Jesus and the Temple
The Crucifixion in its Jewish Context

This volume investigates the cultural, political, economic, and religious conflicts that led to the historical Jesus' arrest, trial, and execution.

Simon J. Joseph (Author)

9781107125353, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 January 2016

342 pages
22.4 x 14.4 x 2.2 cm, 0.59 kg

'… this is an excellent scholarly work on the historical Jesus and an insightful resource for both undergraduate and graduate courses on the topic.' Yongbom Lee, Horizons

Most Jesus specialists agree that the Temple incident led directly to Jesus' arrest, but the precise relationship between Jesus and the Temple's administration remains unclear. Jesus and the Temple examines this relationship, exploring the reinterpretation of Torah observance and traditional Temple practices that are widely considered central components of the early Jesus movement. Challenging a growing tendency in contemporary scholarship to assume that the earliest Christians had an almost uniformly positive view of the Temple's sacrificial system, Simon J. Joseph addresses the ambiguous, inconsistent, and contradictory views on sacrifice and the Temple in the New Testament. This volume fills a significant gap in the literature on sacrifice in Jewish Christianity. It introduces a new hypothesis positing Jesus' enactment of a program of radically nonviolent eschatological restoration, an orientation that produced Jesus' conflicts with his contemporaries and inspired the first attributions of sacrificial language to his death.

1. The death of Jesus as an historical and theological problem
2. The eschatological Torah
3. The eschatological Temple
4. The Temple controversy
5. Redescribing the Temple incident: towards a new model of eschatological restoration
6. The Jewish Christian rejection of animal sacrifice
7. The dying savior
Summary and conclusion.

Subject Areas: Judaism [HRJ], The historical Jesus [HRCA], Christianity [HRC]