(Prov 8). Solomon (as we previously argued) was therefore an image of the preexistent Christ, as well as a type of his redemptive work.
For this reason, Jesus is not only a prophet and king, but also a priest and a new temple. Jesus fulfills his messianic priesthood in a number of ways. First, John makes certain that his readers recognize that Jesus is the true Temple. Christ is the returning kavod of the Old Testament. He has returned to “tabernacle” among us (John 1:14).315 Indeed “his body” (2:21) is the true Temple.316 The temple of Jesus’s body will be destroyed and raised up again (2:22–24). Hence, he not only mediates the presence of God, but he will also destroy the old creation and bring about a new creation through his sacrifice on the altar of the cross.
The second major aspect of Jesus’s fulfillment of the temple cult in John is the fact that Jesus recapitulates the ritual festivals. Indeed, as Wright has shown, John structures Jesus’s ministry around Israel’s liturgical calendar.317 Several other scholars have noticed this pattern as well.318 According to John’s reckoning, Jesus attends three Passovers (2:12–25, 6:4, 11:55—19:42), the festival of Tabernacles (7:2), and possibly Hanukah (10:22).319 In this vein, Scott Hahn writes:
We also see a dramatic identification of Jesus and the Temple in John 7–10:21. There, the backdrop is the festival celebrating the building of the Temple (Tabernacles), during which the priests daily poured out water from the Pool of Siloam on the altar steps and kept the Temple courts illuminated twenty-four hours a day in anticipation of the eschatological prophesies. In the midst of this, Jesus claims himself to be the true source of water and light, and brings light to a blind man through the waters of Siloam, thus supporting his claim to be the true Temple.
In John 10:22–42, during the Feast of Dedication, which commemorates the re-consecration of the Temple by the Maccabees, Jesus describes himself as the one “consecrated” by the Father and sent into the world—that is, he calls himself the new sanctuary. In John 14:2–3, Jesus again refers to his “Father’s House,” a Temple reference alluding to John 2:16 and supported by other Temple references—the house with many “rooms” is probably the many-chambered Temple of Ezekiel 41–43; and the “place” (Greek: topos; Hebrew: mâqôm) he goes to prepare connotes the “sacred place” of the Temple. In the final analysis, this passage describes Jesus’ departure to be prepared as a Temple wherein his disciples will “dwell.”320
Jesus’s fulfillment of Israel’s cult not only takes the form of his recapitulation of its festivals, but also of its sacrificial worship. John the Baptist informs his listeners at the beginning of the gospel that Jesus is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (1:29). Raymond Brown notes that this description of Jesus is reminiscent of both the Suffering Servant and the paschal lamb.321 These two echoes of the Old Testament fit together nicely insofar as we have seen that Isaiah envisions a universal Passover lamb to match his universal exodus. Jesus’s identification with the paschal lamb is also shown by the fact that his death occurs during the festival of Passover. Later, it will be shown that other details of Jesus’s passion reinforce his fulfillment of the Passover sacrifice.
Beyond the Passover sacrifice, there is much in John’s narrative to suggest that Jesus is also the fulfillment of the Day of Atonement. In this regard, it should first be noted that the location of Jesus’s betrayal in the garden of Gethsemane is significant. As George Beasley-Murray observes, John, like Luke, does not give us the specific name of the garden of Jesus’s betrayal (although 18:1 strongly implies Gethsemane).322 In other words, John appears to be interested in emphasizing the location of the beginning of Jesus’s passion as simply a “garden.” From the re-creation imagery used by John earlier, it is not unlikely to think that John intends his readers to think of this garden as a new Eden.
The second interesting thing about the location of Jesus’s arrest is that it takes place at the base of the Mount of Olives. The Mount of Olives is not only the route through which David fled from Absalom (as we mentioned in our discussion of Mark), but it is also the location where Ezekiel saw the glory of the Lord resting when it left the temple (Ezek 11:23).323 Read in this light, the Mount of Olives has become the real temple, since it is de facto the new holy of holies where the kavod has come to rest. As a result, the themes of both the true Temple and Eden come together in a remarkable way. The identification of Eden as the protological temple was, as Stephen Um demonstrates, by no means limited to the Old Testament, but was widely recognized in the literature of Second Temple Judaism.324 If this reading of John’s intention is correct, then John wishes to portray Jesus as the new Adam and the true high priest standing in the reconstituted garden-temple of Eden.
The location of the narrative within the true garden-temple then forms the context of Jesus’s atoning actions. These actions draw a striking parallel with the liturgy of the Day of Atonement as it was possibly practiced during the time of Christ. First, let us examine the description of Jesus’s arrest:
Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, “Whom do you seek?” They answered him, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus said to them, “I am he.” Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, “I am he,” they drew back and fell to the ground. So he asked them again, “Whom do you seek?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. So, if you seek me, let these men go.” (18:4–8, emphasis added)
Andrei Orlov has noted the significance of the fact that John mentions the divine Name “I AM” three times (though Jesus himself, of course, technically only speaks the divine Name twice, and only implies it in the Greek a third time) and has connected it with traditions in the Mishnah concerning the liturgy of the Day of Atonement.325
According to the Mishnah, after the high priest completed his ritual sacrifices of the bull and the goat meant for YHWH, he would confess the sins of the people over the scapegoat while reciting the following prayer:
O Lord, your people, the house of Israel, has committed iniquity, transgressed, and sinned before you. Forgive, O Lord, I pray the iniquities, transgressions, and sins, which the people, the house of Israel, have committed, transgressed, and sinned before you, as it is written in the Torah of Moses, you servant, “For on this day shall atonement be made for you to clean you. From all your sins shall you be clean before the Lord.” (Yoma 6:2, emphasis added)326
There is an obvious parallel between this text and John’s description of Jesus’s arrest, the chief one being that there is a threefold repetition of the divine Name. Both the location of the recitation of this prayer and the reaction of the hearers is also highly suggestive. First, this prayer is spoken after the priest comes out of the holy of holies, which, as we have seen, is where John effectively places Jesus. He moves towards the people in the way that John described Jesus’s moving towards the guards. The reaction of the guards directly parallels the description of the priest and people in the courtyard of the temple:
And the priests and people standing in the courtyard, when they would hear the Expressed Name [of the Lord] come out of the mouth of the high priest, would kneel and bow down and fall on their faces and say, “Blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom forever and ever.327
Despite these significant parallels, we must remain somewhat cautious regarding this interpretation in light of the fact that the Mishnah was compiled more than one hundred years after the writing of John’s gospel (probably around AD 200).328 These parallels are at least highly suggestive and fit well with the earlier scholarship that showed John viewed Jesus’s ministry as tied up with the fulfillment of the Jewish liturgical calendar.
The rest of John’s passion narrative offers other echoes and similarities with the Day of Atonement. If Jesus offers himself up in the temple-garden as the goat for YHWH, then he must also be cast out of the city like the scapegoat. For this reason he is crucified outside the city (19:17). Of course, the difficulty is that there were two goats, and only one
