הנצרות הקדומה, יהדות בית שני, מקדש ירושלים ומקדש אחרית הימים: בעקבות ספר חדש Eyal Regev, The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred, New Haven 2019

Eyal Regev’s new book reassesses some perceptions, still dominant in scholarly discourse, about earliest Christian attitudes toward the Temple. According to these perceptions, the belief in Jesus atoning death caused nascent Christianity as a whole to reject the value of the sacrificial cult centered in Jerusalem. Regev bases his reassessment on two methodological strategies. First, he distinguishes attitudes attested in the New Testament: participation in Temple worship; transferal of sacrificial imagery – without denying the importance of the traditional cult – to the Messiah’s death and/ or to the experience of his followers; criticism of the deficiencies in the performance of the cult; and finally, definite rejection of the cult. Second, he strives to reconstruct the particular historical contexts of various strata of the earliest Christian tradition; this allows Regev to comprehend the criticism as directed at concrete aspects of mishandling the Temple cult and not against the institution itself. In light of tendencies in other Second Temple Jewish sources, e.g., those attested in the Dead Seas Scrolls, Regev demonstrates that from the historical Jesus to Paul to the compilers of the Gospels, it is the first three modes of conversation with the Temple issue that are actually present. In other words, even when Jesus death is perceived as a complementing or more effective path to atonement, this does not presuppose the annulment of traditional sacrifices. Moreover, the application of sacrificial imagery to the crucifixion not only provides Jesus followers with the elucidation of his death’s atoning function, but also helps to maintain their integral connection to the Temple as the foundational aspect of Judaism. Only in the later Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation does Regev discern – as in some other post-Destruction Jewish trends – the readiness to abandon traditional Temple-centered piety.
Though I identify isolated problematic points in Regev’s argumentation, I find quite convincing his criticism of the uniform scholarly portrait of earliest Christianity as parting ways with Jerusalem Temple piety, as well as his diagnosis that later Christian notions unduly informed this portrait. I suggest, however, that more attention should be paid to the complementing issue of attitudes toward the eschatological Temple and its function within end-of-days redemption scenarios. This aspect, also featured in late Second Temple sources outside the New Testament, definitely deserves an in-depth treatment in relation to the explicitly messianic movement of Jesus followers.