destruction whether he had literally made any such reference or not, precisely as a way of finding meaning in the midst of the meaninglessness of total violence. That the destruction now could be encompassed in the vision then of the one who was their hope made it tolerable. But such was the extremity of their experience in the thick of Roman war that, for a time, it was even possible to imagine these events as harbingers of nothing less than the end of the world. That dread, too, was given expression, transformed into hope, by the remembered Jesus; “And because wickedness is multiplied,” he is remembered to have said, “most men’s love will grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.”26
The Gospels are obsessed throughout with the destruction of the Temple, and why not? Recall that all four of the canonical texts define the crime for which Jesus was crucified as a crime against the Temple.27 The content of the charge of blasphemy brought against Jesus is defined by his statement “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.”28 Whatever actually “happened” in the lifetime of Jesus, the momentous violence of the Roman War that was being indiscriminately inflicted on Jews even as the Gospels were written was enough to force the narrative into the form that it took—now with the “Jewish” enemies of Jesus getting what they deserved for rejecting him. The point deserves emphasis: the Gospels’ first purpose was to respond to the present crisis of those who wrote the texts and to whom the texts were addressed. The Temple dominates the story of Jesus in 30 because the Temple—in its destruction by Rome—dominated the story in 70 of those who wrote the Gospel, read the Gospel, and heard the Gospel.
Looked at from this vantage of torment decades after the death of Jesus, even the Passion narrative takes on a character unimaginable to later Christians who tell his story without reference to the Roman War. Instead of the usual way of seeing Jesus’ agony and death on the cross as unique, a one-time instance of transcendent suffering extreme enough to redeem the fallen cosmos, the view from the year 70—recall the ten thousand corpses hung on crosses ringing the Temple Mount—would necessarily have seen the crucifixion of Jesus as mundane. The consolation offered by the Passion account had to be less a matter of Jesus as the substitute sufferer than of Jesus as the fellow sufferer. What befell Jesus is befalling us! When, at the moment of his death, according to the three Gospels, the Temple is symbolically destroyed by that torn veil, the identification of Jesus with the horrors of Roman savagery would have been taken to be complete. One could imagine surviving the Temple-destroying savagery only because Jesus had. Here, of course, is the power of the proclaimed Resurrection, the hope that evolved into conviction that survival, even of the worst fate imaginable, was a possibility—nay, a promise.
The Temple as the Cause of the Gospel
By the time of Jesus, the Temple Mount had been the historic heart of Jerusalem for at least a thousand years, and the mythic tradition of Israel pushed the date of its sanctification perhaps twice that far into the distant past. Indeed, the “mount” was first associated with Mount Moriah, to which Abraham brought his son Isaac as a ready sacrifice, obeying what he took to be God’s brutal command. Abraham may or may not have existed, but if he did, he is dated to about the year 2000 B.C.E., a full millennium before King David. Abraham’s altar of sacrifice—where, in the Genesis account,29 an animal replaced a human as the preferred offering of Israel’s God—became the altar to which the people, in that neverland of myth, brought their lambs and doves. The mount entered history when, precisely there, David ordered the first construction of the Temple in about 1000 B.C.E., and his son Solomon accomplished that construction. Across the subsequent centuries, the Temple would be built and built again, although the Babylonian destruction in 588 would permanently mark the difference between the First Temple, attributed to Solomon, and the Second, built by those returned from Babylon in 515, and rebuilt by their descendants.
A century and a half before the birth of Jesus, a Jewish dynasty—the Hasmoneans—restored the independence of Israel after a period of Seleucid (or Greek) domination. They marked this triumph by undertaking a massive reconstruction of the Temple. Indeed, Hanukkah, the annual Jewish festival of light, recalls the joyous rededication of the Temple after that restoration. It had walls made of huge stones and broken by five stout gates, embellished palaces, a citadel, towers, courtyards; the ritual buildings themselves occupied a plateau that was about three hundred yards square.30 This construction repeated patterns and designs common in the Hellenized world, and the Jerusalem Temple began to loom as one of its great structures.
When the Romans, under Pompey, brought Israel’s independence to an end in 67 B.C.E., skirmishes, referred to earlier, were fought by resisting Jews in Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount, but no lasting damage was done to the Temple as the dominance of Rome began. When the Roman client ruler, the quasi-Jewish Herod the Great, was elected “King of the Jews” by the Roman Senate in about 39 B.C.E., his challenge was to establish his legitimacy with a population that regarded him as an interloper. With a view to winning over his skeptical subjects—and to impressing his patrons in Rome—he undertook the project of making the Jerusalem Temple even grander. By about the year 20 B.C.E., having scrupulously commissioned more than a thousand Jewish priests as masons and carpenters, Herod had completed most of a major reconstruction, which indeed made the Temple of Jerusalem one of the most spectacular buildings in the world. Ad hoc construction on the compound would continue for another eighty years, until the catastrophe of 70 C.E., but the main redesign and renovation was accomplished quickly. Red-tiled roofs, colonnades, hundreds of pillars, grand stairways, a huge central sanctuary with looming columns, wall bridges, hundreds of finely hewn blocks, multiple courtyards, double and triple gates, porticoes—all made of gleaming gold-white Jerusalem stone and pale limestone, and positioned atop a spectacular butte visible for miles: the Temple was breathtakingly beautiful.
That the Temple magnificently enshrined the sacred precincts in which believers, gathering periodically by the hundreds of thousands, could make their joyous sacrificial offerings in petition and thanksgiving was what made the Temple precious to almost all Jews. Indeed, it was precious to non-Jews as well, with the so-called Courtyard of the Gentiles being one of the Temple’s most commodious spaces—an indication of Israel’s ecumenical openness that contradicts a later Christian disparagement of Judaism as exclusivist and clannish.
The glories of the Temple notwithstanding, Jews disdained Herod and his successors, and many were ambivalent about the Hellenized culture that stamped the architecture of his greatest achievement. But ambivalence drained away as they made “aliyah,” going up to the hilltop city for religious festivals, and from the city up to its sacred plateau. Jews were devoted to the Temple not for its physical splendor but for the devotion it inspired. That it brought them into intimate contact with the Holy One, in a setting whose magnificence could make the Holy One’s presence seem palpable, redoubled their love for this place. It was truly the navel of the cosmos, axis mundi, the house of God.
But where is God when God’s house is destroyed? As would happen in the twentieth century, scattered Jewish survivors of Rome’s mass violence in the year 70 were at the mercy of the dread that their God had abandoned them. Because their sanctuaries, religious symbols, and texts were destroyed in the Roman onslaught, and because they had been driven from the living center and seal of the covenant—Eretz Yisrael and its soul city, Jerusalem—the content of the Jewish religious imagination was in danger of being all but deleted.
But instead of simply disappearing, as so many peoples crushed by empire had and would again, the Jews, even as the Roman brutalizing continued intermittently for decades, retrieved from the tradition new meanings of old revelations, a fresh interpretation of the interpretations. They were able to do this only because once before, returning from Babylon six hundred years earlier, they had reinvigorated their religion around an equivalent experience of total loss. All first-century Jews, the followers of Jesus decisively included, were primed by an ancient tradition to transform that loss into a profound act of religious reinvention—spawning,
