3 - Functionality and Identity of the ‘Veil of the Temple’

Summary

Introduction

S. Jellicoe insisted that it is ‘primarily to the Greek Old Testament that we should look … for the theological significance of the terminology of the New (Testament)’. As we have seen, however, lexical evidence for which veil Matthew had in mind in his velum scissum, let alone what is meant by it, in itself is inconclusive since the LXX knows three curtains it translates καταπέτασμα. While syntactical evidence (the locative genitive) is much more helpful in identifying which of these curtains the evangelist had in mind, it is neither the only nor the most decisive means by which such a verdict regarding the identity of Matthew's veil and the significance of its rending can or should be made. As we have seen in the introduction, one of the few points of agreement among scholars who address the rending of the veil is that whatever else it means, it surely refers to the cessation of the veil's function. How did it function? If Matthew's term refers to the inner veil before the holy of holies, D. Senior claims it ‘signified the locus of God's presence at the heart of Israel's cultic life’ and ‘served as a wall of separation between the people and Yahweh, the “wholly other”’. C. Meyers says ‘it guarded the … Ark, from the profanity of contact with humans’. S. Motyer says it ‘is taken to embody the whole religious system of the Temple’.