by Ken Howcroft.
This is the first of a two-part series by Ken. Part two will follow next week.
The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE at a time of regime change in Rome was a major event, and catastrophic for the Jewish people. Have you ever wondered why it is not directly mentioned in the New Testament? Does it have any lasting implications for us in our world? This piece turns over the stones that were thrown down (Mark 13:2) to look at the roles in the drama played by the Temple and its authorities, sundry Herods and the Romans, and the traces of their interactions in the Gospel of Mark. It is in two parts. Part 1 sets the historic background. Part 2 will look at the time of Jesus and the early Church.
The story begins in the time of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who ruled swathes of the Middle East from 175 to 164 BCE. The priestly elite in Jerusalem were at first happy to ‘modernise’ and transform Jerusalem into an Hellenistic city. But in 169 BCE Antiochus IV had visited Jerusalem and looted the Temple, and then in 167 rededicated its Temple to Olympian Zeus. This is what the Book of Daniel refers to as the ‘abomination of desolation’. it led to a rebellion led by the Maccabees. They ousted the traditional (hereditary) high-priestly families and were then themselves declared to be High Priest-Kings in what we have come to know as the Hasmonean dynasty.
Not all of this was universally popular. One member of the traditional families, Onias IV, failed in an attempt to be reinstated in Jerusalem by the Seleucids and so went off to Egypt around 160 BCE and founded an alternative Temple and cult in Leontopolis. Yet another group of the old elite, the Sadducees, supported the Hasmoneans. A more moderate group however continued seeking to engage with Hellenistic rulers. Against this, the lay movement of Pharisees opposed the Hasmoneans for their usurpation of the High Priesthood. The group that centred around the Dead Sea Scrolls (probably Essenes or closely linked to them) similarly believed that the High Priest-Kings were illegitimate, and also that the Temple rituals were being conducted wrongly on a lunar rather than a solar calendar.
There were therefore major tensions between Jewish groups which focussed on the Temple. These continued for the next two hundred years. In 63 BCE the Roman general Pompey intervened to bring Judaea under direct Roman rule. He besieged and captured Jerusalem. He entered the Temple and, whether inadvertently or not, went into the Holy of Holies and thereby desecrated it. The following day he ordered that it be purified and its rituals resumed. He left the Hasmonean priests in office, but deprived them of what we would call ‘political’ power.
In 54 BCE however Crassus, who with Julius Caesar and Pompey made up the First Triumvirate, plundered the Temple’s money and gold.
Things began to change with the parallel rise to power of Herod the Great in Judaea and the Emperor Augustus In the whole of the Roman Empire. Herod was a loyal client of Mark Antony. In 47 BCE he was named by the Romans as governor of Galilee. In 40 the Roman Senate appointed him King of Judaea and supported him in regaining Jerusalem from the Parthians in 37 and gaining complete control of the country in 34. When Julius Caesar’s heir, Octavian, had defeated Antony in 31 and become the Emperor Augustus, Herod skilfully moved from being Antony’s loyal client to Augustus’s.
Augustus’s attempts to settle the empire were mirrored in Herod’s to settle Jerusalem and Judaea. Both involved the creation of infrastructure and investment in huge public building works. While the former built, for example, the Forum Augustum in Rome, the latter built a new harbour and city in Roman style on the coast at Caesarea Maritima (the choice of name being significant!). Aligned with the harbour rather than with the city streets he built an imposing temple to Roma and Augustus. The Roman Empire was being opened up to the Jews.
At the same time in Jerusalem Herod almost completely rebuilt and extended the Temple. The extension included the creation of a Court of the Gentiles which took up about half of the total area. In it Gentiles could study and pray. But also Jews and Gentiles wanting to offer sacrifices and make money offerings could buy temple-approved animals and change their money into temple-approved Tyrian shekels there. The Temple was being opened up to the Gentiles in general, and the Roman Empire in particular.
Herod therefore followed Augustus in enacting a policy of “eusebeia” – performing the actions that were appropriate to the gods, particularly ‘local’ gods. According to Livy, Augustus was “the founder and restorer of all sanctuaries”. The Jewish writers Josephus and Philo say that in Jerusalem Augustus presented the temple with golden vessels and other precious gifts, and he ordered that whole-offering sacrifices be made on his behalf, paid for from his private purse. That is not the same as saying that he should be worshipped and sacrifices offered to him. His son-in-law and main military commander Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (with whom Herod’s family were closely linked) paid for a hundred oxen to be sacrificed, together with other gifts.
But what did the various Jewish factions make of all this, and are there any traces in, for example, the Gospel of Mark? We shall explore that in Part 2.
Theology Everywhere 