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PREFACE
On 7 February 1999 I was present for the first time at an episcopal
Liturgy of the Orthodox Church. It was a revelation.
For many years I had been trying to reconstruct the world of the
Jerusalem temple, especially of the first temple, and as I was writing
my first book, The Older Testament (1987), I began to realize
that this was where the roots of Christianity lay. How the older faith
had survived was not clear. In the Qumran community was one possibility:
another was that it had never really disappeared, and that
reconstructions of the second temple period had been inaccurate when
they presented the Jerusalem ‘establishment’ as the norm
for both Palestine and the Diaspora. The problem of locating both Philo
and the Qumran texts within this picture had been a warning of changes
to come. Scholars are now reconstructing a whole variety of ‘Judaisms’
to try to explain, for example, why 1 Enoch, found at Qumran,
does not quote from the Hebrew Scriptures and has, in its earlier
strata, no place for Moses.
It is no longer wise to consider one form of Judaism as ‘orthodoxy’
and all others as sectarian, it being recognized that there was a huge
difference between Rabbinic Judaism and the varieties of the faith in
the second temple period. The Sages had not been preserving the older
ways but creating a substantially new system after the destruction of
the temple in 70 CE. Part of their method was defining the canon, but
the books excluded from that Hebrew canon were preserved by Christian
scribes. We now know that even the text of the Hebrew Scriptures was
different before the advent of Christianity. It is becoming
increasingly clear that the Old Testament which should accompany the New
Testament is not the one usually included in the Bible. An
exploration of the ‘surface’ of the Old Testament is no
longer enough, nor can ‘canonical’ texts continue to enjoy
a privileged position.
I began to realize that all the major elements of Christianity had been
part of the earlier temple tradition: incarnation, atonement, covenant,
resurrection and the Messiah. Resurrection, for example, had been the
apotheosis known to the ancient high priesthood, as I argued in
The Risen LORD.
The Jesus of History as the Christ of Faith
(1996). The Trinitarian faith of the Church had grown from the older
Hebrew belief in a pluriform deity, and so the earliest Christian
exegetes had not been innovators when they understood the LORD
of the Hebrew Scriptures as the Second God, the Son of El Elyon. The One
whom they recognized in Jesus had been the LORD,
and so they declared ‘Jesus is the LORD.’
This was the subject of my book The Great Angel. A Study of Israel’s
Second God (1992). Monotheism, in the way that it is usually
understood by biblical scholars, had been a consequence of changes made
in the seventh century BCE, and was not part of the older faith.
Whilst writing The Revelation of Jesus Christ (2000) it became
clear to me how little of Christian origins could be illuminated by some
approaches that are currently fashionable in both Old and New Testament
scholarship. Premises are unquestioned, accepted because they were
proposed by an influential person, or because they seem to work in other
disciplines. We shall never solve the problems by using the methods that
created them. Until my experience of the Orthodox Liturgy, I had
restricted my own researches to ancient texts. My own confessional
background being Bible-based rather than Liturgy-based, it had never
occurred to me that Liturgy could be relevant to my quest. My
introduction to Liturgy opened up a whole new world, or rather, showed
me a world that I already knew very well!
I was invited by the Centre of Advanced Religious and Theological
Studies (CARTS) in Cambridge to devise a research project in this area.
This I did, and ‘The Temple Roots of the Christian Liturgy’
was set up. After a few months, however, I withdrew, when I discovered
that the extent of my contribution to the project was being
misrepresented in favour of someone else. The previously unpublished
material in this book is what I had prepared to seed this project: ‘The
Angel Priesthood’, ‘The Holy of Holies’, ‘The
Veil as the Boundary’, ‘Wisdom, the Queen of Heaven’,
‘Temple and Timaeus’ and ‘Text and Context’.
This is all essentially work in progress, mapping possibilities; there
is much more to do, which I had hoped would be the work of the CARTS
project. The remainder of the book is articles relevant to Temple and
High Priesthood previously published elsewhere, before I discovered the
Liturgy. I should like to thank the editors of the Scottish Journal
of Theology and The Journal of Higher Criticism for
permission to reprint.
Margaret Barker
St Thomas, 2002
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