Jesus and the Temple: The Crucifixion in its Jewish Context

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.

• Links the Temple incident and Jesus' death while carefully distinguishing between historical and theological interpretations of both
• Resolves long-standing contradictions and inconsistencies about the Temple and sacrifice in New Testament studies and Jesus research
• Provides a historically compelling explanation for why Jesus died

• Table of Contents
• 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.