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)
