The Temple in Christianity and Islam, Part One: Jesus and the Roman Empire

Relief of the spoils of the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 on the Arch of Titus, Rome, Italy (Image credit: Carole Raddato, Wikimedia Commons)

NOTE: For those interested in the Temple’s place in Islam, click here to read Part 2.

In AD 70, the Roman army regained control of Jerusalem from the Jewish rebels. Since the Roman occupiers now saw the Jews as essentially terrorists and religious fanatics, they massacred countless men, women, and children throughout the city. The Romans also razed much of Jerusalem itself, including the holiest site in Judaism, the Second Temple (Herod’s Temple). For the Jews, the loss of the Temple was not only shocking and traumatic but would also force them to reimagine their very faith and identity. On the other hand, for the first-century Christians, though, many of whom were not only still quite conscious of their movement’s Jewish roots but were themselves ethnic Jews, the destruction of the Temple was seen as but the fulfillment of the Messiah’s prophecy.

In the New Testament and some apocryphal Christian sources, the Temple is portrayed positively prior to Jesus’s adulthood. And why would it not be? The First Temple had been built by King Solomon at God’s behest. The Hebrew scripture describes the structure in surprising detail and tells us that it housed the Ark of the Covenant in its Holy of Holies (see 1 Kings: 6-8:9). While Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 BC, it would be rebuilt by order of the Persian king Cyrus the Great later in the same century. For both this and for ending the Babylonian Captivity, Cyrus, despite being a gentile, is called “Messiah,” or “Christ,” by the Prophet Isaiah (45:1).

In the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph present the infant Jesus to the Lord in the Temple and offer sacrifices in accordance with Jewish Law (2:22-4). Later we read of how, unbeknownst to his parents, the twelve-year-old Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem following the Passover feast in order to listen and speak with the teachers in the Temple. When Mary and Joseph eventually discover him there, he asks them, “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” (Luke 2:41-52). Jesus’s temporary abandonment of his earthly parents and their home back in Nazareth represents a desire to be closer to his true Father, God, and he accomplishes this by spending time in his Father’s home, the Temple.

According to the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, Jesus’s mother, Mary, was dedicated to the Temple at a young age by her parents, Joachim and Anna. She is portrayed as having grown up there, and in later traditions is said to have been permitted by the priest Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, to enter into the Holy of Holies. The belief that Mary grew up in the Temple seems to be found in the Qurʾan as well. While the Muslim scripture does not explicitly refer to the Temple, it does speak of Mary being raised in a mihrab, or sanctuary, under the protection of Zechariah (Q 3:37) (see Part 2).

While the Temple is presented as a place of great sanctity by the Gospels in connection with Jesus’s early life and in the Protoevangelium, once Christ has come of age, it begins to be portrayed quite differently. In one of the fierier events recounted in the Gospels, Jesus drives out the moneychangers, merchants, and livestock from the Temple. We read of how he held a makeshift whip of cords as he overthrew their tables and poured out their money, rebuking them for turning his Father’s house into a marketplace (John 2:13-25). While this event, usually known as the “Cleansing of the Temple,” is often seen as a condemnation of commerce in the holy site, read in the larger context of the New Testament, it seems that Jesus’s actions are not intended to reform the Temple but to announce God’s permanent rejection of it. According to the Gospel of John, when the Jews ask Jesus what right he has to do such things, he says in reference to his own body, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (2:18-9). To paraphrase John Behr’s commentary in John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel, the Temple in Jerusalem has become nothing more than a marketplace, whereas Jesus’s body is the true Temple of God.

Mosaic of Jesus cleansing the Temple in Jerusalem from Monreale Cathedral, Palermo, Sicily, Italy (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The New Testament also portrays God’s rejection of the Temple as a response to Israel’s failure to accept his Christ. For instance, the first two Gospels connect the story of Jesus’s cursing of the fig tree—an Old Testament symbol of the Jewish people, or Israel (e.g., Hosea 9:10)—for its failure to bring forth fruit with the Cleansing of the Temple (Matt. 21:18-22; Mark 11:12-26). Moreover, that the Temple will be destroyed as a result of Israel’s unfaithfulness is announced by Jesus himself:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Matt. 23:37).

Jesus also seems to speak of the suffering that will be experienced by the Jewish people during the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70. He says that when one sees “the ‘abomination of desolation’ spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place,” those in Judaea should take flight and escape to the mountains (Matt. 24:15-6). Of course, the specific “abomination of desolation” spoken of by Daniel occurred in the second century BC when the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes built an altar to Zeus Olympus in the Temple. But Jesus is invoking the scripture here to prophesy a different “abomination of desolation.” Matthew even editorializes Jesus’s prophecy with, “whoever reads, let him understand” (24:15). The evangelist likely did so in order to emphasize to the Christian community that Christ’s words had already come to pass when the future-emperor Titus had entered into the Second Temple’s Holy of Holies before its destruction.

Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple, his prophecies about its destruction, and his mystical words regarding his body being the true Temple seems to have made him some enemies. In Mark’s account of the Temple’s cleansing, we are told that the chief priests and scribes became fearful and sought to destroy Jesus because his teachings had astonished the people (11:18). When Jesus stands before the Sanhedrin false witnesses testify to him having said that he would “destroy this temple made with hands, and within three days […] build another made without hands” (Mark 14:58). Even while nailed to the cross, Jesus is mocked by those passing by for having supposedly claimed to have been able to destroy the Temple in Jerusalem and rebuild it in three days (Matt. 27:39-40). Yet, when he dies, as a testimony to the efficacy of his sacrifice on the cross, the curtain hanging in front of the Temple’s Holy of Holies is miraculously torn in two (Matt. 27:51).

Following the destruction of the Second Temple, things would only get worse for Jerusalem. In response to the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132, the Roman emperor Hadrian not only further razed the city but prohibited Jews from residing in it. In fact, this prohibition became a staple of Roman law and, with the exception of the Sasanian occupation from 614-628, would remain in effect until Jerusalem’s conquest by the Prophet’s companion ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab in c. 638 (see Part 2). Moreoverr in 134, Hadrian erased Jerusalem from the map altogether when he refounded it as the pagan city of Aelia Capitolina. To help symbolize the eradication of monotheism, both Jewish and Christian, from the city, the emperor built a temple dedicated to Aphrodite on the site of Jesus’s tomb and likely one to Zeus on the Temple Mount.

But even with the Jewish Temple in ruins and Jerusalem itself replaced by a pagan city, a number of the early church fathers still predicted that the Antichrist would rule from the Temple during the end times. This view had been inspired in part by St. Paul’s prophecy regarding the lawless man who will set himself up in the Temple and claim to be God (2 Thess. 2:3-4). It is also important to bear in mind that the term “antichrist” comes from the Greek αντίχριστος (antichristos), meaning “in place of Christ.” Thus, St. Hippolytus portrays the Antichrist as fulfilling a sort of “worldly” interpretation of Jewish messiahship. For instance, he says that while Jesus has gathered believers, both Jew and gentile, from around the world to his body, the Antichrist will gather specifically the Jews to Jerusalem. Hippolytus also writes, “The Saviour raised up and showed His holy flesh like a temple, John 2:19 and [the Antichrist] will raise a temple of stone in Jerusalem.” Moreover, St. Irenaeus teaches that the Antichrist will reign for three and a half years from the Temple before being overthrown at the second coming of Jesus. For both these saints, a rebuilt Temple would have terrifying eschatological implications.

While Aelia Capitolina stood for nearly two centuries in Jerusalem’s stead, the biblical city would not be forgotten. In 324, the first Christian emperor of Rome, St. Constantine the Great, would resurrect Jerusalem, but this time as a decidedly Christian city. The emperor not only destroyed the pagan temples and symbols put there by his predecessors, but with the help of his pious Greek mother, St. Helen, he constructed churches and Christian shrines throughout Jerusalem. Yet, no church or shrine would be constructed on the Temple Mount. Instead, Constantine attempted to demonstrate Christianity’s supersession of Judaism by turning the former site of the Temple into a garbage dump.

In 361, Constantine’s nephew Julian (usually called “the Apostate”) would be crowned emperor. As an avowed pagan who had rejected the Christian faith he had been brought up in, Julian would set about reversing his family’s Christianizing polices in the hope of reviving Rome’s polytheist past. One of the more creative ways in which he went about trying to undermine Christianity’s position in the empire was by ordering the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. While considering the numerous atrocities Rome had committed against the Jewish people, Julian’s gesture may appear rather enlightened. In reality, however, his project seems to have had far less to do with making amends for the empire’s many crimes against the Jews than it did with disproving the New Testament. Since most Christians at the time believed that Jesus had prophesied the permanent destruction of Temple when he said that “not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matt. 24:2), the emperor sought to rebuild the Temple in order to humiliate Christianity.

c. AD 361-363 Roman coin of Emperor Julian the Apostate (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Unfortunately for Julian, his project seems to have had the opposite effect, as the Temple’s reconstruction would prove a miserable failure. While historians continue to debate what exactly happened, there are a number of ancient accounts of the debacle. One of the most important of which comes from the pagan historian and admirer of Julian, Ammianus Marcellinus. He writes,

[Julian’s] desire to leave a great monument to perpetuate the memory of his reign led him to think in particular of restoring at enormous expense the once magnificent temple at Jerusalem, which, after much bitter fighting during its siege first by Vespasian and then by Titus, had finally been stormed with great difficulty. Alypius of Antioch, who had once governed Britain as the praetorian prefects’ deputy, was placed in charge of this project. He set to work boldly, assisted by the governor of the province, but repeated and alarming outbursts of fire-balls near the foundations made it impossible to approach the spot. Some of the workmen were burnt to death, and the obstinate resistance of the fiery element caused the design to be abandoned.

Of course, Christians saw the project’s failure as a miracle. St. Gregory the Theologian—who, along with St. Basil the Great, had gone to school with Julian in Athens—condemns the emperor for his wicked opposition to Christianity and believes that God had intervened to prevent the Temple’s reconstruction. He speaks about a series of miraculous events, including a supernatural fire, preventing work on the Temple, and of the cross appearing above Jerusalem to both Christian and non-Christian alike. Moreover, Gregory sees God’s hand in Julian’s death at the Battle of Samarra in 363 as well. This view is also shared by St. Ephraim the Syrian, who in his Hymns Against Julian condemns the emperor’s project in Jerusalem as an affront to God. In fact, a tradition would even arise among Christians that Julian had actually been slain by none other than the Great Martyr Mercurius.

While the Roman Christian status quo was restored to Jerusalem following Julian’s death, as mentioned above, in 614, the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, would temporally lose control of the holy city. In an event likely spoken of by Qurʾan 30:2-5 and lamented by the Prophet Muhammad, the Zoroastrian Sasanian shah Khosrow II Parviz would conquer Jerusalem. Having taken the city, the Sasanians, along with their Palestinian Jewish allies, massacred thousands of Christians and destroyed numerous churches. Moreover, there seems to have been a notable Jewish movement in Jerusalem during this period to reconstruct the Temple. While it is unclear if the Jews were eventually expelled from the city by the Sasanians or later by the Byzantines in 628, the new plan to rebuild the Temple did not come to fruition. Furthermore, even though the emperor Heraclius himself would triumphantly enter Jerusalem in 630, the days of Byzantine-ruled Palestine were numbered. For the new religion that had arisen in Arabia among the descendants of Ishmael was about to change the face of Jerusalem and bring new life to the Temple Mount.

In the second part of this series, we will examine the place of the Temple in the Islamic tradition. Among other things, we will look at potential references to the Temple in the Qurʾan, the Prophet Muhammad’s connection to the city, and how the Arab conquest of Jerusalem transformed the Temple Mount from a Roman trash heap into a space dedicated to the worship of the God of Abraham.