Jesus and the Temple: The Crucifixion in its Jewish Context

Description

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.

Simon J. Joseph is Adjunct Professor of Religion at California Lutheran University. He is the author of Jesus, Q, and the Dead Sea Scrolls and The Nonviolent Messiah.

'There is much to be commended in this book. Jesus and the Temple is a very readable and well-researched investigation into the circumstances of Jesus's death. ... an engaging read and one full of tantalizing possibilities. Joseph's arguments deserve to be taken seriously by anyone interested in the study of the historical Jesus and the question of why he died.' Timothy Wardle, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society '... 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