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In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity Oskar Skarsaune InterVarsity Press, 455 pages, $30

The year was A.D. 70. Jerusalem was surrounded by Roman troops, and an important Jewish leader made a daring escape. He had his friends carry him inside a coffin past guards at Jerusalem's gates. (Josephus reports that in the two and a half months before Jerusalem's final destruction, 115,000 corpses were carried out of the city. No wonder Yochanan employed this ruse.)

Once outside the walls, Rabbi Yochanan made his way to the Roman camp and asked to see General Vespasian. They struck a deal, and Rabbi Yohanan went on to Yavneh where he took the lead in reorganizing Jewish belief and life, thus laying the foundations for the Rabbinic Judaism we know today.

But Rabbi Yohanan wasn't the only one to escape. According to Eusebius, the community of Jewish believers in Jesus fled Jerusalem as well and took refuge in the Gentile town of Pella in the Decapolis.

Those who remained in Jerusalem died. The Temple, the ritual center of Jewish religion, was destroyed. And much of Judaism died with it. The various religious and political parties whose names we know from the New Testament and Josephus were wiped out: No more Sadducees, Shammaite Pharisees, Essenes, or Zealots.

But the followers of Yohanan and the followers of Jesus survived, each group developing its own unique way to worship the God of Abraham without the sacrificial system of Moses. Though the two groups went their separate ways, they continued to influence each other, much the way Republicans and Democrats do: by the way they frame issues and by the way they try to distinguish themselves from each other. In In the Shadow of the Temple, Oskar Skarsaune, professor of church history at Norwegian Lutheran Theological Seminary, tells how that competition helped keep Christianity Jewish.

Becoming the Temple
Each of the two survivor movements had to find a way to "replace" the recently destroyed Temple and its sacrifices. Rabbinic Judaism bolstered the role of synagogue and the Torah in order to fill the void. The nascent church thought of itself as the new Temple (Eph. 2:19-22; cf. 1 Pet. 2:4-8). Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate priest. He was also the chief cornerstone of the new living temple, the foundation being the apostles and prophets, and believers being the living stones. The Holy Spirit was the new Shekinah, the manifestation of God's Temple presence.

Those images are familiar to modern Bible readers, but the power of these metaphors is lost on us. For Jewish followers of Jesus, the precincts of Jerusalem and the Temple provided a point of geographical integration. Isaiah had predicted that the word of the Lord would go forth from Jerusalem (Isa. 2:3). In that poetic passage, Jerusalem is in synonymous parallelism with Zion, the mount of the Lord, and the house of the God of Jacob. The latter two phrases refer to the Temple, while Zion was the part of Jerusalem where the cenacle (or "upper room") was located and the earliest church was informally headquartered. Thus apostles prayed in the Temple and taught in the Temple. Skarsaune writes, "It seems as if the early believers purposefully ignored the sacrificial cult going on in the Temple. … They treated the Temple as if it were the supreme synagogue"—a place for teaching and for prayer, but not for sacrifice. According to Acts 4, their earliest clashes with the authorities came precisely because they taught in the Temple.

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October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10