Sublime

The result is a very different charge against the Temple from that of economic trickery—for which, indeed, there is comparatively little evidence in exactly this period.191 Instead, the evidence, as Borg argued in 1984, ‘points decisively to the role of the Temple in resistance toward Rome’.192 As in Jeremiah’s day, the Temple had become the focal

this seems new or surprising to you, this is likely because centuries of Christian anti-Judaism have profoundly distorted the way Judaism is seen and understood, even, tragically, by many—probably most—Jews.

There is no historical verisimilitude in the picture of the Pharisees as petty, and perhaps Pelagian, legalists. There is no evidence that the Pharisees as such were directly involved in the events which led to Jesus’ actual death. And there is no connection, in this scheme, between the Pharisees’ reaction to Jesus and the Temple incident, which lo

Ephesus had become an epicenter of imperial cult in Asia Minor, with a local temple to “the Goddess Roma and the Divine Augustus” and a provincial temple to the emperor Domitian.

Hatred and persecution of Jews goes back to biblical times. It was continued by the Greeks and Romans. It found a special place in Christian theology.

Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The J

The early Christians believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, not, as some Jewish apologists today have absurdly said, “the Christian Messiah.”

The Stoic philosopher Seneca was not alone among the Roman elite in wondering how it had possibly come to pass in Jerusalem that “the vanquished have given laws to the victors.”

Nor was Israel created as a kind of worldly superpower (though it may have looked like that in the time of David and Solomon), a new nation that would beat the world at its own game. Rather—and this is something the early Christians come to with hindsight, only at that stage tracing its earlier stages in the Psalms and prophets—the point is that th