Jesus, the Temple, and Early Christian Memory
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
Jewish identity during the Second Temple period (515 BCE-70 CE) was complex, multifaceted, and variable, but many studies of this period treat Jewish attitudes toward one key feature--the Jerusalem temple--as simple and uniform. Brevard aims to complicate this notion by examining early Christian traditions of Jesus’s relationship with the temple. Early Christian memory constructed, transformed, and transmitted traditions about the past into their present contexts. Examining early Christian memory, as represented by canonical and noncanonical gospel traditions in the first three centuries CE, allows scholars to ask how certain figures, institutions, or beliefs were remembered and represented, as well as to posit theories as to why memories were constructed in particular ways and how these memories related to their contemporary historical and social frameworks. Early Christians remembered Jesus as having a complex relationship with the Jerusalem temple, and these early Christian traditions of Jesus impacted their own contemporary worldviews. This complicated relationship with the temple, however, was not a new phenomenon but one that was already familiar to those constructing, experiencing, remembering, and transmitting their Jewish identity throughout the diaspora world in the Second Temple period.
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- Complicates the notion that Jewish attitudes toward the Jerusalem temple were simple.
- Examines early Christian traditions of Jesus’s relationship with the temple.
- Argues that early Christians’ complicated relationship with the temple.
Distinguished by its engaging style and judicious selection of dialogue partners, Scott Brevard’s excellent book demonstrates how a nuanced analysis of social memory theory and Jewish attitudes to the Jerusalem temple can sharpen our grasp of how the early Christians remembered Jesus and the temple—and why they did so in the ways they did.
——Wayne Coppins, Professor of Religion, University of Georgia
Scott Brevard’s analysis breaks essential new ground in its attention to the most obvious yet so far completely neglected ‘site of memory’ in the study of Christian origins: the Jerusalem Temple. Theoretically grounded and carefully reasoned, this work will open up a new, fertile area for scholarly enquiry.
——Alan Kirk, Professor of Religion, James Madison University