Professional Documents
Culture Documents
--John J. Reilly
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Akenson's governing assumption is that the key event that created Christianity and Rabbinical
Judaism was the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in AD 70. Actually, he holds that there
never was such a thing as non-rabbinical Judaism. Akenson uses the words "Judahism" to refer
to the religion of Yahweh that existed in Palestine between the end of the Babylonian Captivity
in the sixth century BC and the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans. This was a religion of very many
sects, which often had little in common and sometimes were mutually hostile.
One growing sect after about AD 30 was the Jesus Faith. Another was the closely related (and
therefore antagonistic) movement known to us as the Pharisaism. (Akenson makes the
interesting observation that we know of just two self-proclaimed Pharisees. One was St. Paul,
the other was Flavius Josephus, the turncoat author of "The Jewish War.") Like the rest of
Judahism, these two groups greatly revered the Temple, and their religious practice was closely
connected with it. According to Akenson, it was only the destruction of the Temple that made it
possible for them to become separate religions. They then set themselves to replace the physical
temple with mental temples. Thus, the Christian scriptures came to refer to Jesus as the Temple,
while the rabbis came to equate studying the rituals that had been performed in the Temple
with actually conducting them.
The year AD 70 (well, the Roman-Jewish War of AD 66-73) is a comforting landmark to historians
of religion. God alone knows precisely when Jesus was born or what the Sadducees really
believed. For scholars of religion to study the first century, they must interpret and reinterpret
partisan texts of ambiguous provenance, all while living in terror that someone will blow their
beautiful theories to smithereens. (As, indeed, they themselves plan to do to the theories of
their colleagues.) For the Jewish War, in contrast, they have vivid first person accounts and sober
descriptions by the standard historians of the second century. Scholars are greatly tempted to
attribute decisive significance to this event for the perfectly understandable reason that they
happen to know a lot about it.
The problem is that the fall of the Temple need not have been decisive for the history of either
Christianity or Judaism.
The case of Christianity need not detain us. It is possible that the whole of the "Jesus Faith" was
reconfigured after AD 70 to show that it had always been independent of its homeland. Maybe
all that the earliest Jesus People wanted was to add a little filigree about the Messiah to their
Temple-based religious practice. Perhaps the entire canon of the New Testament grossly
misrepresents both the life of Jesus and the careers of the Apostles, particularly that of St. Paul.
Well, maybe. The problem with this sort of argument is like the problem with the argument that
God created the world in 4004 BC, fossils and all, to look as if it were billions of years old. The
fact is that the texts of the New Testament say what they say. They do not suggest that the
Temple was central to the concerns of the earliest Christians, or even to Jesus himself. If the New
Testament is judged to be wholly misleading on this matter, then fancy can wander freely.
However, the result will have nothing to do with history.
With Judaism, the matter is more complicated. The Mishnah, the code of the "oral law," does
consist in large part of loving recollection of the structure of the Temple and the rites performed
there. Prayers for the reconstruction of the Temple featured in public and private devotions for
centuries. These observations, however, do not address the question of whether this
preoccupation could not have developed had the Temple not been destroyed.
The obvious analogy is Islam. Like Judaism before AD 70, Islam has a ritual center, in Mecca. It
has a legal tradition, the Sharia, which resembles the Babylonian Talmud in seeking to be
completely comprehensive both of secular life and religious practice. It has a Book, the Koran,
which like the Torah is held to be a special, textual revelation from God. If anything, the Koran is
even more insistent on the importance of the ritual center at Mecca than is the Jewish canon
about Jerusalem, since the Koran enjoins Muslims to make a pilgrimage to Mecca if they possibly
can.
Something else that Judaism and Islam have in common is that their adherents have been
spread out all over the world for a very long time. This was true of Judaism (let us forget this
"Judahism" hypothesis) even during the period of the Second Temple. This is not the kind of
thing you would normally expect of a cult tied to a particular place, which is what is usually
meant by a "temple religion." The religion of the Classical world, like that of much of the Far East
today, is built around the particular shrines of local gods. Grand abstractions like "Zeus" or
"Shiva" are really for poets. The piety of the practitioners of these cults is always local. They
worship the god of one temple because he is the god of where they live. If they travel, then
naturally they worship the gods of the places through which they pass. To do otherwise would
seem nonsensical.
In contrast, what Judaism and Islam, as well as Christianity and some forms of Buddhism, have in
common is that they are fairly portable. You can find God wherever you are, and if a holy book
directs your attention to a sacred site on the far side of the world, then the site's sacredness
comes from the book and not the other way around. This is true today in the case of Islam, even
though a ritual center is an important part of its theology. It also has been true of Judaism since
the Babylonian Captivity. The term for this is monotheism, and it has more to do with how a
religion works than do the details of its ritual dimension.
That said, though, it is hard to imagine that the destruction of the Second Temple did not have
some effect on the evolution of Judaism. Here is what might have happened if the Angel of
Death had passed over the Temple in AD 70.
It is not difficult to imagine a history in which the Temple survives. The Roman-Jewish War was
also a civil war. The contenders actually held different parts of the Second Temple and fought
each other as the Romans invested the place. Supposedly, the Pharisees were not really very
keen on rebelling against Rome in the first place. That is why many of them were expelled from
Jerusalem by the zealots. One of their leaders, Yohanan ben Zakkai, then made a deal with the
Emperor Vespasian to allow Yohanan to found the academy at Jamnia, where the Mishnah began
to be composed. Suppose that, instead of abandoning Jerusalem, the Pharisees had contrived to
gain control of the Temple complex, or some large fraction of it. They might then have
negotiated with the Romans to, in effect, trade Jerusalem for the Temple by holding the later
against the rebels. Though much of the city might have been destroyed in the Roman assault,
still the Temple would have been spared.
Thereafter, the Temple would have continued to function as a ritual center as before, but with
some differences. For instance, immediately after the rebellion was put down, the Temple would
have found itself in the odd position of being a huge religious center without much of a
surrounding population. The Temple would have been in small danger of being abandoned: Jews
from all over the world came to visit and sent donations. Doubtless Jerusalem would have been
rebuilt, as it had been before. Still, activity in the Temple would have begun to shift away from
ritual and toward scholarship, particularly if the Pharisees were running the place. This would
have accelerated trends that had long existed in Judaism.
Even before Babylonian Captivity, the prophets complained that God was less impressed by
offerings in the Temple than by, say, the fair treatment of tenant farmers and the even
administration of justice. The ethical dimension to Judaism would certainly have continued to
develop, whether there was a temple or not. There is also some reason to suppose that the
ritual practiced at the Temple might have begun to change dramatically.
We have to remember that, when we talk about ritual in this context, was are talking about
animal sacrifice. This, of course, was typical of temples throughout the ancient world: they were
abattoirs. The difference was that the Jerusalem Temple was huge, one of the wonders of the
world, and to some extent it must have been a terrifying place. While this assessment may seem
to be the projection of modern delicacies onto ancient people, there is some evidence
otherwise. Noted Jewish authorities, including Maimonides himself, have argued that animal
sacrifice was a brutal practice that God sought first to restrict and then to eliminate. Also, for
what it is worth, we should remember that the other major religious survivor of first-century
Palestine, Christianity, dropped the practice of animal sacrifice from the first. (This was the case
even though Christianity, too, retained the basic texts on the subject in its Old Testament.)
Ironically, the emphasis given to the old rituals in the Mishnah and the Talmuds was due
precisely to the abruptness with which they were cut off. In the normal course of events, one
suspects, temple sacrifice would have become rarer and more symbolic, until eventually no
actual animals were killed at all. As it was, though, all the early rabbis were left with were
memories to record, which they did with great thoroughness.
We must therefore imagine the Temple continuing to function through late antiquity, becoming
all the while less like a Classical temple and more like an academy. There was one more major
Jewish revolt in Palestine, the Bar Kochba rebellion of the 130s. It is entirely possible that the
continued existence of the Temple would have defused this uprising. That rebellion is famous in
the study of Messianic millenarianism. (Bar Kochba was called the Messiah, though he may not
have claimed the title for himself.) However, richly endowed religious foundations usually take a
dim view of militant endtime movements, as the history of the Catholic Church illustrates.
Even if the influence of the conservative Temple failed to prevent the outbreak, the existence of
the Temple would still have altered matters. It is likely that the Temple authorities would have
stood aloof from the rebellion. Jerusalem might have been declared an open city, or it might
actually have resisted Bar Kochba in the name of Rome. Even if the insurgents gained control of
Jerusalem for a period, in this case the Romans would have had no reason to destroy the city or
the temple when they reconquered the country. Unlike the situation in AD 70, there would have
been a normative form of Judaism, one more concerned with the affairs of the spirit than with
those of this world. The Romans would have made haste to reestablish this orthodoxy in its chief
center as soon as they could. This would have been the quickest way to restore peace. After all,
this was pretty much what the Emperor Vespasian did with Rabbi Yohanan.
By the time Christianity became the Imperial religion in the fourth century, it is quite likely that
Jerusalem would have been a university town, like Athens or Alexandria. Like them, it would
have had increasing trouble with the Imperial government's wildly gyrating religious policies. In
the fifth century, these resulted in the closing of the academies in Palestine in which the
Jerusalem Talmud was composed. In 529, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian closed even the
Academy at Athens. It would thus be reasonable to suppose that, sometime in those centuries,
the Temple would have been converted into a church, and the associated schools into
seminaries.
In the seventh century, with the appearance of Islam, the role of Jerusalem in world history
would have become considerably different. It is conceivable that the attraction of Jerusalem,
with the Temple intact, might have preempted the choice of Mecca as the center of Muslim
worship. (Mohammed prayed to Jerusalem for a time, even without the Temple.) This would
have had considerable consequences for the development of later Islamic civilization. Neither
Mecca nor Medina are suitable points from which to administer a great empire. They are too
isolated, too small, and they depend on local resources that are too thin. To a lesser extent, the
same is also true of Jerusalem. As the Ummayid and Abbasid Dynasties realized, Damascus or
Baghdad was far preferable. However, if Jerusalem had been the goal of the Haj, with the Temple
now the holiest of Mosques, it was close enough to the Mediterranean's major trade routes that
it could have continued its role as a center of learning. Jerusalem is wrongly placed to be a large
city. With the Temple, however, it would never have become a backwater.
In later centuries, Jerusalem would have been captured and lost by the Crusaders, patronized
and abused by the Turks. Its political history might not have been dramatically different from
that in our own world. The biggest difference would have come in the 20th century. In 1900,
Palestine was a relatively lightly populated country. Its cities, including Jerusalem, were of mainly
historical interest. Had the Temple been the center of Islam, however, these things would not
have been the case. Certainly the enterprise of Zionism would have been inconceivable. Jews
might well have had easy access to the Temple by the second half of the 20th century. Christians
have been able to hold services in the Hagia Sofia under the Turkish Republic, to take a
comparable case. Nevertheless, we must consider the possibility that one consequence of the
preservation of the Temple in the first century might have been the non-existence of Israel in the
twentieth.