Christou]” (Heb 6:1). (Michael Patrick Barber, The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology, and the Gospel of Matthew [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023], 54-55)

 

Heb 2:3 affirms continuity with Jesus’s teaching, but this cannot be said to necessarily involve an affirmation that he taught during his public ministry that the Levitical cult had been rendered obsolete. (Ibid., 55 n. 37)

 

Blog Archive