This is an ambitious book. It seeks to trace a history of “Early Christian” attitudes toward the Temple, and to see how such attitudes explain or at least describe the formation of “Christian identity.” Regev, a professor of Jewish studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, bravely ventures into that most overwritten of fields, New Testament studies, while drawing on a slim dossier of New Testament texts: the canon-within-the-canon of Paul's letters, the Gospels and Acts, with adjuvant considerations of Revelation and of Hebrews. A chapter on the historical Jesus opens the work. Chapters 2 through 8 review these New Testament texts in their two-source-hypothesis order (Mark first; “Q” blended in with Matthew). Chapter 9, invoking various social theories, considers attitudes toward the Temple and toward the Jewish sacrificial cult with respect to evolving Christian identity, synched with developing second-century traditions of adversus Iudaeos. A brief retrospective tenth chapter brings the book to its close.
What roles does the Temple play in the early Christian imaginaire? Regev views his selection of texts through an analytical grid of four relational categories: (1) participation; (2) analogy; (3) criticism; and (4) rejection. What emerges is variety across these different documents and, sometimes, within them.
Regev's chapter on Paul breaks down the apostle's various deployments of Temple imagery: priest-work, pleasing aromas from burnt offerings, sacrifices of various kinds (whether with reference to Jesus or to Paul's gentile auditors), community as inspirited analogue to the Temple, and so on. On balance, Regev concludes, Paul's orientation is positive, which accounts for his appropriation of Temple metaphors to construct so much of his message. Paul is against sacrifices to pagan gods, not sacrifices to Israel's God. “There is no essential contradiction between Paul's belief in Christ and worship in the Temple” (95). It should be noted, however, that of all of Regev's other New Testament authors, only Paul could have worshiped at the Temple. Mid-first century, when he dictated his letters, the Temple was still standing. By 70 CE, it was gone.
Missing from this chapter, curiously, is sustained consideration of Paul's list of ethnic Israel's divinely granted privileges, among them doxa (“glory,” the LXX's translation of kavod) and latreia (Hebrew ʿavodah), both references to Jerusalem's Temple, where God's presence abides and his cult is performed (Rom 9:3–4). Even odder is the omission of Paul's naming the Temple Mount as the place of Christ's impending eschatological manifestation: “Out of Zion will come the Deliverer” (Romans 11:26 NRSV, quoting Isaiah 59:20; mentioned only in passing in a note). Paul died before the First Revolt. He accordingly—again, unlike the other NT texts under consideration—has nothing to say about the Temple's demise, which he never anticipated: Christ's resurrection and imminent return are, for him, what mark the hour on God's clock. Apocalyptic eschatology is not a category that Regev thinks with when reading either Paul's letters or the later Gospels. Its absence in effect decouples traditions about the Temple (Rom 11:26) and/or about its destruction (Mark 13 and parallels; John 2; Rev) as a signal of God's coming Kingdom—a core message of this movement that perforce will itself alter as time continues not to end on time.
The two later synoptic Gospels, Matthew and Luke, evince on balance a positive orientation, mixed with other more ambivalent attitudes. Matthew, devoted both to the (now defunct) Temple and to the “Christian” message, demands a choice of the believer: “A Christian must decide which”—that is, Jesus or the Temple—“is greater” (152, in re Matt 12:6). Luke's two-volume history of the early church, the gospel and Acts, splits the difference. The Temple itself is a holy place. Its personnel, the chief priests, oppose the new movement and seek to limit Christian access to it (e.g., pp. 183–89, with an interesting excursus on the execution of James). Temple, good; priests, bad. Luke's narratives in effect appropriate the Temple itself as a symbol of Christianity's legitimate Jewishness: “The Temple theme enables Luke to present Christianity as if it is mainstream Judaism” (196).
No such concern affects John's gospel, which Regev rightly sees as dominated by its own very high Christology. For John, Jesus effects a type of replacement, though this is complicated (200–206: Jesus's body, or perhaps the Eucharist, functions as “temple”). With his hero's repeated pilgrimages to the holy city, John certainly foregrounds Jerusalem (215). Assessing the multivocal scholarship on its complex symbolism, Regev finally argues that “for the readers of John, what is left from the Temple is . . . [a] transferred Temple Christology” (219). Christ, now (that is, postdestruction, the period of John's audience), is “God's exclusive mediator” (220), with the Temple serving as an “explanatory model for understanding Jesus” (221, emphasis in the original). Jesus is thus, functionally, like the Temple. Since it no longer stands, John can present Jesus as the one who (uniquely?) offers access to God.
Paul worked when the Temple was still up and running. The evangelists’ situation is more complicated: they write postdestruction, but perforce set their stories in the predestruction past. Revelation (chap. 7) and Hebrews (chap. 8) grapple with no such narrative complexities. In consequence, their respective teachings can be complex in different ways.
Questions concerning both the ethnicity of the authors and of their audiences—Jewish? gentile?—have no clear answers, though Regev assumes that “Israel” in Revelation represents an ethnically mixed body of Christ-believers (224). Most of John of Patmos's revelation occurs within, or proceeds from, a heavenly Temple, where the enthroned God is worshiped (225), and whence punishments, plagues, and judgment issue upon the damned. Its thick Temple imagery—the throne, the ark, the altar, the bowls of incense, the lampstands, and so on—provides the scaffolding for Regev's interesting observations (224–40). And his conjecture that Revelation dates from the 90s undergirds his reading it as a statement against Rome, a cathartic compensation for the actual Temple's loss (perhaps, he says, because the author himself witnessed the First Revolt, p. 250). For John of Patmos, “Only God is superior to the temple” (251).
Hebrews, of course, is likewise thick with Temple talk. Questions of ethnicity and of provenance are no less confounding, and its biblical bookishness can support a date of composition to either side of 70 (254). Here Temple personnel dominate, with this text's idiosyncratic presentation of Jesus as a celestial high priest (254–64). But Jesus is more than Hebrews’ high priest: he is also the heavenly Temple's ultimate sin sacrifice, effecting a more efficacious atonement and purification compared to his tellurian Levitical predecessors. Regev's views on the theological argument of Hebrews is no less complex than the text itself: I cannot summarize here. But the discussion serves as a nice springboard into the following chapter, a summary conclusion that both reviews what precedes it while venturing an analysis of the Temple as a “key symbol” (nodding to Sherry Ortner) for developing early Christian identity.
Regev's strength is textual analysis, not historical thinking; and, as a specialist in a quite different field, he necessarily depends upon a limited selection of secondary works, almost all of it New Testament scholarship. It is brave to venture into a new field; but too often Regev misdescribes the positions of the scholars he cites, or invokes a “consensus view” when, in fact, no such consensus exists. He thinks hermeneutically rather than historically (e.g., p. 293, where, pursuant to metaphorical identifications of “Eucharist” with “sacrifice,” Cyprian [d. 258] becomes a mid-second-century contemporary of Justin Martyr [d. 165]). His bibliography makes this point: commentaries, theologically inflected studies, and theological essays predominate, while there is nothing from early Roman social, political, or religious historians, nothing on Greco-Roman cults as comparanda. These New Testament texts seem to exist in a social-historical vacuum, their putative ancient context constructed from Regev's own close reading of them. But twelve texts—taking Paul as contributing six—does not “early Christianity” make, the book's title notwithstanding. And the idea of a “Christian identity” cannot but be oversimple. In brief: Regev's exercise is valuable as a literary study, but as a historical one it cannot stand.
