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)
