The Problem with the Destruction of the Temple

[Secret Alias]

There is a problem with the entire approach that scholarship has to the importance of the temple in the Gospel of Mark. As it stands we have two almost antithetical ideas when we approach the destruction of the temple:

1. we are told that it was a cataclysmic event the most important event in Jewish history which proved that God was angry with the Jewish people for their sins. In other words, the temple is good and holy but God punished the Jews for other sins by destroying this holy building - a sign of his covenant with his 'chosen people.'
2. we are told from early Christians like St Stephen, the pseudo-Clementines and perhaps even the gospel of Mark that the temple was in itself something bad and that God was punishing the Jewish people for constructing something as monstrous as a permanent physical structure perhaps with even part of the effrontery was that the permanent building had a roof.

What I am saying is that we are led to our understanding of the significance of the destruction of the temple through modern - and specifically - rabbinic source which with their celebration of the Tisha B'Av that the temple was holy and that the destruction was caused by sin in other respects - not for having constructed a horrible building like this.

I think it is important to think about the claim that Marcion 'hated' the Jews, hated the Jewish god and hated the Jewish religion from this perspective. If it was understood to be Jewish orthodoxy that the temple was good and the destruction was caused by other sins - not the sin of making a permanent building - then Marcionism was necessarily viewed as anti-Jewish. But given the fact that we know that the significance of the temple was not viewed 'monolithically' as necessarily holy or vile within Judaism it is easy to see that within the right context Marcionism's 'dislike' of the temple might not be viewed as something necessarily 'anti-Jewish' or 'anti-Yahwehist.'

For instance Stephen would necessarily have agreed with Marcion that the destruction of the temple was divinely sanctioned. So too we must suppose that the community which produced the pseudo-Clementines. Similarly if τὸ βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως = the temple, the holy of holies or was re-interpreted to mean the existence of a permanent building at Jerusalem we can see a possible agreement with Marcionism.

The point is that Jewish groups today with their appalling 'wailing at the wall' represents a complete revision of the complex relationship which must have existed between the permanent temple built by the hated Herod the Great and the Jewish community. We shouldn't forget that the Pentateuch DOES NOT proscribe the construction of a permanent tabernacle but instance a flimsy portable one. Things are not always as they appear at first glance.

One might also suppose that Qumran community living in the desert or at least removed from the permanent temple might be part of a movement which did not view the contemporary Herodian building as 'holy.' Samaritans had their permanent temple destroyed at the turn of the first century BCE and managed to get along fine without it. There is no special memory of that temple with Samaritanism and in fact the orthodox position within the religion is that the building never existed!

As the Samaritans demonstrate - and even any semi-conscious reading of the Pentateuch - a permanent temple is NOT NECESSARY for the carrying out of sacrifices. Why it is that we perpetuate the nonsense that the end of the physical building 'necessarily' meant the end of sacrifices is another absurdity. Unless evidence is uncovered that the Romans made the sacrifices illegal at Jerusalem we can only assume that the Jews voluntarily abandoned animal sacrifices or it was imposed on them by Agrippa in the years after the temple's destruction. Either way we are often guilty of allowing Jews to redefine the history of the period based upon the rabbinic agenda - i.e. that the end of sacrifices was necessary and divinely sanctioned.

It is very difficult to actually make sense of why sacrifices did not continue after 70 CE if not in Jerusalem at least somewhere nearby. While Judaism became defined by the loss of the temple, why it became defined in the particular manner in which it was defined, has not been given adequate thought by scholarship. It is a touchy subject which threatens to challenge the way we think of what it meant to be Jewish in the post-destruction landscape. As such it has a great deal of significance over whether or not Marcionism was in fact a Jewish sect first and foremost.

[Secret Alias]

Also let's consider a parallel modern event - the Holocaust. Has a monolithic Jewish 'theological' understanding of that event emerged 60 years + after 1945? No. So it isn't surprising that we shouldn't expect a monolithic 'Jewish attitude' toward the destruction of the temple by the time of the Bar Kochba revolt. But even thereafter it seems strange to suppose that the 'God destroyed the temple (and perpetrated a holocaust against the Jews) because of their sins' would have gained any traction among Jews. What did the Jews do wrong other than build the fucking temple in the first place? Clearly the sacrifices were maintained as the Pentateuch proscribed. What was their bloody crime if not building the permanent structure in the first? How bad could 'their sins' have been for God to decide to slaughter one million Jews?

The fact that we haven't seen Jews claim that God killed them for their sins 60 + years on after a similar percentage of overall Jewry in the modern world is a good sign that this radical position is untenable. Yes one can argue that the prophets said this or that. But as we all know you can get the prophets to say almost anything. The idea that Jews bought into a system that said 'we're to blame' for our suffering is one thing. But to posit that God slaughtered all the inhabitants of Jerusalem for some technicality and that this view emerged immediately after 70 CE (i.e. the writing of the gospel of Mark) is absurd. It still isn't clear what the crime or violation was that would justify a divine holocaust.

The slaughtering and abuse half a century earlier doesn't make sense either if this message (i.e. the gospel) was appealed to Jews. After all where in the Pentateuch or the prophetic writings does it say that God is going to come back to earth and not tell anyone and you (pl) are going to abuse him and kill him? Where is the specific 'law' that is violated with this act especially when God didn't explicitly tell the Jews 'I am God.'

And getting back to Isaiah and Jeremiah and all the other prophets associated with the sinfulness of Jews. When the prophetic writings were read during the functioning of sacrifices in Jerusalem, did those engaging in the proscribed religious observances of the Pentateuch read all the warnings in the prophetic writings as something necessarily anachronistic? I mean it must have been known that the kings of Israel did not do all the things Moses proscribed in the Law. So they must have read Isaiah and the rest in a different way than we do. 'Ah, those stupid bastards in the age of the kings. They had the Pentateuch of Moses and still they didn't fulfill all the commandments of God. No wonder the temple was eventually destroyed.'

But in an age where the sacrifices were being dutifully carried out, it must have been difficult if not impossible to make sense of the destruction. That's why you'd have to suppose that only solution was to question whether or not the Pentateuch was indeed the will of God, whether it was written by Moses or falsely crafted by Ezra as a reproduction of something written by Moses. All of which leads us back to Marcion. Yes, in age where it had been 'decided' that God decreed the holocaust in Jerusalem, that God sanctioned the destruction of the temple Marcion's position that the Law, the temple, the whole Second Commonweath 'sham' was a false religion would seem 'anti-Jewish.' But surely in the period before all this had been decided Marcion could surely have been a 'good Jew' who simply denied some aspects of the 'sham' which preceded the destruction.

To this end I can make a very reasonable case that Marcion was a Jew or Marcionism represented the sincere beliefs of a community of Jews who simply said the religion of the Second Commonwealth period wasn't the religion of our ancestors at the time of Moses. The Pentateuch was a lie. The Israelites didn't sacrifice all these fucking animals as a wandering people in the desert. It's fucking absurd. That's why God came back just before his plan to wipe out this abominable shitty religion and introduced something better to the apostle. He could say this and be a 'good Jew' if he was a Jew.

[andrewcriddle]

IIUC you are suggesting that Marcion was in effect pro-Abraham (and pro God's covenant with Abraham) but hostile to Moses.
This might well be a plausible position in the 2nd century CE, but do we have any evidence that Marcion himself believed this ?

Andrew Criddle

[Secret Alias]

A circumstantial one (if you are correct). The Acts of Archelaus.

1. the text purports to be set in Harran (Osroene) c. 260 CE
2. Bauer claims the region was Marcionite
3. there is a strange understanding of orthodoxy at the heart of the text where Paul = the Paraclete (Marcionite according to Origen Homilies on Luke)
4. there is a strange Abrahamic segue in the middle of the narrative where Abraham's hospitality (perhaps the theophany with three visitors) is said to have prefigured Marcellus/Marcion's

When Marcellus, the man of consummate piety, had heard this recital, he burst into a flood of tears, touched with pity for misfortunes so great and so various. But making no delay, he at once prepared victuals for the sufferers, and did service with his own hand for the wearied; in this imitating our father Abraham the patriarch, who, when he entertained the angels hospitably on a certain occasion, did not content himself with merely giving the order to his slaves to bring a calf from the herd, but did himself, though advanced in years, go and place it on his shoulders and fetch it in, and did with his own hand prepare food, and set it before the angels. So Marcellus, in discharge of a similar office, directed them to be seated as his guests in companies of ten; and when the seven hundred tables were all provided, he refreshed the whole body of the captives with great delight, so that those who had strength to survive what they had been called to endure, forgot their toils, and became oblivious of all their ills. When, however, they had reached the fifteenth day, and while Marcellus was still liberally supplying all things needful for the prisoners, it seemed good to him that they should all be put in possession of the means of returning to their own parts, with the exception of those who were detained by the attention which their wounds demanded; and providing the proper remedies for these, he instructed the rest to depart to their own country and friends. And even to all these charities Marcellus added yet larger deeds of piety. For with a numerous band of his own dependants he went to look after the burying of the bodies of those who had perished on the march; and for as many of these as he could discover, of whatsoever condition, he secured the sepulture which was meet for them. And when this service was completed he returned to Charra, and gave permission to the wounded to return thence to their native country when their health was sufficiently restored, providing also most liberal supplies for their use on their journey. And truly the estimate of this deed made a magnificent addition to the repute of the other noble actions of Marcellus; for through that whole territory the fame of the piety of Marcellus spread so grandly, that large numbers of men belonging to various cities were inflamed with the intensest desire to see and become acquainted with the man, and most especially those persons who had not had occasion to bear penury before — to all of whom this remarkable man, following the example of a Marcellus of old, furnished aid most indulgently, so that they all declared that there was no one of more illustrious piety than this man. Yea, all the widows, too, who were believers in the Lord had recourse to him, while the imbecile also could reckon on obtaining at his hand most certain help to meet their circumstances; and the orphaned, in like manner, were all supported by him, so that his house was declared to be the hospice for the stranger and the indigent. And above all this, he retained in a remarkable and singular measure his devotion to the faith, building up his own heart upon the rock that shall not be moved.

[Secret Alias]

Another difficulty. The modern Jewish understanding (entirely reactionary I might add) that the five books were given by god on Sinai makes Yahweh responsible for the sacrificial religion of the temple. Yet the original understanding was clearly that only the ten commandments were given by god on Sinai. What's neat about the false Jewish reading is that it gets out of certain difficulties that emerge with the correct reading. In other words, it allows us to simply think that Yahweh instituted the priesthood and the rules of sacrifice and so couldn't have ordered its destruction in 70 CE.

Yet it is clear that torah is used in Deuteronomy to mean only the ten utterances on Sinai. This is the way the Samaritans still read the book of Deuteronomy and the Sadducees undoubtedly read the text the same way. To this end we have a much more complex situation where at the core of the Pentateuch we find a narrative that effectively narrates only the giving of the ten god-given ordinance, the Ten Commandments but as a secondary layer also institutes a complex sacrificial system which included a hereditary priesthood. It is difficult to figure out what the ur-text read like or appeared like (Deuteronomy itself is a 'second law' or secondary text). But whatever the case may be, the narrative of the reception of the ten utterances was not understood to be holy in itself or at least not on the same level of holiness as the words which came from god, the Ten Commandments.

To this end, it is at least conceivable that a more primitive religion like that of Dositeanism could have shrugged off the destruction of the temple. God didn't give the temple. God didn't even inscribe the words which established the instructions for how to build the desert tabernacle. These came from Moses purporting to be the words of God but clearly there was at the hint that this may not have been so. There seems to be something secondary even about the existence of the Pentateuch.

The lasting relic from antiquity (i.e. 'antiquity' from the perspective of the Second Commonwealth) was the testimony of broken pieces of the original tablets. It is said that the broken and the completed 'second law' were both preserved in the ark of the covenant. But this seems to mirror a more original idea that all that was left of the original covenant was were broken stones. This reminds me at least of the situation we moderns face when trying to piece together archaeological 'ruins.' So it is that the second commonwealth began its reconstruction with a side by side symbol of the past (the broken tablets) and the future (the 'restored' tablets).

It is entirely possible that the ten utterances could have survived their physical destruction by a passing on of oral and written records. Nevertheless the side by side symbol of past and future, death and resurrection, clearly had an influence on the story of the Christian resurrection. For the giving of the Torah is understood to have happened with the same ambiguity inherent in the Christian 'three days/after three days':

After Moses had gone down the mountain to the people, he consecrated them, and they washed their clothes. Then he said to the people, “Prepare yourselves for the third day. Abstain from sexual relations.” On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled ...

And then the torah was given. Of course the one inscribed by god was destroyed and then afterwards one written by Moses follows:

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write these words, for according to the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel. So he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And he (Moses) wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

At the very least the picture seems to reinforce the situation of having broken and whole 'torahs' preserved in the temple. From a manufacturing perspective it would have been difficult to preserve a 'magic' testimony, one would before 'actual' fire letters written by the hand of god. So Ezra conspired to have a 'broken' copy of the 'magic' torah and one that was obviously written by Moses by a (human) hand.

The idea that Moses was actively involved as a human '(re)interpreter' of what was originally written by god mirrors Ezra's own activity at the start of the Second Commonwealth. I think the humanly transcribed torah alongside the broken 'magic' tablets allows for the idea that Moses innovated with respect to the sacrificial religion. Surely if Moses wrote the 'surviving' torah he also could have added new commandments which formed the Pentateuch. This must have been Ezra's craftiness, acknowledging that only the ten commandments 'literally' came from 'god's hand' but allowing for Moses 'the interpreter' to have written a new copy.

For we learned in a Baraita: Three things Moses did on his own responsibility, and the Holy One, blessed be He, agreed with him: he added one day, [to the two days of separation God had ordained]; he separated from his wife [completely. He began the separation as the rest of the people did, but after the Giving of the Torah he did not go back to his wife (Rashi)], and he broke the Tablets.

Clearly if the door is opened to Moses actively independently from god we could expect to find establishing the entire sacrificial religion of Israel as yet another of Moses's innovations.

Interestingly as a side note the Christians and Philo must have understood the separation as something that Moses did under instruction from God given that they interpreted the final commandment 'do not lust' as exactly the kind of behavior demonstrated by Moses and the people.

The point here of course is that - despite Giuseppe's simple minded arguments to the contrary - there does seem to be a way in which Marcionites and early Christians could have been 'anti-Jewish' or against the (sacrificial) religion of the Second Commonwealth period and still have been pro-god of Israel. Moreover given that the earliest Pentateuchal narratives seem to allow for there to be two powers (i.e. where one speaks from heaven and another was on the mountain) one might even allow for the fact that Moses's independence was partly attributable to the 'weakness' of the power on the mountain. In other words, his 'dispatch' to Israel was something of a stop gap measure.