6 - Jesus and the eschatological Temple

Summary

I have argued in the preceding chapter that Second Temple Jewish attitudes toward the Land and concerns about purity cannot be dissociated from fundamental convictions about the centrality of the Temple. Thus the conclusions reached concerning Jesus' marginalization of Israel's purity and corresponding territorial expectations would seem to imply an analogous stance toward the Temple. If the Temple was ‘the linchpin of Jewish territorialism’, the evidence that Jesus distanced himself from common expectations concerning the Land would seem also to suggest a similar distance from common notions concerning the role of the Temple in the eschaton. Is this the case?

In this chapter, I examine a number of sayings and actions of Jesus concerning the Temple and attempt to show that they are sensible and that the tensions evident in them find resolution within a particular eschatological framework which formed the basis of Jesus' conception of the relationship between the society of the eschaton and life in the present. I wish to argue that Jesus' conviction that the time of fulfilment had arrived was such that he believed that the eschatological Temple should already be functioning. Thus the failure of the standing Temple to be the eschatological Temple stands at the heart of his indictment of the Temple and prompts a conception of the eschatological Temple which drew on sacred traditions quite distinct from those of Jewish restorationism. To these traditions I turn first.