Sunday, December 10, 2023

Michael Patrick Barber on Jesus's Positive Approach to the Temple

  

Traditions Indicating Jesus’s Endorsement of the Temple Cult

 

1.     Jesus speaks of coming judgment due to actions that include shedding blood in the sanctuary
(Matt 23:24-26//Luke 1149-51 [Q?])

2.     Jesus Sends the cleansed leper to the priest and to offer sacrifice
(Matt 8:1-5//Mark 1:40-45//Luke 5:12-16)

3.     Jesus quotes Isaiah 56’s prophecy of an eschatological temple
(Matt 21:13//Mark 11:17//Luke 19:46)

4.     Jesus commends the widow who gives to the temple treasury
(Mark 12:41-44//Luke 21:1-4)

5.     A future desolating sacrilege in the holy place is likened to divine judgment
(Matt 24:15//Mark 13:14; cf. Luke 21:20)

6.     Jesus directs the apostles to prepare the Passover lamb at the Jerusalem temple
(Matt 26:17-19//Mark 14:12-16//Luke 22:7-13; cf. Luke 22:15)

7.     Jesus was in the temple teaching daily
(Matt 26:55//Mark 14:49//Luke 22:53; Luke 19:47; Luke 21:37-38; cf. Matt 21:14; Matt 21:23; Matt 26:55; Mark 12:35; Luke 20:1; John 8:20, 59; 18:20)

8.     Jesus teaches on how to rightly offer sacrifice
(Matt 5:23-24)

9.     Jesus affirms the holiness to the temple and its sacrifices
(Matt 23:16-21)

10.  Jesus’s parents presented Him as a child in the Temple and offered the purification sacrifice
(Luke 2:22-25)

11.  Jesus’s family went up to the temple to keep Passover annually
(Luke 2:41)

12.  The child Jesus identifies the temple as “my Father’s house”
(Luke 2:49)

13.  Jesus sends ten lepers to be declared clean by priests after healing them
(Luke 17:2-19)

14.  Jesus describes a tax collector and a pharisee praying at the temple
(Luke 18:10-14)

15.  Jesus visits the temple at Passover time
(John 2:14; cf. 2:23)

16.  Jesus goes into the temple and encounters a man He healed
(John 5:14)

17.  Jesus goes to the temple for the Feast of Tabernacles
(John 7:10, 14; cf. John 7:37)

18.  Jesus attends the temple at the Feast of Dedication
(John 10:22)

19.  Jesus’s “Triumphal Entry” is connected with crowds going to Jerusalem to keep Passover
(John 12:2-13)

20.  Jesus meets Greeks going up to worship at the temple at Passover
(John 12:20-21)

21.  Jesus’s final meal is connected to the liturgical feast of Passover in Jerusalem
(John 13:1-2) (Michael Patrick Barber, The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology, and the Gospel of Matthew [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023], 46-48)

 

 

According to one view, the predictions of the temple’s destruction were invented by the author of Mark. The vast majority of scholars, however, have found this unlikely. Consider the charge made at Jesus’s trial in Mark: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple [naon] made by hands, and within three days I will build another not made by hands’” (Mark 14:58). Mark’s discomfort with attributing this exact saying to Jesus is undeniable. He explicitly tells us that the witnesses “gave false testimony [epseudomartyroun]” (Mark 14:57). This being said, because Mark likely thinks the other charges and mocking derisions involved in Jesus’s passion—such as the title “king of the Jews”—ironically profess a truth, he probably detects some truth in the charge concerning the temple. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the evangelist expects the reader to connect the charge about the temple to Jesus’s resurrection. Up until this point in Mark’s narrative, Jesus has repeatedly used the language of “three days” to refer to his future act of rising from the dead (cf. Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34). Indeed, when the Fourth Gospel repeats a similar saying (John 2:19), it emphasizes that Jesus was talking about his resurrection and not the physical temple (John 2:21). Still, John makes it clear that the connection to the resurrection was only made after the Easter experience of the community. Likewise, Mark gives no indication that Jesus’s original hearers connected the supposed saying of the false witnesses (Mark 14:48) to resurrection imagery. For them, the saying simply concerns the temple. The charge, therefore, indicates that Jesus’s earlier prediction of the coming destruction of the temple (Mark 13:2) had become known outside of Jesus’s circle of disciples. Nevertheless, Mark’s handling of their report indicates he is uncomfortable with the way it has been formulated. Perhaps this is because Jesus’s earlier statement about the downfall of the sanctuary never involves the claim that he himself would destroy it. (Michael Patrick Barber, The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology, and the Gospel of Matthew [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023], 85)

 




Blog Archive