Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. James Carroll

over Jewish authorities, and Jews were wrong to reject him. The Church Triumphant rose from the ashes on the Temple Mount.

      To accept the destruction of the Temple as proof of Christian claims, one has to accept a particular view of Jesus as a future-foreseeing “prophet.” He is remembered in the Gospel of Matthew, for example, as having pointed to the buildings of the Temple compound and declaring, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.”²¹ Thus, words taken to have been uttered in the year 30 or so, about an event that occurred forty years later, are registered both as proof of Jesus’ power to foretell the future and as an indictment of those who “kill the prophets and stone those” who are sent from God.²² Despite his being shown weeping at what he foresees—“Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”—Jesus allegedly approves the destruction. Indeed, in the Gospel of John, he taunts his antagonists by saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” That claim is promptly explained by the Gospel writer: “But he spoke of the temple of his body.”²³ Jesus was himself the replacement of the Temple—precisely in the way that the Church would replace the Synagogue. On Good Friday, at the very moment of Jesus’ death, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are alike in reporting that, in Matthew’s language, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom”—a symbolic destruction of the Temple.²⁴ Jesus’ death means that the day of the Temple is over. An occasion not of mourning, but of celebration.

      We saw earlier that meanings change when, instead of looking at Auschwitz through the lens of the cross, the cross is beheld through the lens of Auschwitz. A similar shift occurs when, instead of looking at the tribulations of Jerusalem in 70 from the vantage of “prophecies” offered by Jesus in 30, we look at the texts about Jesus from the vantage of the later context during which the texts were composed. Quite simply, when Jesus is remembered as describing in harrowing detail the events that will accompany the destruction of the Temple—“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death; and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another”²⁵—he is not foretelling an apocalyptic end of the world. Rather, almost as an eyewitness, he is offering a journalistic description of precisely what happens when the Romans smash down on the Jews and when Jews themselves turn against one another. And “eyewitness” is to the point, of course, because, though Jesus did not see such things, the author of the Gospel of Matthew, and the people to whom he was writing, surely did.

      It is possible, although far from certain, that in 30 or so, Jesus did use an imagined destruction of the Temple as a metaphor, but he was not “predicting.” This is a small but urgent point; the fully human Jesus could not and did not foresee the future. As an apocalyptic prophet, drawing on the deep legacy of Israel’s past, which had been defined by the Temple destruction at the hands of the Babylonians in 588 B.C.E., such an image could have occurred to him. Jeremiah’s lamentation for that destruction of the Temple might have come readily to his lips. But if Jesus invoked such a nightmare scene, the past was his point of reference, not the future—Nebuchadnezzar, not Caesar. Like all Jews, he would have found the literal destruction of the Temple a second time unthinkable, much as Americans, even remembering, say, the apocalyptic carnage of the Civil War, would have found unthinkable the events of September 11, 2001—until they happened, in all their horror.

      Whether Jesus had in fact discussed the Temple destruction was less the point for the Gospel writers and readers than the harsh fact that, in their time, the Temple had been destroyed. We will take up the chronology of Gospel composition below; it’s enough here to note that all four of the Gospels were written during or after the destruction in 70. The writers would have invoked Jesus, and the destruction of his death, in connection with the Temple destruction whether he had literally made any such reference or not, precisely as a way of finding meaning in the midst of the meaninglessness of total violence. That the destruction now could be encompassed in the vision then of the one who was their hope made it tolerable. But such was the extremity of their experience in the thick of Roman war that, for a time, it was even possible to imagine these events as harbingers of nothing less than the end of the world. That dread, too, was given expression, transformed into hope, by the remembered Jesus; “And because wickedness is multiplied,” he is remembered to have said, “most men’s love will grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.”²⁶

      The Gospels are obsessed throughout with the destruction of the Temple, and why not? Recall that all four of the canonical texts define the crime for which Jesus was crucified as a crime against the Temple.²⁷ The content of the charge of blasphemy brought against Jesus is defined by his statement “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.”²⁸ Whatever actually “happened” in the lifetime of Jesus, the momentous violence of the Roman War that was being indiscriminately inflicted on Jews even as the Gospels were written was enough to force the narrative into the form that it took—now with the “Jewish” enemies of Jesus getting what they deserved for rejecting him. The point deserves emphasis: the Gospels’ first purpose was to respond to the present crisis of those who wrote the texts and to whom the texts were addressed. The Temple dominates the story of Jesus in 30 because the Temple—in its destruction by Rome—dominated the story in 70 of those who wrote the Gospel, read the Gospel, and heard the Gospel.

      Looked at from this vantage of torment decades after the death of Jesus, even the Passion narrative takes on a character unimaginable to later Christians who tell his story without reference to the Roman War. Instead of the usual way of seeing Jesus’ agony and death on the cross as unique, a one-time instance of transcendent suffering extreme enough to redeem the fallen cosmos, the view from the year 70—recall the ten thousand corpses hung on crosses ringing the Temple Mount—would necessarily have seen the crucifixion of Jesus as mundane. The consolation offered by the Passion account had to be less a matter of Jesus as the substitute sufferer than of Jesus as the fellow sufferer. What befell Jesus is befalling us! When, at the moment of his death, according to the three Gospels, the Temple is symbolically destroyed by that torn veil, the identification of Jesus with the horrors of Roman savagery would have been taken to be complete. One could imagine surviving the Temple-destroying savagery only because Jesus had. Here, of course, is the power of the proclaimed Resurrection, the hope that evolved into conviction that survival, even of the worst fate imaginable, was a possibility—nay, a promise.

The Temple as the Cause of the Gospel

      By the time of Jesus, the Temple Mount had been the historic heart of Jerusalem for at least a thousand years, and the mythic tradition of Israel pushed the date of its sanctification perhaps twice that far into the distant past. Indeed, the “mount” was first associated with Mount Moriah, to which Abraham brought his son Isaac as a ready sacrifice, obeying what he took to be God’s brutal command. Abraham may or may not have existed, but if he did, he is dated to about the year 2000 B.C.E., a full millennium before King David. Abraham’s altar of sacrifice—where, in the Genesis account,²⁹ an animal replaced a human as the preferred offering of Israel’s God—became the altar to which the people, in that neverland of myth, brought their lambs and doves. The mount entered history when, precisely there, David ordered the first construction of the Temple in about 1000 B.C.E., and his son Solomon accomplished that construction. Across the subsequent centuries, the Temple would be built and built again, although the Babylonian destruction in 588 would permanently mark the difference between the First Temple, attributed to Solomon, and the Second, built by those returned from Babylon in 515, and rebuilt by their descendants.

      A century and a half before the birth of Jesus, a Jewish dynasty—the Hasmoneans—restored the independence of Israel after a period of Seleucid (or Greek) domination. They marked this triumph by undertaking a massive reconstruction of the Temple. Indeed, Hanukkah, the annual Jewish festival of light, recalls