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8 The Temple and Jesus the High Priest in the New Testament Harold W. Attridge Early Christians display a variety of attitudes toward the Temple of Jerusalem and its priests, some taking it for granted, some using it as a multifaceted symbol, some considering it to be a relic of the past to be replaced by the new reality of the Christian community. Attitudes toward the Temple were no doubt affected by its destruction in 70 ce as well as by the tensions that developed between believers, both Jew and Gentile, in the Messianic status of Jesus, and traditional Jews who did not share that belief. Our access to what early Christians thought about the Temple is provided mainly through the writings of the New Testament. Apocryphal materials and historical accounts add a few interesting tidbits, and we shall look at some of them here, but they generally reflect later realities. Using these writings requires some caution, since many tell stories about the past, including the life of Jesus or the experience of the early church. How much of that story is an accurate reflection of early belief and practice and how much is part of the theological imagination of the writer is not always clear. This paper will attempt to trace the attitudes of Jesus and his followers chronologically, from the earthly ministry of Jesus to the beginning of the second century, with some attention to later developments. The Temple and its Priests in the Words and Deeds of Jesus The sayings of Jesus, though redacted and shaped by the imagination of later generations of Christians, contain tantalizing bits of information. Some of his sayings seem to take the Temple for granted as a holy place where certain kinds of religious transactions usually take place. Thus, Jesus admonishes one 213 who is angry while on the way to bring a sacrifice to the altar, presumably in the Temple, to leave his sacrificial business aside until he resolves his personal relationship (Matt. 5:23-24). Similarly, in a story of the healing of a leper, Jesus tells the man healed to go, make the appropriate offering, and show himself to the priest (Matt. 8:4; Mark 1:44; Luke 5:14). In materials such as this, the Temple and its role in the life of Israel are assumed. It is, however, noteworthy how few of these sayings there are. Stories about Jesus and the Temple, especially in the last days of his ministry, are a prominent part of the Gospel tradition, but we need to assess those in the context of the narrative theology of the evangelists. There is another saying about the Temple attributed to Jesus in several slightly different forms that merits special attention. All three of the Synoptic Gospels report that in his last week in Jerusalem Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple, not one stone of which would stand on another (Matt. 24:2; Mark 13:2; Luke 21:6). Scholars have long debated whether this saying, in some form or other, is an authentic prediction of the historical Jesus or a product of later Christian prophecy, perhaps uttered originally at the time when the Roman emperor Gaius attempted to have his statue placed in the Temple, or perhaps even later, at the time of the Jewish revolt against Rome.1 We know from Josephus of the presence of at least one other prophet active at that time who predicted that the Temple would fall.2 That Jesus of Nazareth, some years earlier, could have made a similar prophecy is not at all improbable. In addition to the prediction of destruction, there is some evidence of a more direct threat against the Temple. Those who accused Jesus before the Sanhedrin alleged, according to the Gospel accounts, that he threatened to destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days (Matt. 26:61; Mark 14:58). Luke’s version of the trial scene (Luke 22:67-71) does not contain this detail, but a version of the charge appears in the narrative about the arrest of the protomartyr Stephen in Acts 6:14. One final saying of Jesus relating to the Temple and to the alleged threat appears in John 2:19, where Jesus tells the crowds in Jerusalem who have reacted to his driving the moneychangers from the Temple: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I shall raise it up again.” Some scholars, such as E.P. Sanders, have found in these sayings and...

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