Jesus is not a partial, false, or misleading revelation of God, but in Christ the reality of God is made known, where previously this reality was obscured. As Paul describes, the reality veiled by the law remains (2 Cor 3:7–18), as something inherent to Judaism obscures the reality of God, or is “a ministry of death” (3:7). However, “death’s ministry by way of scriptures engraved in stones” according to Paul, “is being abolished” (3:7 DBH). The nature of this “abolishment” (καταργουμένην, or being “wiped out” or “set aside,”) includes the deadly part of the ministry of death. The scriptures are not set aside, but death and killing, which scriptures (apart from Christ) fostered, are abolished – “in the Anointed it is abolished” (3:14). Paul describes passage from the ministry of death focused on the scriptures, to the ministry of Christ, who removes the veil and provides a new interpretive principle of life and Spirit. Which raises the question of Christ’s relationship to Judaism.
Jesus is Jewish and thoroughly situated in Judaism, and yet his teaching and life are interpreted by the Jews as an attack on Judaism and particularly an attack on the temple. The accusation against him at his trial involves his action and teaching in regard to the temple and that he claims equality with God in forgiving sins (which is to say the same thing). His association and acceptance of sinners (those beyond the pale of Jewish acceptance), his healing of the same on the sabbath, and his teaching regarding his own kingdom and kingship, struck at both the religious and political power of Judaism summed up in the temple. As E.P. Sanders has written, if Jesus claimed that his followers (the least) would be the greatest in the Kingdom and that he, and not the religious leaders in Israel spoke for God, this was a blow against the religio-political entity constituting Israel.[1] Sanders concludes, “Jesus opposed the scribes and Pharisees during his teaching activity (whether basically or only marginally), but he was killed either because the Romans (perhaps on the advice of the Jerusalem leaders) took him to be a Zealot or because he offended and threatened the Jewish hierarchy by his challenge to the temple.”[2]
His interruption of the temple sacrifices (e.g., Matt. 21:12-13) gets at the heart of both Jesus’ threat and the significance of his death. It is not that Herod’s Temple is an abuse of God’s intended purpose and Jesus hoped to clean up the economy of Herod’s temple, but the fact that the temple was temporary and only symbolic of the reality of God revealed in Christ. Jesus’ interruption of the principal function of the temple, sacrifice, points to the contingent and temporary nature of the institution (evident from the inception of sacrifice). The issue was not primarily money-changers or the selling of animals, as the sacrifices had always included these services.[3] The function of the temple was sacrifice, and Jesus disrupted the purpose of the temple as a sign of his permanent disruption of sacrifice. The temple deals in the death of animals, which did not touch upon the deadly attitude of the human heart, and Jewish response to his interruption of the killing is the motive for killing Jesus.
As Josephus points out, whoever controls the temple controls the Jews: “Whoever was master of these [fortified places] had the whole nation in his power, for sacrifices could not be made without (controlling) these places, and it was impossible for any of the Jews to forgo offering these, for they would rather give up their lives than the worship which they are accustomed to offer God” (47. XV.248).[4] Not only the ruling Jews but the Romans exercised control by maintaining ultimate jurisdiction over the temple and its precincts. As long as the Jews were making sacrifices for the Roman Emperor, goodwill was maintained. But Josephus points to the beginnings of Jewish revolt and ultimate destruction of the temple as arising with a sacrificial crisis. Eleazar persuaded the priests who were then serving “to accept no gift or sacrifice from a foreigner.” Josephus describes the result: “This action laid the foundation of the war with the Romans; for the sacrifices offered on behalf of that nation and the emperor were in consequence rejected. The chief priests and the notables earnestly besought them not to abandon the customary offering for their rulers, but the priests remained obdurate” (BF II.409.f).[5] The discontinuation of sacrifices on behalf of Rome unleashed the violence which would destroy the temple. The sacrificial crisis, in the description of René Girard, was unleashed, fulfilling the threat the Jews felt from Jesus: “If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (Jn. 11:48).
Jesus’ death would hold off Rome for a period, the point made by the high priest, Caiaphas: “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish” (Jn. 11:50), but the deeper meaning was not that Jesus would preserve the temple for another forty years or so, only delaying the inevitable: “Now he did not say this on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but in order that He might also gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (Jn. 11:51-52). In their shortsighted understanding, the Jews understood the Romans were appeased, just as they were, through the continued sacrifices. They would begin to plot Jesus’ death from that day forward, thinking they were saving Israel, when, in fact, their action brings the purposes of the temple and Israel to a conclusion. So, the deadly aspect of the temple is exposed and ended by the murderous plots of its defenders.
Everyone understood Jesus’ action in the temple was symbolic, but it was not the symbolism of clearing (cleansing) the temple of trade, but the symbolism of destruction (the destruction of the temple and its sacrificial system). Jesus makes this clear in John, when he says “destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn. 2:19). Yes, he is talking about himself (the real significance of the temple) but it was clear that temple destruction (obsolescence of the temple, at a minimum) was involved with his identity and his death and resurrection. They killed him as he threatened their sacrifices, which point to their lack of efficacy (the heart was left untouched). Eventually an army would destroy the temple, and it would take nothing less, but Jesus clearly posed this possibility within himself; not so much the literal destruction of the temple, but the relative unimportance of the temple compared to the reality.
The temple is not really the problem, anymore than the law is a problem. Judaism, the law and the temple are adequate, as long as they are understood as having a limited purpose. The early Christian community continued to meet in the temple precincts (Acts 2:46; 3:1) and Paul would even offer a sacrifice in the temple to demonstrate his good standing in Judaism (Acts 21:26). The early Christians did not consider the temple as somehow impure. Their continued association with the temple demonstrates that its symbolic importance is overridden and rendered relatively insignificant, as it did not touch upon the reality of Christ. They could remain Jewish, with all that entailed, as this did not pertain to the deeper and true significance of Christ. Yet, this relativizing of the temple and Judaism seems to have been the problem for the Jews.
The non-Christian Jews did not consider the Christian attitude toward Christ, in comparison to the law and temple, to be quite so harmless. The accusation against Stephen, which Luke notes is false, is that this “man incessantly speaks against this holy place and the Law” (Acts 6:13). An examination of Stephen’s speech, which occasions his stoning, has him pointing out from Scripture (Is. 66:1) that the temple was never to be taken as anything but symbolic (Acts 7:49). This combined with his focus on their rejection of the “Righteous One” sets them over the edge. They kill Stephen as they did Jesus, which he explains is their ancestral habit: “you are doing just as your fathers did. Which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They killed those who had previously announced the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become” (Acts 7:51-52). The temple, the law, and Judaism have not resolved the problem of murder, killing, and death, but aggravate and accentuate the problem. It is a ministry of death which shows itself in the murder of the Messiah, which in Paul’s words, brings this ministry to an end.
The manner of Jesus death on the cross subverts violent sacrifice and replaces it with the nonviolent offering of love, forgiveness, and life, which Paul sums up as the ministry of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:8). Jesus did not absorb the wrath of God but the wrath and violence of men and his defeat of death or his own murder, in the manner of his death and resurrection, makes death as inconsequential as the ministry of death which killed him. It proved death and the covenant with death empty. Death as final, ultimate, eternal, in the world’s sacrificial systems, seemingly provides an “infinite” fulcrum of power to leverage life from others. Jesus explains that prior to him and his kingdom, violence is the primary means of obtaining the kingdom: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matt. 11:12). The days of John the Baptist include all of those days that precede Jesus, so that kingdom building up to this time, whether that of Jews or Gentiles, is violent. As Anthony Bartlett puts it, the violent “are taking over or hijacking God’s kingdom and its meaning. This is the key. Violence as a theme and activity violates the kingdom.”[6]
It is not that Judaism did not contain its own nonviolent sort of kingdom, but this evolving peaceable kingdom was subverted by murderous impulses. According to Bartlett, Jesus’ comparison of John the Baptist to Elijah, numbers even John among the violent, who like Elijah, imagines fire from heaven (consuming the prophets of Baal) is the divine means of establishing the kingdom. Jesus has those sent from John report back that his kingdom is very different from that of the old ministry of death: “Go and report to John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. ‘And blessed is he who does not take offense at Me’” (Matt. 11:4-7). Jesus’ peaceable, healing, inclusive ministry to the poor and outcasts may be grounds for even John to take offense. “Thus, the problem about accepting Jesus is the radically changed code he offered – forgiveness and nonviolence, and each entirely coincident with the other.”[7] The transition between John and Jesus must be what Paul identifies as passage from the ministry of death to the ministry of the Spirit.
Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection proves death is not nearly as fatal or powerful or necessary as was thought. Jesus shows death is not efficacious, by pouring out his life, not only in one moment of death, but in a life of sacrificial love which defeats the orientation to death (the ministry of death). Thus his followers are commanded to take up their cross, as his manner of life defeats the reign of death: “but now has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10); “Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Heb. 2:14-15). Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, inclusive of the temple incident, is not then, a display of violent power but putting into effect the counter-power of non-violent deliverance from death.
The one who enters triumphantly into Jerusalem on the foal of a donkey (Matt. 21:6) is the humble (ani, which translates as “poor,” “oppressed,” or “afflicted”) king (of Zech. 9:9). The term elsewhere describes the victim of murder (Job 24:14) or the poor man who must give up his only cloak to secure a loan (Deut. 24:12-13). According to Bartlett, “In contemporary terms, we could easily say this king is unarmed, powerless, and so must bring deliverance without violence.”[8] This is the point of Zechariah enacted: “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem; And the bow of war will be cut off. And He will speak peace to the nations; And His dominion will be from sea to sea, And from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zech. 9”10). The gentle, meek, non-violent, king, riding on the foal of a donkey is victorious over death and violence. His ride into Jerusalem, and entry into the temple, is the sign the ministry of death represented by the temple is ended (Mk. 11:14) and the living spiritual sacrifice of the Peaceable Kingdom is inaugurated.
[1] E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985) 296.
[2] Sanders, 57.
[3] Sanders, 63.
[4] Cited in Sanders, 64.
[5] Cited in Sanders, 64.
[6] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 155.
[7] Bartlett, 156.
[8] Barlett, 164.