Jesus and the Temple, Actual and Symbolic
This post will repeat some of the content of earlier posts, but I’ve put that content in to address a central preoccupation of Mark 11-13, namely the Temple as the central symbol of the nation of Israel.
Starting in Mark 11, Jesus arrived at the Temple, which formed the focus of his attention for the next three complete chapters of Mark, ending with his trial before the Sanhedrin. The Temple was the holiest of sites for the Jewish nation, containing in its deepest recesses the Holy of Holies where the High Priest visited God once a year. Jesus had visited the Temple many times over his lifetime as a devout Jew, and this visit was his last.
Embedded in the narrative are symbols relating to the nation of Israel. Jesus cursed the fig tree for being fruitless, reminding his followers of the traditional symbolism in which the fig tree represents Israel. This fig tree which has put all its energy into leaves rather than into buds that will fruit is a living parable. Its owners have not pruned it into fruitfulness (as per Sarah Ruden, The Gospels, 43, n.). The next day, the dried up tree was a pointed warning to his followers about what was coming for Israel and the temple.
The allusion provided by the fig tree signifies in two directions. First, the ideal of human life is often referred to in the first Testament as sitting under one’s own vine and fig tree. National peace allows unmolested cultivation of crops, including those with some degree of luxury and pleasure. This picture of peace is found throughout the Jewish scriptures. Second, the prophets often target this picture and show its destruction as a sign of God’s displeasure and judgment. The prophet Joel depicts the judgment of the Lord as coming in a horde of locusts destroying the vines and fig trees, and the regeneration of Israel as productive vine and fig tree (1:7, 11; 2:22). The prophet Hosea, speaking for God: “I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness, … as the first ripe in the fig tree…” but they followed after idols (9:10). The prophet Amos identifies the diseased and worm-eaten vines and fig trees as the judgment of God, who says, “yet you have not returned to me” (4:9). It would be hard for people familiar with the prophets to miss this allusion.
In case this was too subtle an allusion, Jesus then told a pointed and provocative parable about a vineyard. What immediately precedes this parable in Mark is the confrontation between the priests, etc., and Jesus over where his authority is from.
“A man planted a vineyard, and put a wall around it, and dug a vat under the winepress, and built a tower, and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey” (Mark 12:1).
No one familiar with the Hebrew prophets would have missed this quotation from the prophet Isaiah. In Isaiah 5, the prophet writes: “Let me sing now for my well-beloved a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard. My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. And he dug it all around, removed its stones, and planted it with the choicest vine. And he built a tower in the middle of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; then he expected it to produce good grapes, but it produced only worthless ones. And now…I will lay it waste…For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his delightful plant. Thus he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress…Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil…Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and clever in their own sight.” The prophecy goes on to predict the defeat and downfall of the nation of Israel.
Jesus essentially said that the same conditions that provoked judgment before have occurred again, and even worse, and how can they hope to escape? This had to be infuriating: Jesus tapped into the Jewish national fear that they would lose their holiest of places, the Temple, which God inhabited, and that they would again be dispersed as exiles. And it confirmed their suspicion that Jesus’s message and person have political implications. This suspicion became more intense as he continued.
The disciples pointed out the grandeur of the Temple, and Jesus said it would be torn down. They asked when, and he said, “Many will come in My name saying, ‘I am He!’ There will be wars, earthquakes, famines, the beginning as of birth pangs. You will be persecuted for My sake, and the Holy Spirit will give you the words to speak. Family members will deliver you to death, and all will hate you because of me. The one who endures will be saved. Then the Abomination of Desolation appears. Run for the hills, don’t stop to take your valuables. This will be the worst trouble since the beginning of creation, and no one will survive if the Lord does not shorten those days. And do not believe any who say, ‘Here is the Christ.’”
These are terrifying words, but for the Jewish hearers, the worst is yet to come.
“But when you see ‘the abomination of desolation’ standing where it should not be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains” (Mark 13:14).
This famous phrase, “the abomination of desolation,” comes out of the book of Daniel. (I think the advice to the reader was interpolated by the gospel writer, knowing that his Gentile readers needed to do some research, rather than a direct quotation from Jesus.)
The fact that Jesus quoted from the apocalyptic book of Daniel requires attention. I was brought up to read the whole Bible with an ingenuous understanding that the stories were written just after the events they narrate, sort of like a diary, that prophecies were about future events, and that events took place as literally as their representation in the text. I also shared with others like me an anxiety over any question that opened up the possibility that scripture included fiction or legend or even oral tradition that was written down much later than the events, or that prophecy could legitimately be insights about events current to the prophet.
As I myself learned a dead language, Anglo-Saxon (Old English), and grappled with the trouble of translating it, and then investigated the questions arising from the relationship of the text to historical events (see Beowulf for an example), I became less anxious about the Bible as well. As a Christian, the Bible remains a measuring stick for my behavior and a source of my understanding of who God is and what Jesus came to do for us, my sacred text. I have become more at ease with thinking of it also as a complex text with many kinds of literature in it. It could have as a motto “Let the reader understand” meaning “This is going to take some study and imagination on your part, reader.”
Also, as I grew in my experience of God’s love and my understanding of God’s character, the literal interpretation of events in the Bible became less crucial to my faith. I had existential experiences of God in my life that pointed me toward seeing the whole of the Bible as the record of others’ experiences of God. The religious communities who discerned what should be in the Bible seemed to me to have chosen a collection that requires reverent imagination to reconcile together. I also became convinced that we cannot read innocently, or in other words, without the pressures of our upbringing and our experience and our allegiances, and thus that before accepting any one reading, it must be tested against the whole Bible, and particularly against the character and teaching of Jesus.
For me, the book of Daniel presents all of the textual problems that previously I could barely acknowledge. According to The Jewish Study Bible, it has two parts: legends of Daniel and other Jewish heroes in the royal courts and four apocalyptic visions. Complicating the matter is the fact that both Hebrew and Aramaic are used, but do not define the boundary between the two parts. The first part probably circulated orally in the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE, and the second part likely dates to the last year of the Maccabean revolt (164 BCE) (JSB, 1640). As with other apocalyptic literature, the scholarly understanding is that they are written after the facts they describe, a symbolic recounting of the history that gives credence to the prophecies about the future (JSB, 1642). Robert Alter points out the similarities between Daniel and the Apocrypha apocalyptic texts, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, all written in the 2nd century BCE (Writings, 747).
Jewish commentary notes the occurrence for the first and only time in the Jewish Scriptures of the idea of personal resurrection in Daniel 12:2-3. There is also an emphasis on the faithful few, and a judgment separating those who deserve reward from those who deserve disgrace. This resurrection was a tenet of faith for the Pharisees of Jesus’s time and persists in some Jewish sects to the present.
Jewish and Christian commentators see different things in this book. Christians have seen prefigurations of Christ; Jewish rabbis have seen the book as a symbolic description of the exilic past and present threats (1642). Thus, the Jewish Scriptures categorize Daniel with “The Writings,” while the Christian Scriptures place it among the prophetic books. This reflects how I understand what goes into the act of reading and understanding: we are unavoidably biased in how we interpret what we read, even when we try very hard to be neutral. So it interests me even more to see what Jesus emphasizes out of Daniel and how he appears to understand it.
So back to Jesus referencing “the Abomination of Desolation.” The first reference is in Daniel 9:27. During the first year of Darius, the Mede, Daniel prays for compassion on his people, repents on their behalf, reminds God of the despair of the chosen people. While he is praying, Gabriel comes and gives him insight into the destiny of his people. They will have “70 weeks” to restrain transgression, seal up sins, make atonement, bring in everlasting righteousness and anoint the holy place. After 69 weeks, the Messiah will be cut off, and a foreign prince will come to destroy the city and the sanctuary. He will in the 70th week stop the offerings, “and on the wing of abomination will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate.”
Commentary in The Jewish Study Bible identifies the word Messiah, which means “anointed one,” with the high priest Onias III, killed in 171 BCE. The foreign prince is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who placed new altar stones on the Temple altar and offered pagan sacrifices (JSB, 1660, n.). Scholars believe that a portion of the Jewish nation at the time collaborated with Antiochus.
By referencing this history, Jesus invoked the understanding from the prophets that the Jewish people suffered invasion and exile because of their idolatry, but he also challenged the politics of his present day. The Sadducees, the priests, were willing to collaborate with Herod and Pilate, representatives of the Roman occupiers, in order to rid themselves of Jesus, fearing that Jesus himself would provoke an invasion by his talk of a kingdom. The Pharisees were willing to cooperate with the Sadducees, their religious opponents, in order to rid themselves of Jesus, who consistently provoked them by pointing out how their outward pious observances covered inward corruption and compromise. Jesus foresaw that their efforts to preserve the political and religious status quo would in the near future be desolated by invasion and ruin. Jesus also contributed to the interpretation that the Messiah referenced in Daniel applied to him also as God’s anointed one. Death is the fate of God’s anointed ones who stand in the way of political and religious self-perpetuation and self-aggrandizement.
During the reign of Cyrus the Persian, Daniel previews (or reviews) the shifting empires of the area. A particularly evil king, a usurper of power, will lose a battle, and take his disappointment out on the people of the holy covenant. “And forces from him will arise, desecrate the sanctuary fortress, and do away with the regular sacrifice. And they will set up the abomination of desolation” (Daniel 11:31). And he will entice those irreligious away from the covenant but the people who know their God will display strength and take action.
This again details the rise and course of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (JSB, 1664), including the Jewish sympathizers who enable him to take over the Temple worship and the Maccabees who “take action” to avenge the desecration.
This next passage comes toward the end of Daniel, where the writing has moved from the symbolic review of history into apocalyptic prophecy. The shift occurs at Daniel 11:40, with the phrase, “At the time of the end.” The events described from here to the end of Daniel have no historical reference, making this a foretelling of the future, in which a major battle will occur in the area near Jerusalem. A time of great suffering will occur, the worst since there was a nation. Wickedness and goodness will be separated and appear in clarity. When the power of the holy people is shattered, the events are completed. Daniel does not understand, and asks what will be the final end. “Many will be purged, purified and refined; but the wicked will act wickedly, and none of the wicked will understand, but those who have insight will understand. And from the time that the regular sacrifice is abolished, and the abomination of desolation is set up, there will be 1290 days” (Daniel 12:11).
Perhaps Jesus was foretelling the Roman invasion in 70 CE as a fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy. At the same time, Jesus’s quotation alludes to the historical abomination of desolation, the idolatrous profanation of the holy place by a political leader, supported in his despicable action by some of the chosen people. It is possible that Jesus used the historical (and possible future) profanation as a metaphor for the way he saw the religious establishment of his day profaning the Temple by making it a “den of thieves.” Perhaps also Jesus was thinking about how his own person would be violated and destroyed at the behest of Jewish leaders using the tools of the Romans. This possibility resonates with Jesus’s words as reported in other gospels, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” referring, as other gospel writers say, to his own body.
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