Adam Gregerman's Building on the Ruins of the Temple explicates early Christian and rabbinic reactions to the Second Temple's destruction (ḥurban). Arguing that twentieth-century scholarship has downplayed the centrality of 70 CE for early Christian thinkers, Gregerman delineates, in the first half of the book, how Justin Martyr (second century), Origen of Alexandria (185–254), and Eusebius of Caesarea (260–340) all used the temple's destruction as a central apologetic tool to make their case for Christianity, and with that, their rebuttal of Judaism. In the second half of the book, Gregerman analyzes rabbinic passages from Eikhah Rabbah that criticize God for destroying the temple, or that, inversely, exonerate the Jews of all responsibility for the events of 70 CE. In Gregerman's view, this bold rabbinic accusation should be understood as an “apologetic response” to the early Christian position that placed full blame on the Jews.

According to Justin, Origen, and Eusebius, God had the Romans destroy the temple to punish the Jews for their wicked crime of killing Jesus some forty years prior. Moreover, the temple's destruction signaled that God's covenant with the Jewish people had been irrevocably annulled; there was no hope for repentance. Now, God formed a new covenant with Jesus's followers. For these three thinkers, the temple's destruction—and the attendant fact that sacrifices, the central Jewish act of ritual worship, could no longer be brought—also signaled that God no longer sought the fulfillment of the ceremonial Torah laws. Without a temple, the ritual laws of the Bible could now be read “symbolically” or “spiritually,” thereby facilitating the full entry of gentiles into the new covenant with Christ. In this new world, the Jewish people would no longer carry a special status, and humanity would no longer need to overcome the stiff barriers of rituals and sacrifices to join the Kingdom of God.

As Justin, Origen, and Eusebius all lived, at least for some time, in Palestine, Gregerman theorizes that these types of arguments reached the Palestinian rabbis. To undermine these Christian “proofs from history,” some rabbis, according to Gregerman, denied the standard Jewish assumption that Jewish sins engendered the temple's destruction. More specifically, Gregerman unpacks more than a dozen passages from Eikhah Rabbah wherein the rabbis, strikingly, shift the blame for the ḥurban from the Jews to God. According to Gregerman, by absolving the Jews from culpability in the loss of the temple and by instead blaming God, these rabbis, neutralized the theological basis for the types of Christian claims put forth by Justin, Origen, and Eusebius. For the rabbis, the covenant with Israel had not been broken, and God had not abandoned the Jews. To be sure, Gregerman recognizes that the material he culled from Eikhah Rabbah does not exhaust the diversity of rabbinic responses to the ḥurban. Alongside the radical rabbinic view that Gregerman traces, we have the typical and dominant rabbinic response, echoing Deuteronomy, that the suffering of the Israelites/Jews should be attributed to their own sins. According to Gregerman, this mainstream rabbinic explanation for the ḥurban lost traction among the Palestinian rabbinate because it ceded too much theological ground to the Christian perspective. In Gregerman's view, these bold and atypical voices of “anti-theodicy” in Eikhah Rabbah have not received sufficient attention in contemporary midrash scholarship.

Building on the Ruins of the Temple takes its readers, in part, on an enjoyable literary tour of the apologetic arguments found dispersed throughout the writings of Justin, Origen, and Eusebius. This journey wonderfully demonstrates how early Christian attitudes on the temple's demise fundamentally intersect with other areas central to the Jewish-Christian debate, such as election, covenant, law, and the gentile mission. That said, these chapters are quite repetitive, as Gregerman thoroughly explicates all the arguments contained in these thinkers’ writings, even if they are closely aligned with one another (the one major exception is Eusebius's three-fold division of history). Because Gregerman focuses mostly on the commonalities between these Christian theologians, it would have been interesting to spotlight the fundamental divergences or innovations between Justin's, Origen's, and Eusebius's attitudes towards Judaism and Jewish law. Regarding the rabbinic material, the book offers an innovative typology of the ways in which the rabbis absolved the Jews of their responsibility for the events of 70 CE. And, as many midrashim in Eikhah Rabbah accuse God of unethical behavior, Building on the Ruins of the Temple should be placed alongside other works cataloguing theological protest in early Judaism.

Both sections of the book—one dealing with early Christianity and the other rabbinic Judaism—are quite erudite and insightful, especially when read independently of the other. However, Gregerman's decision to regard the rabbinic material as responding to these early Christian claims might very well generate some scholarly resistance. First, we have the problem of dating. While the book's early Christian thinkers lived from the second to the fourth centuries, scholars have dated the editing of Eikhah Rabbah to the fifth century. Thus, it might have been more beneficial for Gregerman to cite and compare tannaitic interpretations to the biblical passages cited by these early Christian theologians. Second, and related to the first, Gregerman skips over the tannaitic theology that, after the ḥurban, God suffers with His people in exile (שכינה בגולה). This bold Jewish claim, not found in Scripture, might have been included in Gregerman's book as it underscores the rabbinic view that, contrary to early Christian arguments and despite the temple's destruction, God did not abandon the Jewish people. Third, and most importantly, I remain unconvinced that the rabbinic protest material in Eikhah Rabbah emerged partially in response to early Christian theology. That is because the theme of theological protest already occupies an important place in the Hebrew Bible (in a nonapologetic context), and we have an abundance of protest material in amoraic and postamoraic texts that have no connection to the temple's destruction. Thus, rather than regarding Gregerman's Eikhah Rabbah texts as an apologetic response to Christian claims, I would argue that they simply express Jewish anger towards God who seems to have sanctioned Jewish powerlessness, humiliation, and degradation (much as we encounter in post-Holocaust protest theology). In other words, my argument is that these Eikhah Rabbah protest texts would have been crafted even had Jesus never lived.

Notwithstanding these remaining questions, Building on the Ruins of the Temple should be applauded for its depth, thoroughness, and clarity. Gregerman is an astute reader of late antique texts (Hebrew and Greek), and his bibliography is fantastic. Scholars who are interested in early Christianity or rabbinic theology should place this work at the top of their reading list.