on the Mediterranean coast. This core would flourish as the center of a post-Temple Rabbinic Judaism. In a similar way, speaking generally, followers of Jesus decamped Jerusalem for Pella, across the Jordan, and for places in Syria, Asia Minor, and North Africa. In Palestine, the Jesus movement remained centered in Galilee, where Roman legions raised havoc, but not with the brute totality of their assault against Jerusalem. Both groups, in line with previous prophetic readings of the Temple destruction wrought by the Babylonians, saw in the Roman destruction a purification willed by God, but they differed in their views of what constituted the behavior from which God took offense.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s call the first group “the rabbis,” attached to a party of Jewish leaders identified in the Gospels as Pharisees. They were inclined, even before the Temple destruction, to emphasize observance of the Law and study of the Torah more than, say, the priests of the Temple, who, given their ritual role at the altar, would have placed prime emphasis on cultic sacrifice. But with the Temple gone and the priests either killed or made superfluous, the rabbis insisted that to be a Jew now was to be focused more than ever on Torah, study of texts, and close observance of the Law. Their attachment to the study-centered institution of the synagogue came into its own. When the tradition of priestly sacrifice was replaced by the metaphoric sacrifice of “a broken and contrite heart,”33 manifest in Law observance, Rabbinic Judaism was born.
Let’s call the other group “the Jesus people.” They had an even more succinct answer to the question “What is it to be a Jew without the Temple?” Now, they said, Jesus is the Temple—“the new Temple.” Here, too, cult sacrifice has entered the realm of metaphor, with Jesus having accomplished the last sacrificial offering “once and for all when he offered up himself.”34 In this the Church was born. The first group said that the Temple had been destroyed because Israel was insufficiently faithful in observing God’s Law. The second said the Temple had been destroyed because Israel had rejected Jesus. The point is that both groups consisted of Jews searching for meaning in the midst of the Roman-generated catastrophe, centered on the destruction of the Temple.
These equally Jewish answers to the Jewish crisis both envisioned an imagined Temple and the necessary movement of sacrifice into the realm of metaphor,35 yet the answers seemed profoundly contradictory, and, in a context in which civil war among Jewish groups was rife, those proposing these answers became fiercely antagonistic. Such competition between factions of an oppressed people was deliberately stoked by the imperial overlords—the universal practice of empires.36 So Rome, too, is a factor in the conflict between the rabbis and the Jesus people.
Usually, the Christian story is told without reference to the fact that the approximate year of the first Gospel’s composition—Mark, in 70—was the same year as the destruction of the Temple.37 If the connection is noted by Christians today, it is assumed to be coincidence, since, in the Christian memory, the fate of the Jewish cultic center four decades after the death of Jesus could have no real bearing on Christians, who by the second century had come to regard their movement as having begun in Jesus’ own repudiation of the Temple.
It may well be that when Jesus of Nazareth arrived on the scene in the year 28 or 29, it was as part of a Temple purification movement. The facts that Herod the Great, the despised Roman lackey and puppet ruler, had rebuilt the Temple, and that his structure reflected the Hellenized style of grandiose pagan temples elsewhere in the Near East, had, as we saw, discomforted some Jews. It sparked full-bore opposition from certain Jewish critics, like the Qumran sect, puritanical ascetics who lived a communal life apart from Jerusalem, centered near the Dead Sea.38 These conscientious objectors to the moral compromises of urban life in a Hellenized world—let’s call them “arch-conservatives”—may have included John the Baptist. But they would have criticized Herod’s Temple in the name of God’s Temple—a point we saw, in brief, before. To resist Herod’s blasphemy, of course, was a mode of resisting the blasphemy of his patron, Rome. But such criticism of the Temple would have been for the Temple’s sake.
Jesus might have associated with the radicals of Qumran. If they included John the Baptist, he surely did. But it seems likely that, from a certain point on, Jesus kept his distance from such purists, including John. As Jesus came into his own, it was as anything but a Zealot. Indeed, the Gospels go out of their way to show him as a man not given to puritanical repudiations. He was not an ascetic, nor did he eschew the bustle of towns and cities. Accommodation marked his style. We will see more of Jesus’ difference from the Zealots below.
If we are, a priori, to take seriously Jesus’ character as a devout Jew, then his devotion to the Temple follows, and we should be very slow to imagine him as repudiating either the Temple itself or the transactions, like money changing, that would have been germane to it.39 There is every reason to believe that Jesus himself, as a devout Jew, was devoted to the Temple, and could not conceivably have repudiated it in total. If, as all four Gospels report, he committed a transgression there, it was more likely as a defense of the Temple than as an attack on it.40 The main evidence for believing that Jesus revered the Temple until the day he died is that his followers then continued to devoutly worship in the Temple as Jews for as long as the holy place survived.
Against the notion that the Gospels began to jell as written accounts of the story of Jesus without reference to the destruction of the Temple and the ongoing Roman War against the Jews that were simultaneous to the writing, I argue that the destruction of the Temple, and the attendant mass violence, were precisely what created the urgent need among the Jesus people for these texts just then. They needed the texts as Jews. That the oral traditions of the story of Jesus, combining memory, myth, interpretation, and literary invention, began to find written form at this moment was no coincidence. It was an answer. And if the Gospels are read in this light—as documents dated to 70 and after, instead of as prophecies dated to 30—they take on meanings that differ decisively from what Christians usually say and are usually told. We are closing in on the actuality of origins.
The most obvious instance of this is well known by now, although its implications have yet to be fully unpacked: the way in which the Gospels are read as setting Jesus not only against the Temple but against his own people. The intra-Jewish antagonism—rabbis versus Jesus’ followers—dating to the last decades of the century hugely influenced how the Gospels, describing events earlier in the century, were composed. The point is that all four canonical Gospels took form after the Roman destruction of the Temple, after the rivalry between surviving groups of Jews began to calcify, in the deadly context of massive war. The war with Rome sparked civil war among Jews, and the Gospels are the literature of that civil war.41 “The Jews” portrayed by evangelists as the mortal enemy of Jesus in about the year 30 were enemies of—if anyone—the followers of Jesus five decades later.
The point for us, though, lies in the way in which the Temple defines the very center of this conflict. Since the Gospels were all written during the catastrophic years in which Jews were traumatized by the loss of the Temple of Jerusalem, it would be odd if that crisis were not reflected in how the story of Jesus was told, since the entire point of composition just then was to put Jesus forward as the solution to the problem of the destroyed Temple. The Jewish experience during the savage violence of what I presume to call the first Holocaust, in other words, could be expected, in the scales of narrative composition, to weigh as much as, if not more than, the remembered actualities of Jesus’ life four decades earlier. The crisis of Temple destruction in 70 was enough for the Jesus people to put the Temple at the center of their explanations of his meaning—and they did. We will see more of this.
Humans are forever on the hunt for meaning, but brute experience can force radical breakthroughs into other orders of existence. The religious wars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, in which tens of millions of Protestants and Catholics slaughtered one another in the name of God, came to the hyper-violent climax of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). That paroxysm of killing, in which something like eight million persons died, led in short order to a new politics—distilled in the idea of the separation of church and state, a pillar of democratic liberalism—while