Excerpts from the Introduction
The invitation to deliver the Cardinal Hume Lectures for 2003 gave me
the opportunity to pause and look around my work. For many years I have
been absorbed in a quest to rediscover the meaning of the temple, and as
I have accumulated material and drawn tentative conclusions, I have
published them before moving on to the next phase. Information has come
from many sources, not just from the work of my fellow biblical
scholars, and I have often been reminded how far I have travelled (or
even strayed!) from the mainstream. In these lectures I describe
something of the view from this point on the journey, and speculate
about what may lie over the horizon, and how this could affect our
perception of Christian origins.
One thing has become quite clear: the original gospel message was about
the temple, not the corrupted temple of Jesus’ own time, but the
original temple which had been destroyed some six hundred years earlier.
All that remained were memories, and the hope that one day the true
temple and all it represented would be restored. Jesus was presented as
the high priest from the first temple; Melchizedek returned to his
people. The restoration of the first temple was the hope of the first
Christians, and to set them, their writings and their presentation of
Jesus anywhere else than in the temple setting distorts what they were
preaching and misrepresents the original gospel. The Book of Revelation
is the key to understanding early Christianity. Because it is steeped in
temple imagery, most people find it an opaque and impossible text, but
people who thought in this ‘temple’ manner also wrote and
read the rest of the New Testament. If we read it in any other way, we
are reading our own meaning into the texts and are not connecting with
the original teachings of the Church.
…
The earliest Christian writings assume a world view
and a setting which can only have come from a temple – and not the
actual temple of their own time. Since the Book of Revelation describes
the heavenly throne and the heavenly court of angels and elders, this
must have been a memory of the holy of holies in the older Jerusalem
temple, furnished with a great golden throne. When the Book of
Revelation was written, the holy of holies had been empty for centuries…
When very similar material was identified in the hymns found among the
Dead Sea Scrolls, it became clear that these were temple scenes with
angel priests attending the heavenly throne. People were still singing
about a temple that had ceased to exist, or rather, had ceased to have a
physical existence in Jerusalem.
• • •
Jesus was described and remembered as a great high priest (Heb.4.14),
the Melchizedek raised up by the power of an indestructible life
(Heb.7.16) who had offered the final atonement sacrifice to fulfil and
supersede the temple rites (Heb.9.1-14). Melchizedek’s priesthood
was more ancient than Aaron’s, and the Letter to the Hebrews
argues that the Melchizedek priesthood is superior to the Aaronic
(Heb.7.11-19). Now Aaron was the brother of Moses, but Melchizedek was
priest in Jerusalem in the time of Abraham. Melchizedek represented
the older faith. The Jerusalem kings had been priests in the manner
of Melchizedek (Ps.110), but there had been no place for an anointed
king, a Messiah, in the religion of Moses. Deuteronomy set strict limits
on the role and powers of the king (Deut.17.14-20), but these rules had
been elaborated with the wisdom of hindsight, and inserted after the
demise of the monarchy. Paul knew where the roots of Christianity lay;
he argued that Christianity looked to the faith of Abraham (and by
implication Melchizedek), and so was rooted earlier than the Law given
to Moses (e.g. Rom.4).
Since the discovery of the Melchizedek text among the Dead Sea Scrolls
(11Q13), we can see the significance of this claim that Jesus was
Melchizedek. One damaged line of the text seems to describe teachers who
have been kept hidden and secret, and the whole text clearly celebrates
the return of the divine Melchizedek to rescue his own people from the
power of the Evil One. Melchizedek was expected to appear exactly when
Jesus began his public ministry, and the description of the role of
Melchizedek is exactly how Jesus is presented in the gospels. Jesus as
Melchizedek was formerly thought to be peripheral to the understanding
of his ministry, something claimed by the early Christians because it
was known that Jesus had no family claim to the priesthood of Aaron.
Jesus as Melchizedek can now be seen as the key to the New Testament,
and the implication of this is that Melchizedek’s temple was the
world of the first Christians.
• • •
The Hebrew Scriptures as we know them were preserved, edited and
transmitted by the priests and scribes of the second temple, the very
people whom the ‘long exile’ tradition condemned as impure
apostates who had altered the Scriptures. ‘Sinners will alter and
pervert the words of righteousness in many ways… and lie and practise
great deceit and write books concerning their words’ (1 Enoch 104.10;
1 Enoch 98.15-99.1 is similar). This Enoch text was regarded as
Scripture by the early Christians, and so they will have known the
accusation that the tradition was being altered…
…
The key event was the great purge in the time of King
Josiah at the end of the seventh century BCE,
when everything that the Deuteronomists deemed impure was removed from
the temple and destroyed ( 2 Kings 23 ).
This is not an objective account, and it is easy to see that most
of what King Josiah removed were the religious artefacts and practices
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and almost all the kings in Jerusalem. They
had survived in the land until the sixth century BCE –
sacred trees, pillars, places outside Jerusalem to offer sacrifice – but
King Josiah removed everything that did not conform to the Moses
religion as set out in Deuteronomy. [8]
In other words, the ‘Moses’ religion with the ten
commandments and the Aaron priesthood did not finally replace the
Abrahamic faith and the Melchizedek priesthood until just before the
first temple was destroyed. (It is hard to find any indication in
the early chapters of Isaiah, written in the eighth century BCE,
that the prophet knew about Moses and the ten commandments.)
• • •
Recovering the world of the original temple is not a simple matter.
There is no single text which reveals the lost world and proves beyond
any doubt that what I am proposing was the case. What is beyond
doubt is the unsatisfactory and even unreasonable account of ‘New
Testament background’ which has prevailed for so long. It has
been assumed that rabbinic texts from a period long after the New
Testament could be used to illustrate the New Testament situation, but
that the writings of Philo, a Jewish contemporary of Jesus in Egypt,
were suspect because they were so different from the rabbinic texts…
…There was no fixed canon of Hebrew Scripture until after the
advent of Christianity, and there is good reason to suspect that the
familiar Hebrew canon was established in reaction to Christianity.
Even the Hebrew text from which the English Bible is translated was
fixed at the end of the first century CE
and excluded the version(s) which the first Christians (and the Dead Sea
community) had used. Other pre-Christian texts preserved the voices of
the long exile and of hostility to the second temple, yet these texts
were only preserved by Christian scribes. Jews were forbidden to read
them, and the scrolls of the ‘minim’ (heretics) had to be
burned even if they contained the sacred Name.[12]
This explains what happened to much of the evidence…
• • •
The temple tradition, once it has been identified, is clear in the
Gospels themselves. The role of the royal high priest (in the older
temple this would have been the anointed king), for example, was to
carry away the sin and uncleanness of the people so that they could be
restored within the bonds of the covenant. The clearest picture of this
is in Isaiah 53. It is no coincidence that this is one of the most
frequently cited texts in the New Testament. The royal high priest was
the great angel in human form, the Man, who passed between heaven and
earth. The vision of Daniel 7 is frequently cited or assumed in the New
Testament, the human figure ascending with clouds to his enthronement.
The royal high priest was born as son of God in the holy of holies.
Psalm 110 (damaged in the Hebrew but readable in the Greek) describes
this process and is the other most frequently cited text in the New
Testament. The two temple rituals originally exclusive to the high
priests were carrying blood into the holy of holies on the Day of
Atonement and eating the most holy Shewbread on the Sabbath. These were
combined to become the Christian Eucharist.
The quest for the temple is also, in a sense, a quest for the underlying
or original meaning of some Old Testament texts. One of the curious
facts about this investigation is that a high proportion of the relevant
Hebrew texts is now either missing from the current Hebrew even though
it was known in the pre-Christian Dead Sea Scroll texts, or unreadable
in the current Hebrew and has to be reconstructed from the Greek. This
cannot be coincidence. Where Christian writings quote a sequence of
scriptural texts – as in Hebrews 1 – we cannot assume that the ideas
expressed were a Christian innovation, that the texts were being used
out of context in order to dress new ideas decently in scripture…
It is beyond doubt that the faith of the temple became Christianity.
Images and practices that most Christians take for granted such as
priesthood, the shape of a traditional church building, or the imagery
of sacrifice and atonement are all obviously derived from the temple. By
reconstructing the world of the older faith it can be shown that
Invocation of the divine Presence, Incarnation, Resurrection, Theosis
(the human becoming divine), the Mother of God and the self-offering of
the Son of God were also drawn from the temple. The gospel as it was
first preached by Jesus, and as it was developed and lived by the early
Church, concerned the restoration of the true temple.
This explains how Christian doctrine was able to develop so quickly; it
was the expression of a long established set of beliefs in the light of
the life and work of Jesus…
8 This was
first set out by J. van Seters in ‘The Religion of the Patriarchs
in Genesis’, Biblica 61 (1980) pp. 220-33.
12 Babylonian Talmud
Gittin 45b; translation in J. Epstein (ed.), The Babylonian
Talmud (35 vols, London, Soncino Press, 1935–48). |
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