научная статья по теме REBUILDING THE JERUSALEM TEMPLE: PAGAN, JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN CONCEPTIONS История. Исторические науки

Текст научной статьи на тему «REBUILDING THE JERUSALEM TEMPLE: PAGAN, JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN CONCEPTIONS»



© 2008 r.

F. Millar

REBUILDING THE JERUSALEM TEMPLE: PAGAN, JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN CONCEPTIONS

1. INTRODUCTION: JERUSALEM AFTER CE 70

The destruction of the Temple by Roman forces under Titus in CE 70 represents a major turning-point in the religious history of the world. It is also one whose consequences are with us still, as the presence of the Dome of the Rock on the site of the Temple forcibly reminds us. With the destruction of the building went the ending of daily sacrificial cult as a central element in Judaism, and with it the role of priests in serving in the Temple, along with the position of High Priest. We may well ask, though we cannot answer, the question of what would have been the consequences for both Judaism and Christianity, and for either pagan or Jewish converts to Christianity, if the Temple had survived, or had been restored1.

In fact, in spite of Josephus' powerful and detailed account of the last days of the Temple, we cannot be certain whether the destruction was in the first instance accidental, or had always formed part of Vespasian's and Titus' plans. What is surely clear is that both the Temple and the High Priesthood could have been restored if the Flavian regime had so chosen, and that the failure to do so represented deliberate policy. Precisely this is the central theme of Martin Goodman's major new work2. Sixty years later, there followed an equally profound and deliberate step, the foundation on the site of Jerusalem of a new pagan city, from which Jews were expelled, the Roman colonia of Aelia Capitolina. Symbolically, it is highly significant that this was the last colonia in the history of Rome of which it is clearly reported that it involved the replacement of the previous inhabitants by new settlers3.

Like all coloniae, Aelia Capitolina will have been officially Latin-speaking. Whether there was any stage at which Latin really was the predominant language spoken within it remains unclear4. What is certain is that in the opening decades of the fourth century it was still a pagan city, which (as Jerome reports) the famous Christian hermit,

1 See M.-Z. Petropoulou, Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism and Christianity, 100 BC-AD 200 (Oxford, in press).

2 M. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: a Clash of Civilisations (2007). See also T. Leoni, 'Against Caesar's Wishes'. Flavius Josephus as a Source for the Burning of the Temple', Journ. Jew. Stud. 58 (2007), 39.

3 See F. Millar, 'The Roman Coloniae of the Near East: a Study of Cultural Relations', in H. Solin and M. Kajava (eds.), Roman Eastern Policy and Other Studies in Roman History (Helsinki, 1990), 7.

4 Even allowing for the possibility of divergence between public writing and current spoken language, the expected publication of the first fascicule of the Corpus Inscriptionum Judaeae/Palaestinias, ed. H.M. Cotton and W. Eck, on Jerusalem, will shed significant new light on this issue.

Hilarion, took care to avoid5. Jerome is here recalling the years before Constantine's victory, after which the temple of Venus was destroyed, and the first Church of the Holy Sepulchre was erected on the site, along with major Christian churches on the Mount of Olives and in Bethlehem. Whatever the linguistic and social history of the city and its territory in the previous period, it is quite clear that the Christian community of Jerusalem, which now emerges into the light of day, was officially Greek-speaking, with some members being speakers of Aramaic or Syriac6. Whether Jews were officially still debarred from Jerusalem or not, some Christian accounts do imply, as we will see, that there was now at least one synagogue in the city.

The stage was thus set for both a complex social pattern of co-existence (and potential conflict), and for an even more profound collision of beliefs, historical memories, rival claims to the Biblical inheritance, and rival hopes and fears as to what further transformations might take place in the future.

2. THE EMPEROR JULIAN AND THE TEMPLE

This powerful and evocative theme has been discussed many times by modern scholars, and no attempt will be made here to rehearse or review the contributions of all the studies to whom this paper is deeply indebted7. Nor will another attempt be made to reconstruct what really happened in 363; instead it will review the vast variety of interpretations and values placed on the idea of the Temple, primarily by Christians. It is typically in Christian writings that we find expositions of values and expectations held by Jews - but for which, as we will see, the archaeological evidence from Late Antique synagogues in Palestine now offers some support. In its emphasis towards the end on Christian texts which were either composed, or are known to have been in circulation, in the sixth century, this paper owes a most profound debt to an as yet unpublished arti-

5 Jerome, Ep. 58,3, recording that Hilarion went only once to Jerusalem in order that he should seem neither to neglect the holy places in spite of his closeness to them, nor again to seclude God in a (mere) place. For, so Jerome reports, for 180 years, from Hadrian to the reign of Constantine a statue of Juppiter stood on the site of the Resurrection and one of the Venus on the rock of the Cross.

6 This is made clear in the account of the Christian pilgrim 'Egeria', dating to the 380's: the bishop always preached in Greek, even if he in fact knew 'the Syrian language', and a translator helped those without Greek, as one did also Latin speakers. See P. Maraval (ed.), Egérie, Journal de Voyage (Sources Chrétiennes 296, Paris, 1982), 47, 3-4.

7 See for example J. Vogt, Kaiser Iulian und das Judentum (Leipzig, 1939); M. Avi-Yo-nah, The Jews of Palestine: a Political History from the Bar Kochba War to the Arab Conquest (Oxford, 1976); G.W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (London, 1978); R.L. Wilken, The Land called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, 1992); M. Par-mentier, 'No Stone upon Another? Reactions of the Church Fathers Against the Emperor Julian's Attempt to Rebuild the Temple', in M. Poorthius and Ch. Safrai (eds.), The Centrali-ty of Jerusalem: Historical Perspectives (Kampen, 1996), 143; RJ. Penella, 'Emperor Julian, the temple of Jerusalem and the god of the Jews', Koinonia 23 (1999), 15; G. Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century (Edinburgh, 2000), esp. ch. VII; S. Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society (Princeton, 2001); J. Hahn (ed.), Zerstörungen des Jerusalemer Tempels: Geschehen-Wahrnehmung - Bewältigung (Tübingen, 2002), esp. 237f.: J. Hahn, 'Kaiser Julian und ein dritter Tempel?'; J.W. Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City (Vigiliae Christianae, Supp. 72, Leiden, 2004); A.S. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: the Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford, 2004); G.G. Stroumsa, La fin du sacrifice: les mutations religieuses de l'Antiquité tardive (Paris, 2005), esp. ch. III: 'Transformations du rituel'; Y.Z. Eliav, God's Mountain: the Temple Mount in Time, Place, and Memory (Baltimore, 2005).

cle by Yannis Papadoyannakis on a neglected text from the reign of Justinian8. For, as will be seen at a series of separate points below, the fact that the Temple still in the sixth century played a significant part in the outlook of Christians - and perhaps especially among Syriac-speaking Christians - is of considerable significance.

Before we consider Christian conceptions, however, we need to discuss pagan and then Jewish ones. But in fact only one pagan writer, the Emperor Julian himself, a former Christian with a knowledge of the Bible and of Jewish and Christian history, can be found to have any developed conception of the Temple, and its possible role and meaning. One pagan narrative writer, but one only, Ammianus Marcellinus, offers a brief account of the steps taken to restore the Temple in the first part of the year 3639: «Ambitiosum quondam apud Hierosolymam templum, quod post multa et interneciva certamina, obsidente Vespasiano, posteaque Tito, aegre est expugnatum, instaurare sumptibus cogitabat immodicis, negotiumque maturandum Alypio dederat Antio-chensi ... Cum itaque rei idem fortiter instaret Alypius, iuvaretque provinciae rector, metuendi globi flammarum prope fundamenta crebris assultibus erumpentes, fecere locum exustis aliquotiens operantibus inaccessum, hocque modo elemento destinatius repellente, cessavit inceptum».

The passage is enough to establish that the project really was begun, and then abandoned in the face of outbreaks of fire, without giving any rationale for it beyond the search for glory. Nor does it record, as almost all Christian sources do, any active role on the part of Jews.

Such a rationale, from the pagan perspective, is supplied only by the Emperor himself, first in his Against the Galileans, and secondly (perhaps) in a letter 'To the koinon of the Jews'; this has often been thought to be inauthentic, and it has recently been argued that it is a forgery reflecting the situation after CE 42910. If so, and if it is a Christian forgery, it will belong with the Church Historian discussed below. Julian was aware that in the past, before the destruction of CE 70, Judaism had shared with paganism the practice of animal sacrifice, and also knew that the Biblical rules laid down that such sacrifices could take place only in Jerusalem in the Temple. Even so, in Against the Galileans, he adds original and thought-provoking considerations of his own11: «No doubt some sharp-sighted person will answer, "The Jews do not sacrifice". But I will convict him of being terribly dull-sighted, for in the first place I reply that neither do you [Christians] also observe any one of the other customs observed by the Jews; and secondly, that the Jews do sacrifice in their own houses, and even to this day everything that they eat is consecrated (306A); and they pray before sacrificing,

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