Book Note | The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred

Eyal Regev. The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

Discussions of the Jerusalem Temple in New Testament scholarship are rife with theological assumptions, and in some cases, supersessionist ideology. Did early Christians uniformly believe that Jesus replaced the Temple in its entirety, including all of the cultic practices therein? Were some of the New Testament writers anti-Temple? Vacating longstanding theological presuppositions, Eyal Regev offers a comprehensive survey of the Temple and Temple practices within the New Testament in his The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred. Regev comes out swinging, and in most cases he succeeds in either disproving or sowing ample skepticism into claims of anti-Temple rhetoric in the literature of the New Testament: “One attitude I have not been able to trace in Second Temple Judaism before 70 CE is a total rejection of the Temple cult as unnecessary” (p. 16).

Regev maps out the primary evidence over the course of nine chapters: the Historical Jesus (ch. 1), Paul (ch. 2), Mark (ch. 3), Q and Matthew (ch. 4), Luke–Acts (ch. 5), John (ch. 6), Revelation (ch. 7), Hebrews (ch. 8), and finally, later 2nd–3rd century Christian views. Chapter 1 tackles the claim that Jesus “takes upon himself the Temple’s role, thereby implicitly making it redundant and forming a counter-Temple movement around himself” (p. 19), a view he attributes in particular to N.T. Wright. Regev examines a handful of episodes in the life of the historical Jesus considered authentic by a majority of scholars, including the Temple cleansing scene, Jesus-sayings about the Temple’s destruction, and the last supper. The cleansing of the Temple is a pivotal episode for Regev, in that Jesus’s actions serve to raise serious questions about his relationship to the Temple. In a clear and strategic fashion, Regev offers nine options for reading Jesus’s Temple cleansing, ultimately making the case that “the money of unrighteous people corrupts or defiles the Temple cult. His protest is not directed against the Temple” (p. 33). Regev makes a similar move with the saying attributed to Jesus, “I will destroy this Temple …” (which, importantly, is couched as “false testimony” in Mark 14:56-58), by demonstrating that, in its proper historical context, “Jesus’s supposed threat … was understood as a political attack on Roman rule” (p. 45).

Chapter 2 sets out alongside a “growing recognition” among scholars to dismantle the idea that “for Paul the Church is the new Temple and that belief in Christ takes the place of the sacrificial cult in the Jerusalem Temple” (p. 54). Regev methodically dissects relevant passages in Paul, Deutero-Paul, and 1 Peter that relate to the Temple and its cultic elements, establishing the boundaries of Paul’s Temple-related metaphors from imaginative theory to cultic practice. For example, in 1 Cor 6:19 when Paul states, “your body is a sanctuary [naos] of the Holy Spirit” (trans. Regev), Paul is not calling for a literal replacement of the Temple, rather Paul is implementing the Temple as an analogy for holiness (p. 58). In speaking to non-Jews, Paul more often uses the Temple as “the source domain of his cultic metaphors” (p. 95).

In Chapters 3 and 4, Regev deals with the Temple in Mark, Q, and Matthew. For Mark especially, a sizeable group of scholars believe the Evangelist views the Temple negatively, and therefore sets Jesus up as its replacement. Some even declare that Mark is “anti-Temple,” taking Mark 13:1-2 (in which Mark’s Jesus remarks “Not one stone will be left here upon another”) as a rejection of the Temple itself. Regev contends that Jesus does not refer directly to the Temple here (i.e., only stones and buildings). Instead, following Lloyd Gaston, Jesus “refers more generally to destruction of the city of Jerusalem” (p. 115). All in all, Regev finds no anti-Temple rhetoric in the Gospel traditions.

Regev’s careful analysis of Temple-related imagery continues in Chapters 5 and 6 with Luke–Acts and John. A major contribution of Regev’s study is its differentiation between criticism of the Temple and complete rejection of it. His treatment of Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 is representative. To avoid making sweeping claims from a single verse like Acts 7:48 (“Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands”), Regev advises readers (1) to consider the broader context of Luke–Acts, which he reads, quite defensibly, as pro-Temple and (2) to consider the literary context of Stephen’s speech, namely as a trial scene with false witnesses (6:12-15). Stephen is critical of the Temple but only insofar as “God should not be confined to a Temple” (p. 178). Likewise, in the Gospel of John, Regev identifies similar exegetical misnomers, such as the apparent “anti-Temple act” of cleansing in John 2:13-22 (p. 200). Jesus’s challenge to the Jerusalem Temple is not a threat to destroy the Temple (p. 204).

In Chapters 7 and 8, Regev encounters a more challenging task with Revelation and the book of Hebrews. As he acknowledges, Revelation 21:22-23 contains the provocative statement that “I saw no Temple in the city” of the new heaven and earth while Hebrews appears to set up an “alternative cult of Christ as high priest” (p. 278). For Revelation, Regev calls upon historical context for assistance: an anti-Roman stance coupled with the traumatic reality of the Temple’s destruction leads John to imagine the New Jerusalem as “the perfect reality and the perfect Temple” (p. 245). For the author of Hebrews, though their work represents “the most critical or even negative attitude toward the Temple in the NT” (p. 279), he suggests the author cares most about Christology, setting up Christianity as “the direct successor of the sacrificial cult, not its suppressor” (p. 283-84). Lastly, in Chapter 9, Regev offers examples of what anti-Temple rhetoric looks like in later centuries. The Epistle of Barnabas, for example, explicitly “equates the Jewish Temple with pagan temples (16:2)” and Justin Martyr claims that “the angels defied God when they taught the Israelites to offer sacrifices, incense, and libations” (p. 297). The later examples are helpful counterbalances to the material surveyed in Chapters 1–8.

Regev’s The Temple in Early Christianity is a highly organized and comprehensive discussion of Temple and Temple-related themes in the New Testament. Regev carefully demonstrates how later ideological assumptions can be poorly retrofitted for New Testament authors, when in fact they might not exist in these texts at all. One lingering question for this reader revolves around the apparent sliding scale between “replacement” and “rejection” of the Temple in early Christianity. For example, if we accept that the Temple is “transformed” in the New Jerusalem into “The Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev 21:22-23; p. 245), does not Revelation veer close to a nascent “replacement” ideology, even if a pro-Temple one? Nonetheless, Regev has handily demonstrated that when scholars make assumptions about certain Temple-related imagery in the NT, or when they conflate the Temple-related imagery between two NT authors, errors abound.

M. John-Patrick O’Connor, PhD is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Louisville Scholar at North Central University. Follow him on Twitter.