Whose Temple?

In his contribution to In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance , Richard Horsley notes that “the temple-state had been set up in Jerusalem in the sixth century by the Persian imperial regime,” and that through the Roman period the Jerusalem temple-state was “a key institution in the imperial order.” That certainly has some historical basis: Herod, who built or refurbished the temple, was a Roman client, and the Romans had plenty of allies among the priestly elites. Horsley takes this to mean that Jesus’ demonstration in the temple was not just an pre-enactment of the coming judgment on the Jews but a “challenge to the Roman imperial order.”

This helps to cut through the Jerusalem v. Rome debate about the Olivet Discourse and the book of Revelation, especially when it is placed next to James Jordan’s arguments concerning the imperial oikoumene set up in the exilic and post-exilic periods. Horsley’s suggestion gives historical grounding to the suggestion that what happens in AD 70 is not merely the destruction of the temple but the end of the entire Israel-among-the-nations structure that began with Babylon. Because the temple is not only the key symbol of Judaism, but the key symbol of Judaism’s alliance with Rome, its destruction is the epicenter of the earthquake that shakes down the post-exilic world.