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The Temple Character of Early Christianity Winthrop University Digital Commons @ Winthrop University Graduate Theses The Graduate School 12-2016 The eT mple Character of Early Christianity Matthew iH gdon Winthrop University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/graduatetheses Part of the History of Christianity Commons, and the History of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Higdon, Matthew, "The eT mple Character of Early Christianity" (2016). Graduate Theses. 46. https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/graduatetheses/46 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the The Graduate School at Digital Commons @ Winthrop University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Winthrop University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE TEMPLE CHARACTER OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY A Thesis Presented to the Faculty Of the College of Arts and Sciences In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Of Master of Arts In History Winthrop University December, 2016 By Matthew E. Higdon i Abstract I will argue that early Christianity more or less comprehensively envisioned itself, across varying traditions, to be a human-temple community, or a series of such communities; and that this word picture, this symbol, to a certain extent ordered their social life and aspirations. I propose three interlocking aspects to this priestly sociology. First, there is the element of unity. From the beginning, the temple model promoted unity, and it became particularly important later among very disparate groups of people within the church Second, the cultic motif generated a fresh kind of priestly ethics appropriate to the self-understanding of the movement. Third, for early Christians the temple framework, fleshing out perception into praxis, both foreshadowed and actualized the future New Creation—in which all such apocalyptically-minded Christians believed. This thesis examines the first 100 years of Christianity in order to observe how and why this group perceived itself as a human temple and how this self-perception played out in the wider Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds. ii Acknowledgements This thesis is dedicated to my loving wife, Alana Higdon. I wish also to acknowledge, gratefully, my thesis advisor, Dr. Gregory Bell, who spent many hours reading my thesis chapters, revising them, and making recommendations; and the other committee members—Dr. Edward Lee, Dr. Peter Judge, and Dr. Robert McEachnie—for reading the thesis and offering valuable input as well. iii Table of Contents Part I: Introduction Chapter One . 2 Part II: Laying the Foundation Chapter Two . 30 Chapter Three . 59 Part III: Constructing the Human Temple Chapter Four . 87 Chapter Five . 153 Chapter Six . 205 Part IV: Conclusion Chapter Seven . 265 Bibliography . 277 1 Part I Introduction 2 Chapter One Temples and Times, Scholars and Perceptions Temples, Then and Now Imagine standing before a huge, colonnaded hall. The massive pillars—each thicker than a full-grown tree—stretch up seemingly into the sky, where the great roof they support features sculptures of festive celebrations, famous battles, and renowned gods. This building is dedicated to the city’s patron goddess, Pallas Athena. Crowds mingle. Some carry fruits and herbs; others, live animals. Passing through the colonnades of the front porch, there is another set of columns, and beyond those is a doorway into the most sacred part of the whole structure: the inner room where Athena’s statue keeps watch over her abode, where also worshippers kneel, pray, give thanks, or offer up sacrifices. Behind that is a backroom, where the priestess discerns divine counsel. On the other side of the backroom, the rear colonnade allows the devout to leave the premises of the sanctuary.1 A tourist who visits these ancient ruins in Athens today might ask a question: “What is the significance of these old temples?” The full dynamic of ancient temples was 1 The description above is an imaginary re-enactment of what one might see if he or she was transplanted to the Parthenon in its once-glorious array, upon the Acropolis in ancient Athens. See “Reconstructed Diagram of the Parthenon,” in Tony Spawforth, The Complete Greek Temples (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 76–77. 3 far more culturally encompassing than that of modern church buildings—most of which, today, are little more than a convenient place to meet once or twice a week. In fact, ancient temples like the Parthenon were far more than just buildings. They acted as a cultural meeting point, where social, economic, and political beliefs and systems of the time converged. Once built, these structures stood in the face of economic, political, and social change. The matter of how subjugated peoples responded to conquerors’ religion(s), of how to incorporate cultic rituals, not the least of which was emperor worship, into their own civic life, is more complex. Scholars have addressed the issue.2 It depended, in part, on where one was born, whether one’s social background embraced many of the elements of Hellenistic culture (as pagans overwhelmingly did), or rejected some of those elements (as some Jews did), or rejected the whole package (as the ethnically-strictest Jews seem to have done).3 2 Recent scholarship includes James S. Jeffers, The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era: Exploring the Background of Early Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1999); Karl Galinsky, “Continuity and Change: Religion in the Augustan Semi-Century,” in A Companion to Roman Religion, ed. Jorg Rüpke (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007), 71–82; N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 311–43; and Allen Brent, The Imperial Cult and the Development of Church Order: Concepts and Images of Authority in Paganism and Early Christianity before the Age of Cyprian (Boston, MA: Brill, 1999). 3 Despite its age, Martin Hengel’s book, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period, 2 vols., trans. John Bowden (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1974), remains one of the standard texts for understanding the interplay of Judaism with Hellenism during the Hellenistic/late-Second Temple period. A more up-to-date study is Daniel Boyarin’s Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Practices of rigid ethnic separation had a precedent in the wake of the Babylonian exile (hereafter referred to as the “exilic” and “postexilic” periods), as is clear from the Book of Ezra. This precedent, combined with keeping Torahic rules about maintaining ethnic purity (esp. Ezra 10), was just the first of many postexilic ethnic/cultural crises that the Jews faced—the most notorious of which was the tyrannical rule of Antiochus Epiphanes. The early Hasmoneans, the Qumran sect, Hillel, Shammai, Philo of 4 This paper addresses a vital question concerning the early Christian community: What, historically, is the theological significance of all the ‘temple’ elements within eschatologically-rooted Christian literature of the first three to four generations?4 Did these elements, and their corresponding rhetoric, reveal a temple-like or priestly character in the earliest and most formatives decades of the movement, nearly two thousand years ago? If so, what might that character have looked like? For one particular Jew, Saul of Tarsus, better known as St. Paul the Apostle, the complex role of Jerusalem’s Temple became further complicated by his own Jewish narrative. Following his so-called conversion, Paul restructured and retold his Pharisaic Alexandria, and a host of other Jews reveal the diverse reactions according to which late-Second Temple Jews responded to pagan Gentiles and their cultural encroachment. 4 “Eschatologically-rooted Christian literature” refers to the writings of the proto-orthodox traditions— as opposed to those of Marcionism, Montanism, Gnosticism and other alternative Christian traditions. Mainstream Christianity was deeply rooted in an apocalyptic worldview, as the overwhelming majority of modern scholarly books and articles now attest. Consult, e.g., E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977) and Jesus and Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985); G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980); Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981); Martin Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul: Studies in the Earliest History of Christianity, trans. John Bowden (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1983); N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); Walter H. Wagner, After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994); C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ & the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History (Oxford, UK: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1996); Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation (1996); Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002); Oskar Skarsaune, In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2002); Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006); Nicholas Perrin, Lost in Transmission?: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007) and Jesus the Temple (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010); Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (London: SPCK, 2008); Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) and Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperCollins, 2012); Allen Brent, A Political History of Early Christianity (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2009); et al.
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