Vespasian is usually mentioned as this terrible pagan Roman general who hated God and whose forces therefore obliterated Jerusalem and the Temple in it. Actually, his campaign in Palestine is rather of a sidelight in his career and had no religious motivation at all. What's more, if it weren't for the same guy in charge of destroying Jerusalem and the Temple there would be no Judaism now at all. The real deal about him will show us something important about religious reactions, to him and more importantly religious reactions to things in general. Here's the deal.
Temples.
First Temple.
The destruction of the second temple shows that Israel has been a massive pain in the butt for everybody else for centuries, not just recently. Notice it's second Temple. There's been two temples, and both were destroyed by conquering foreign powers.
The original Temple was built by King Solomon, who reigned from about 970 to 931 BC (or BCE if you will), helped by an architect from Tyre in Phoenicia (now in Lebanon) named Hiram. It was to replace the Tabernacle constructed 440 years earlier under Moses as the Israelites went from Egypt through the Sinai Desert on their way to conquer Canaan. Thus it was to be God's dwelling place on earth, and be the sole place of worship sacrifices, replacing local ones. Solomon's dad King David had gotten quite wealthy from trade with the Phoenicians.
More murky historical stuff nobody cares about? Yeah well the Phoenician alphabet is the oldest one, traders carried it across their known world, the Romans adopted and adapted it, whereupon it became the alphabet used world wide now and is the reason you're reading this or anything else, so relax.
This first Temple, Solomon's, was plundered by Pharaoh Shoshenq I of Egypt (called Shishak in the Bible) about 926 BC during the reign of Solomon's son and successor Rehoboam, at a time of Israelite civil war during which they split into the Kingdom of Judah (the tribes of Judah and Levi) and the Kingdom of Israel (the other ten tribes) to the north. Not least of the issues in the split was the Temple, which put out of business the various local temples and their priests.
It was restored in 835 BC by Jehoash, King of Judah. Then it was plundered again about 700 BC by Sennacherib, King of Assyria (capital, Nineveh, modern day Mosul, Iraq, see Kings II in the Bible), not on religious reasons as he plundered everyone who didn't accept Assyrian rule, especially the Babylonians; he obliterated Babylon (about 53 miles south of modern Baghdad, Iraq) in 689 BC. Assyria also obliterated the Kingdom of Israel around 722 BC or so and deported the people (2 Kings 17:6) to nobody knows where exactly as no identifiable further record of them exists, hence lost "Lost Tribes of Israel". Josephus says they were beyond the Euphrates River and too numerous to even guess by his time. This left the Kingdom of Judah, which is why Jews are called "Jews" since the other tribes are lost (lots of fanciful theories about where they went abound).
Assyria fell apart amidst internal strife, Babylon came roaring back which kind of got the Egyptians nervous, and when King Jehoakim of Judah quit paying tribute -- which doesn't mean saying nice words, "tribute" comes from the Latin tributum, meaning contribution; it's money and/or goods and services given as a sign of submission -- and hoped the Egyptians would contain the Babylonians, Nebuchadnezzar (the second, actually) eventually conquered Jerusalem on 16 March 597 BC and looted the city and the Temple, and took the current king and other notables, like Ezechiel, to Babylon. But resistance remained, the new king Zedekiah allied with the Egyptians, the prophet Jeremias warned this is not gonna end well, and it didn't.
Nebuchadnezzar had enough and obliterated the Temple in 587 BC and started resettling the locals to Babylon, the famous "Babylonian Captivity". So now all twelve tribes had been deported. This wasn't just about the Israelites; resettlement of conquered peoples for more politically practical reasons was a common practice in ancient Assyria and Babylon. Ancient? We do it now! In die Vertreibung (expulsion) after WWII about 31 million ethnic Germans were expelled from lands that would no longer be Germany as the victors determined the borders that would eventually become Germany as it is now. Then again the Nazi Generalplan Ost under Himmler planned the ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe for more Germans to move in; the Soviet victory at Stalingrad started the process by which it wasn't successful. And there's the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1947/8 in which about 700,000 Palestinians were evicted or fled to avoid eviction in the creation of the modern State of Israel.
Second Temple.
The second Temple dates from 516 BC. What happened? Babylon fell to Persia, or in modern terms, Iraq fell to Iran, in 539 BC, that's what. The great Babylon was overtaken by a power that became even greater, Persia, specifically, the First Persian Empire, sometimes called Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great (Cyrus II actually; Cyrus I was his grandfather). It became the largest empire the world had yet known and lasted until it was conquered by Alexander the Great, who greatly respected Cyrus' legacy and made a point of visiting his grave in 330 BC. His grave is still there, in his capital Pasargadae, near modern Shiraz, Iran; a UNESCO World Heritage Site and to this day site of celebrations on Cyrus the Great Day, on 29 October, the day Cyrus entered Babylon, and on Nowruz, Iranian New Year, on the spring (in the northern hemisphere) equinox on or around 21 March.
There's a lot to respect. Cyrus was a conqueror indeed, but he did not obliterate those he conquered and allowed them to keep their culture within his empire under a client-ruler (satrap). In a move that was not unique toward the Jews but actually typical of him toward conquered peoples, Cyrus issued an edict whereby the Jewish exiles in Babylon were allowed to return to their land and rebuild their temple. This momentous event is among many other places recorded in the Bible; in fact the Jewish Bible, which is more or less the Christian Old Testament though with the books in a different order, ends with the account of the edict in II Chronicles 36.
(Side note. Chronicles was originally one book called The Matters of the Days in Hebrew. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek couple centuries before Christ since most Jews spoke Greek at that time (what is called the Septuagint) the book was divided in two and called The Things Left to the Side, or Paralipomena in Greek. When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in C5 AD (what is called the Vulgate) he called them Chronicon, Chronicles in English, and the two-part division and the name Chronicles has pretty much stuck in anybody's translation since, although older RC translations like the one I grew up with whose OT is based on the Septuagint, which has a few more books than the Hebrew canon, retained the name Paralipomena, along with other Greek-like spellings such as Ezechiel and Jeremias that I use sometimes.)
The fact is, the usual term "captivity" makes it seem much different than it actually was. Psalm 137 (136 in the Septuagint and Vulgate, the famous "super flumina babylonis", above the waters of Babylon), which the Septuagint attributes to the prophet Jeremias no less, is a lament of the exiles for being in Babylon rather than Judah, not for being treated poorly, human rights abuses as we might say now, but for being unable to sing a song in a strange land of their native land even when asked to by the Babylonians, and prays that their right hand lose its ability if they forget Jerusalem (guess there weren't any lefties) or prefer present joys to Jerusalem.
Yes they were exiles with the loss of their land and Temple, but they were not slaves, they were not prisoners, they were not badly treated. In fact in 538 BC when Cyrus allowed their return to the land from which they were exiled most chose to stay! Esther, a Jewish woman and protagonist of the Biblical book, became the wife of whom the book names Ahasuerus, King of Persia, and thus a Jew becomes Queen of Persia! (The story is pretty wild; I'll leave that to the book.) Ahasuerus is generally identified as Xerxes I, the fifth king of the Achaemenid Empire (First Persian Empire) from 486 to 465 BC. He's the one who lost big-time to the Greeks under Themistocles at Salamis in September 480 BC. The Septuagint and the Vulgate identify him as Artaxerxes I, the sixth king and the third son of Xerxes, whose rule was 465 to 424 BC. Either way, well after 538 BC when Cyrus allowed the return.
So, there's ambivalence in the Bible itself about the return -- unless one is one of those who can't handle ambivalence in what is supposed to be the word of God and thus says since it can't be it isn't. On the one hand, Isaias (oh sorry, Isaiah) 45:1 says God anointed Cyrus to make his proclamation of return and rebuilding, and as anointed one is what messiah means, he is so described, the only non-Jew in the Bible to be called an anointed one of God. On the other hand, most Jews stayed. For those who returned, the rebuilding of the Temple was complete in 516 BC, a little over twenty years after the return. This is recorded in the Book of Esdras (oh sorry, Ezra), which was originally one book along with the Book of Nehemias (oh sorry, Nehemiah), the two were not separated until the first printed Bibles in C16 AD, and also recorded in variants called 3 and 4 Esdras, or 1 and 2 Esdras by those who call 1 and 2 Esdras Ezra and Nehemiah, found in the Apocrypha in modern Bibles if that is included.
Second Temple Judaism was not like that of the First, in either the building or the religion. The building itself was not a reconstruction of the first but a rather plain structure, which those returnees old enough to remember the first found very disappointing. It is not the ruins of this building that are there to-day but we'll get to that. Also, the returnees did not return to the Kingdom of Judah; the kings were gone, and the land became a client-state of Persia under its Babylonian name Yehud. Before, the temple priesthood was subordinate to the kings, but with them gone, the priesthood increased in power, with the High Priest effectively becoming the ruler, a role that would endure after the Greeks and then the Romans took over, with the latter making sure the High Priest didn't rock the boat.
The second Temple did not have the Ark of the Covenant from the first Temple and the Tabernacle of Moses before it. One of the strangest things about the Bible is that despite the enormous importance of the Ark, containing the stone tablets given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai and all, there is absolutely no mention of what happened to it after the destruction of the first Temple. Speculation abounds of course, to the present day even to hit movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And too, in contrast to Jewish reaction to later catastrophe, it was thought that God had allowed the destruction of the first Temple and the "captivity" due to their lack of adherence to Biblical religion and dalliance with the gods and women of those around them, so on returning a great emphasis was placed on getting it right and sticking to it -- no intermarriage, even with those who hadn't been deported, a purity of community, a purity of Temple worship with the priestly animal sacrifices, and study of the Law of Moses and the Prophets. To this end, Esdras and the 120 Men of the Great Assembly (Nehemias 10) codified existing observances into three times of prayer to correspond with the times of sacrifice in the Temple, morning, afternoon and evening, thus establishing a form that is still used in synagogue worship and was adapted by the Christian church into Matins, Vespers and Compline.
They also established the central prayer of Jewish worship, the Amidah, which means "standing" because it is said standing, also called the Shemoneh Esreh, which means "eighteen" because it is composed of eighteen blessings, said on weekdays at all three times of prayer to this day. The Amidah for Sabbath condenses the petitions since Sabbath is a foretaste of eternity when no petitions are needed, and the Christian church evolved a Christian prayer in exactly its structure, which is said to this day too -- usually called the Gloria, from its first word in Latin. They also finalised the canon, the list of books to be considered authoritative, of the Hebrew Bible as we have it now (when used as the Old Testament in Christian Bibles the book order is different but the list is the same).
The building was different too, twice over. What is there in ruins now is neither the first Temple nor the original second Temple but a massive rebuilding and replacement of it undertaken by Herod the Great, Jewish client king to the Romans of Judea at the time of Jesus' birth. Herod was Jewish, but an Edomite (descendant of Esau) and also a Roman citizen. He began as governor of Galilee in 41 BC with the backing of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, was appointed King of Judea by the Roman Senate in 37 BC and given military support to bring the area under tighter Roman control. When Marc Antony lost out to Octavian as the Roman Empire was taking over the Roman Republic Herod was solidly behind the new Empire and switched allegiance to Octavian, who as Caesar Augustus was the new and first Emperor and the guy mentioned in the famous nativity account in Luke read at Christmas who ordered the census. Herod brought a great deal of prosperity to Judea and at the same time was quite cruel. Look at the dates -- all this is happening in the unsettled violent change from Republic to Empire, same era as the Arminius episode, and Herod was concerned to maintain his power. This is the same Herod who would order the Massacre of the Innocents recorded in Matthew, but nowhere else, which some say indicates the passage is a literary invention to mirror the Passover slaughter in Exodus, but given that Herod had his wife (one of them, anyway) and several of his children killed as well as many others as threats to his power that particular massacre probably wasn't all that significant to warrant mentioning with non-Biblical sources.
The second second Temple, so to speak, Herod's, was begun about 20 BC. The Temple per se was completed in about three years, but construction on the entire complex continued much longer. John 2:20 says it had been under construction for 46 years when Jesus went there for Passover. So, at the time of its destruction in 70 AD none of it was very old at all. It's what it meant that was, and its loss was of huge impact. But before we get to the impact of the destruction we need to get to the destruction itself.
Before we do, have you noticed something? How is it that a guy who died in 4 BC, BC standing for Before Christ, was in power when Christ was born? That's because Christ was around Before Christ too. Huh? Here's the deal. The calendar in world-wide use now was originally produced by commission of Pope Gregory the Great, who was head of the Roman Empire's state Catholic Church a little over a hundred years after the Western half of the Roman Empire, the part with Rome actually in it, collapsed in 476 AD. Part of the idea was to number the years going forward starting with Christ and going backward from him. Thing is, the calculations of what year that was were a little off but we didn't know that until the calendar had been in standard use for centuries. So keeping the same year numbers, the year Christ came was about 4 BC.
Taxes and Religious Significances.
While Jews and Christians assign various religious significances to the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, to the Romans doing it had no religious motivation or significance whatever.
The Romans could not care less about whatever local religious observances there were in the areas they controlled, unless they rocked the boat about who runs things. What motivated the First Jewish Revolt was all about who is the true god and what therefore one does or does not do, such as pay taxes to foreign rulers, but the Roman reaction to it was mostly about the non-payment of taxes by Jews who thought it wrong to pay them, as well as attacks by Jews on Romans in the area, not about who was right about God. The Roman governor ordered the Temple plundered for the money since they would not pay, which resulted in an escalation in which the Roman garrison was taken and the client king (Agrippa) had to flee. When initial attempts to quash the rebellion failed, Emperor Nero had enough and ordered General Vespasian to take over and, as we might say now, turn it into a parking lot.
First Temple.
The destruction of the second temple shows that Israel has been a massive pain in the butt for everybody else for centuries, not just recently. Notice it's second Temple. There's been two temples, and both were destroyed by conquering foreign powers.
The original Temple was built by King Solomon, who reigned from about 970 to 931 BC (or BCE if you will), helped by an architect from Tyre in Phoenicia (now in Lebanon) named Hiram. It was to replace the Tabernacle constructed 440 years earlier under Moses as the Israelites went from Egypt through the Sinai Desert on their way to conquer Canaan. Thus it was to be God's dwelling place on earth, and be the sole place of worship sacrifices, replacing local ones. Solomon's dad King David had gotten quite wealthy from trade with the Phoenicians.
More murky historical stuff nobody cares about? Yeah well the Phoenician alphabet is the oldest one, traders carried it across their known world, the Romans adopted and adapted it, whereupon it became the alphabet used world wide now and is the reason you're reading this or anything else, so relax.
This first Temple, Solomon's, was plundered by Pharaoh Shoshenq I of Egypt (called Shishak in the Bible) about 926 BC during the reign of Solomon's son and successor Rehoboam, at a time of Israelite civil war during which they split into the Kingdom of Judah (the tribes of Judah and Levi) and the Kingdom of Israel (the other ten tribes) to the north. Not least of the issues in the split was the Temple, which put out of business the various local temples and their priests.
It was restored in 835 BC by Jehoash, King of Judah. Then it was plundered again about 700 BC by Sennacherib, King of Assyria (capital, Nineveh, modern day Mosul, Iraq, see Kings II in the Bible), not on religious reasons as he plundered everyone who didn't accept Assyrian rule, especially the Babylonians; he obliterated Babylon (about 53 miles south of modern Baghdad, Iraq) in 689 BC. Assyria also obliterated the Kingdom of Israel around 722 BC or so and deported the people (2 Kings 17:6) to nobody knows where exactly as no identifiable further record of them exists, hence lost "Lost Tribes of Israel". Josephus says they were beyond the Euphrates River and too numerous to even guess by his time. This left the Kingdom of Judah, which is why Jews are called "Jews" since the other tribes are lost (lots of fanciful theories about where they went abound).
Assyria fell apart amidst internal strife, Babylon came roaring back which kind of got the Egyptians nervous, and when King Jehoakim of Judah quit paying tribute -- which doesn't mean saying nice words, "tribute" comes from the Latin tributum, meaning contribution; it's money and/or goods and services given as a sign of submission -- and hoped the Egyptians would contain the Babylonians, Nebuchadnezzar (the second, actually) eventually conquered Jerusalem on 16 March 597 BC and looted the city and the Temple, and took the current king and other notables, like Ezechiel, to Babylon. But resistance remained, the new king Zedekiah allied with the Egyptians, the prophet Jeremias warned this is not gonna end well, and it didn't.
Nebuchadnezzar had enough and obliterated the Temple in 587 BC and started resettling the locals to Babylon, the famous "Babylonian Captivity". So now all twelve tribes had been deported. This wasn't just about the Israelites; resettlement of conquered peoples for more politically practical reasons was a common practice in ancient Assyria and Babylon. Ancient? We do it now! In die Vertreibung (expulsion) after WWII about 31 million ethnic Germans were expelled from lands that would no longer be Germany as the victors determined the borders that would eventually become Germany as it is now. Then again the Nazi Generalplan Ost under Himmler planned the ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe for more Germans to move in; the Soviet victory at Stalingrad started the process by which it wasn't successful. And there's the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1947/8 in which about 700,000 Palestinians were evicted or fled to avoid eviction in the creation of the modern State of Israel.
Second Temple.
The second Temple dates from 516 BC. What happened? Babylon fell to Persia, or in modern terms, Iraq fell to Iran, in 539 BC, that's what. The great Babylon was overtaken by a power that became even greater, Persia, specifically, the First Persian Empire, sometimes called Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great (Cyrus II actually; Cyrus I was his grandfather). It became the largest empire the world had yet known and lasted until it was conquered by Alexander the Great, who greatly respected Cyrus' legacy and made a point of visiting his grave in 330 BC. His grave is still there, in his capital Pasargadae, near modern Shiraz, Iran; a UNESCO World Heritage Site and to this day site of celebrations on Cyrus the Great Day, on 29 October, the day Cyrus entered Babylon, and on Nowruz, Iranian New Year, on the spring (in the northern hemisphere) equinox on or around 21 March.
There's a lot to respect. Cyrus was a conqueror indeed, but he did not obliterate those he conquered and allowed them to keep their culture within his empire under a client-ruler (satrap). In a move that was not unique toward the Jews but actually typical of him toward conquered peoples, Cyrus issued an edict whereby the Jewish exiles in Babylon were allowed to return to their land and rebuild their temple. This momentous event is among many other places recorded in the Bible; in fact the Jewish Bible, which is more or less the Christian Old Testament though with the books in a different order, ends with the account of the edict in II Chronicles 36.
(Side note. Chronicles was originally one book called The Matters of the Days in Hebrew. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek couple centuries before Christ since most Jews spoke Greek at that time (what is called the Septuagint) the book was divided in two and called The Things Left to the Side, or Paralipomena in Greek. When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in C5 AD (what is called the Vulgate) he called them Chronicon, Chronicles in English, and the two-part division and the name Chronicles has pretty much stuck in anybody's translation since, although older RC translations like the one I grew up with whose OT is based on the Septuagint, which has a few more books than the Hebrew canon, retained the name Paralipomena, along with other Greek-like spellings such as Ezechiel and Jeremias that I use sometimes.)
The fact is, the usual term "captivity" makes it seem much different than it actually was. Psalm 137 (136 in the Septuagint and Vulgate, the famous "super flumina babylonis", above the waters of Babylon), which the Septuagint attributes to the prophet Jeremias no less, is a lament of the exiles for being in Babylon rather than Judah, not for being treated poorly, human rights abuses as we might say now, but for being unable to sing a song in a strange land of their native land even when asked to by the Babylonians, and prays that their right hand lose its ability if they forget Jerusalem (guess there weren't any lefties) or prefer present joys to Jerusalem.
Yes they were exiles with the loss of their land and Temple, but they were not slaves, they were not prisoners, they were not badly treated. In fact in 538 BC when Cyrus allowed their return to the land from which they were exiled most chose to stay! Esther, a Jewish woman and protagonist of the Biblical book, became the wife of whom the book names Ahasuerus, King of Persia, and thus a Jew becomes Queen of Persia! (The story is pretty wild; I'll leave that to the book.) Ahasuerus is generally identified as Xerxes I, the fifth king of the Achaemenid Empire (First Persian Empire) from 486 to 465 BC. He's the one who lost big-time to the Greeks under Themistocles at Salamis in September 480 BC. The Septuagint and the Vulgate identify him as Artaxerxes I, the sixth king and the third son of Xerxes, whose rule was 465 to 424 BC. Either way, well after 538 BC when Cyrus allowed the return.
So, there's ambivalence in the Bible itself about the return -- unless one is one of those who can't handle ambivalence in what is supposed to be the word of God and thus says since it can't be it isn't. On the one hand, Isaias (oh sorry, Isaiah) 45:1 says God anointed Cyrus to make his proclamation of return and rebuilding, and as anointed one is what messiah means, he is so described, the only non-Jew in the Bible to be called an anointed one of God. On the other hand, most Jews stayed. For those who returned, the rebuilding of the Temple was complete in 516 BC, a little over twenty years after the return. This is recorded in the Book of Esdras (oh sorry, Ezra), which was originally one book along with the Book of Nehemias (oh sorry, Nehemiah), the two were not separated until the first printed Bibles in C16 AD, and also recorded in variants called 3 and 4 Esdras, or 1 and 2 Esdras by those who call 1 and 2 Esdras Ezra and Nehemiah, found in the Apocrypha in modern Bibles if that is included.
Second Temple Judaism was not like that of the First, in either the building or the religion. The building itself was not a reconstruction of the first but a rather plain structure, which those returnees old enough to remember the first found very disappointing. It is not the ruins of this building that are there to-day but we'll get to that. Also, the returnees did not return to the Kingdom of Judah; the kings were gone, and the land became a client-state of Persia under its Babylonian name Yehud. Before, the temple priesthood was subordinate to the kings, but with them gone, the priesthood increased in power, with the High Priest effectively becoming the ruler, a role that would endure after the Greeks and then the Romans took over, with the latter making sure the High Priest didn't rock the boat.
The second Temple did not have the Ark of the Covenant from the first Temple and the Tabernacle of Moses before it. One of the strangest things about the Bible is that despite the enormous importance of the Ark, containing the stone tablets given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai and all, there is absolutely no mention of what happened to it after the destruction of the first Temple. Speculation abounds of course, to the present day even to hit movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And too, in contrast to Jewish reaction to later catastrophe, it was thought that God had allowed the destruction of the first Temple and the "captivity" due to their lack of adherence to Biblical religion and dalliance with the gods and women of those around them, so on returning a great emphasis was placed on getting it right and sticking to it -- no intermarriage, even with those who hadn't been deported, a purity of community, a purity of Temple worship with the priestly animal sacrifices, and study of the Law of Moses and the Prophets. To this end, Esdras and the 120 Men of the Great Assembly (Nehemias 10) codified existing observances into three times of prayer to correspond with the times of sacrifice in the Temple, morning, afternoon and evening, thus establishing a form that is still used in synagogue worship and was adapted by the Christian church into Matins, Vespers and Compline.
They also established the central prayer of Jewish worship, the Amidah, which means "standing" because it is said standing, also called the Shemoneh Esreh, which means "eighteen" because it is composed of eighteen blessings, said on weekdays at all three times of prayer to this day. The Amidah for Sabbath condenses the petitions since Sabbath is a foretaste of eternity when no petitions are needed, and the Christian church evolved a Christian prayer in exactly its structure, which is said to this day too -- usually called the Gloria, from its first word in Latin. They also finalised the canon, the list of books to be considered authoritative, of the Hebrew Bible as we have it now (when used as the Old Testament in Christian Bibles the book order is different but the list is the same).
The building was different too, twice over. What is there in ruins now is neither the first Temple nor the original second Temple but a massive rebuilding and replacement of it undertaken by Herod the Great, Jewish client king to the Romans of Judea at the time of Jesus' birth. Herod was Jewish, but an Edomite (descendant of Esau) and also a Roman citizen. He began as governor of Galilee in 41 BC with the backing of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, was appointed King of Judea by the Roman Senate in 37 BC and given military support to bring the area under tighter Roman control. When Marc Antony lost out to Octavian as the Roman Empire was taking over the Roman Republic Herod was solidly behind the new Empire and switched allegiance to Octavian, who as Caesar Augustus was the new and first Emperor and the guy mentioned in the famous nativity account in Luke read at Christmas who ordered the census. Herod brought a great deal of prosperity to Judea and at the same time was quite cruel. Look at the dates -- all this is happening in the unsettled violent change from Republic to Empire, same era as the Arminius episode, and Herod was concerned to maintain his power. This is the same Herod who would order the Massacre of the Innocents recorded in Matthew, but nowhere else, which some say indicates the passage is a literary invention to mirror the Passover slaughter in Exodus, but given that Herod had his wife (one of them, anyway) and several of his children killed as well as many others as threats to his power that particular massacre probably wasn't all that significant to warrant mentioning with non-Biblical sources.
The second second Temple, so to speak, Herod's, was begun about 20 BC. The Temple per se was completed in about three years, but construction on the entire complex continued much longer. John 2:20 says it had been under construction for 46 years when Jesus went there for Passover. So, at the time of its destruction in 70 AD none of it was very old at all. It's what it meant that was, and its loss was of huge impact. But before we get to the impact of the destruction we need to get to the destruction itself.
Before we do, have you noticed something? How is it that a guy who died in 4 BC, BC standing for Before Christ, was in power when Christ was born? That's because Christ was around Before Christ too. Huh? Here's the deal. The calendar in world-wide use now was originally produced by commission of Pope Gregory the Great, who was head of the Roman Empire's state Catholic Church a little over a hundred years after the Western half of the Roman Empire, the part with Rome actually in it, collapsed in 476 AD. Part of the idea was to number the years going forward starting with Christ and going backward from him. Thing is, the calculations of what year that was were a little off but we didn't know that until the calendar had been in standard use for centuries. So keeping the same year numbers, the year Christ came was about 4 BC.
Taxes and Religious Significances.
While Jews and Christians assign various religious significances to the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, to the Romans doing it had no religious motivation or significance whatever.
The Romans could not care less about whatever local religious observances there were in the areas they controlled, unless they rocked the boat about who runs things. What motivated the First Jewish Revolt was all about who is the true god and what therefore one does or does not do, such as pay taxes to foreign rulers, but the Roman reaction to it was mostly about the non-payment of taxes by Jews who thought it wrong to pay them, as well as attacks by Jews on Romans in the area, not about who was right about God. The Roman governor ordered the Temple plundered for the money since they would not pay, which resulted in an escalation in which the Roman garrison was taken and the client king (Agrippa) had to flee. When initial attempts to quash the rebellion failed, Emperor Nero had enough and ordered General Vespasian to take over and, as we might say now, turn it into a parking lot.
This question of taxation by the Romans that would lead to the obliteration of Jerusalem was long-standing. It's the same issue in the New Testament passages Mark 12:13-17, also told in Matthew 22:16-22 and Luke 20:20-26, namely, asking Jesus if it's moral according to God to pay taxes to Rome. It's the same issue in Jesus calling a tax collector for the Romans who was himself Jewish to be among the Apostles! Who, btw, was Matthew himself! Not the kind of guy you want around if you're looking to attract followers, since he would have been largely despised, yet Jesus called him and not after extensive catechesis or a change of heart on Matthew's part but while he was on the job collecting taxes, just telling him "Follow me." It's the same issue in the famous parable told in Luke 18:9-14 of the Pharisee and the Publican, sometimes translated tax collector.
OK, what's a publican? Don't hear anybody talking about publicans now do you? Yeah you do, we just don't use that term for them. A publican (publicanus in Latin) was a private contractor with a public government contract for which it successfully bid. They're in the news now all the time. Then as now a lot of their activity was in construction of public works and buildings, and in supplying the military. This practice began after the overthrow of the Kingdom and the establishment of the Republic around 500 BC and the oldest surviving account of such activity is from 390 BC. Our modern practice comes directly from the Roman Republic. But there are two important differences.
One is, there was no Roman IRS, and the publicans also collected taxes in Roman controlled areas. The other is, Senators could not participate in running a publican company (societas publicanorum) and publicans could not hold Senate seats. No Dick Cheneys. Also, publicans were mostly of the equites class, which is often translated as Knights but was not knights in the mediaeval sense we usually think of, but a property-owning based class (horses were part of the property, which is the basis for the later use of the term) and, they were the lower of its two ranks, with the senatorial class number one. That's the Republic. With the Empire this began, along with much else, to change. It had to.
In the Republic, there was a temporary position called dictator (one who speaks, ie commands) which the government could appoint for a specific cause (causa) to address a crisis. The dictator was to resign upon completion of the task or after six months. Julius not-yet-Caesar had gathered a great deal of power from his wars in Gaul (France) and Britannia (England) and the Senate ordered him to resign his command and return to Rome. To do so would leave him open to prosecution as a war criminal, so instead, he returned to Rome alright but at the head of his 13th Legion (Legio tertia decima gemina) which was illegal as hell, a capital offence actually to exercise imperium (command) in Rome itself, crossing the boundary river the Rubicon 10 January 49 BC.
He knew exactly what he was doing and what would happen. It's from this event that we get the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" for taking an action after which there is no reversal or point of return, and also the phrase "the die is cast", from his reported words by Suetonius "iacta alea est" as they waded through the river (it's shallow), though modern usage usually changes the original word order to alea iacta est.
The die was cast. He was now not only open to prosecution as a war criminal but subject to the death penalty for violating the restrictions of command. It set in motion a long civil war in which the Roman bureaucracy was centralised and strengthened, what was left of the Senate proclaimed him dictator perpetuo (dictator in perpetuity), two months later on the proverbial Ides of March (the 15th) in 44 BC he was assassinated in the Senate, which in turn led to further civil war, with his adopted son Octavian being named Augustus (illustrious one) by the weakened Senate on 16 January 27 BC, though he himself liked Romulus as a title, as the reference to the founder of Rome connoted a second founding of Rome, and Imperator Caesar divi filius, Commander Caesar the son of the god (Julius Caesar had been declared a god by the Senate on 1 January 42 BC).
So there you go, from imperium legally broken to Imperator legally established, from complete defiance of the Roman Republic and its concepts to a Roman Empire based on very non-Roman concepts. This is covered in more detail on other posts on this blog, but the point here is, in the time of Jesus' public ministry, 30-33 AD, the Jewish Revolt, 66-73 AD and the destruction of the second Temple in it (70 AD), Rome was not this great monolith but in the stages of becoming one amid great political and social upheaval in changing from the Republic to something very different, the Empire, with sentiment from significant Romans that this change was not for the best and being a republic was better.
This wasn't a problem just for Jesus. What we now consider great Roman figures also had a tough time in this transition -- Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Stoics in general, Tactitus, all of them leery of the Empire and much in sympathy with the former Republic. To the extent that not just Jesus died in this context -- Cicero was executed and Seneca, under orders from Nero, committed suicide.
At the time of Jesus' death the Empire was quite new, only 60 years old. When the great revolt began it was 93 years old. When the Temple was destroyed it was 97 years old and just the year before experienced huge upheaval with the death of Emperor Nero. Territorial governors like Herod and local tax collectors like the publicans were in a very precarious position toward both the local population and the government they worked for, with their roles changing dramatically as the autocratic centralized nature of imperial Rome rapidly evolved and diminished them.
Vespasian.
OK, what's a publican? Don't hear anybody talking about publicans now do you? Yeah you do, we just don't use that term for them. A publican (publicanus in Latin) was a private contractor with a public government contract for which it successfully bid. They're in the news now all the time. Then as now a lot of their activity was in construction of public works and buildings, and in supplying the military. This practice began after the overthrow of the Kingdom and the establishment of the Republic around 500 BC and the oldest surviving account of such activity is from 390 BC. Our modern practice comes directly from the Roman Republic. But there are two important differences.
One is, there was no Roman IRS, and the publicans also collected taxes in Roman controlled areas. The other is, Senators could not participate in running a publican company (societas publicanorum) and publicans could not hold Senate seats. No Dick Cheneys. Also, publicans were mostly of the equites class, which is often translated as Knights but was not knights in the mediaeval sense we usually think of, but a property-owning based class (horses were part of the property, which is the basis for the later use of the term) and, they were the lower of its two ranks, with the senatorial class number one. That's the Republic. With the Empire this began, along with much else, to change. It had to.
In the Republic, there was a temporary position called dictator (one who speaks, ie commands) which the government could appoint for a specific cause (causa) to address a crisis. The dictator was to resign upon completion of the task or after six months. Julius not-yet-Caesar had gathered a great deal of power from his wars in Gaul (France) and Britannia (England) and the Senate ordered him to resign his command and return to Rome. To do so would leave him open to prosecution as a war criminal, so instead, he returned to Rome alright but at the head of his 13th Legion (Legio tertia decima gemina) which was illegal as hell, a capital offence actually to exercise imperium (command) in Rome itself, crossing the boundary river the Rubicon 10 January 49 BC.
He knew exactly what he was doing and what would happen. It's from this event that we get the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" for taking an action after which there is no reversal or point of return, and also the phrase "the die is cast", from his reported words by Suetonius "iacta alea est" as they waded through the river (it's shallow), though modern usage usually changes the original word order to alea iacta est.
The die was cast. He was now not only open to prosecution as a war criminal but subject to the death penalty for violating the restrictions of command. It set in motion a long civil war in which the Roman bureaucracy was centralised and strengthened, what was left of the Senate proclaimed him dictator perpetuo (dictator in perpetuity), two months later on the proverbial Ides of March (the 15th) in 44 BC he was assassinated in the Senate, which in turn led to further civil war, with his adopted son Octavian being named Augustus (illustrious one) by the weakened Senate on 16 January 27 BC, though he himself liked Romulus as a title, as the reference to the founder of Rome connoted a second founding of Rome, and Imperator Caesar divi filius, Commander Caesar the son of the god (Julius Caesar had been declared a god by the Senate on 1 January 42 BC).
So there you go, from imperium legally broken to Imperator legally established, from complete defiance of the Roman Republic and its concepts to a Roman Empire based on very non-Roman concepts. This is covered in more detail on other posts on this blog, but the point here is, in the time of Jesus' public ministry, 30-33 AD, the Jewish Revolt, 66-73 AD and the destruction of the second Temple in it (70 AD), Rome was not this great monolith but in the stages of becoming one amid great political and social upheaval in changing from the Republic to something very different, the Empire, with sentiment from significant Romans that this change was not for the best and being a republic was better.
This wasn't a problem just for Jesus. What we now consider great Roman figures also had a tough time in this transition -- Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Stoics in general, Tactitus, all of them leery of the Empire and much in sympathy with the former Republic. To the extent that not just Jesus died in this context -- Cicero was executed and Seneca, under orders from Nero, committed suicide.
At the time of Jesus' death the Empire was quite new, only 60 years old. When the great revolt began it was 93 years old. When the Temple was destroyed it was 97 years old and just the year before experienced huge upheaval with the death of Emperor Nero. Territorial governors like Herod and local tax collectors like the publicans were in a very precarious position toward both the local population and the government they worked for, with their roles changing dramatically as the autocratic centralized nature of imperial Rome rapidly evolved and diminished them.
Vespasian.
Vespasian distinguished himself in the ongoing conquest of Britannia, which began in 43 AD under Emperor Claudius, in which Vespasian commanded one of the four legions sent (Legio secunda Augusta, to be specific). He retired from the military after that and pursued a political career, retiring in 51 after incurring the disfavour of Claudius' (fourth) wife Julia Agrippina, who was the mother of Nero by an earlier marriage and whom Claudius made his heir. Vespasian's military expertise is no doubt why Nero appointed him to take care of this political problem. Josephus' account is controversial among Jews; he was a Jew himself, but also a Roman citizen and had imperial patronage. Ironically, he regarded Vespasian highly.
With the death of Nero political chaos fell upon the new Empire, and in 69 was the Year of Four Emperors, Vespasian being the last. Theoretically, he did not have the pedigree for that, being of the equestrian not senatorial class, but the army was behind him and the Senate soon confirmed him. He was all for the Empire, and it being rather new at the time, was suspicious of those still hankering for the old Republic, particularly the Stoics. He was otherwise known as quite amiable though. As Emperor he embarked upon many reforms, extended financial generosity to many, and to the public as a whole.
One such is still famous, the so-called Colosseum! It's real name is Amphitheatrum Flavium, or Flavian Amphitheatre in English. Why "Flavian"? It's from Vespasian's actual name. In English we tend to refer to significant Romans by one name, but a Roman had three. His was Titus Flavius Vespasianus. Flavius is his nomen, the name that gives your clan (gens) and identifies you as a citizen, hence the Romans would use that and not what looks like a "last" name in English but in Latin is a cognomen, originally a nickname but later identifying your family within the clan.
Flavian also describes the dynasty he established. After a ten-year reign, he was succeeded by his son Titus, who had also taken over the destruction of Jerusalem when his dad got involved in bigger stuff, and also was then the first emperor to be succeeded by a biological heir.
Among his reforms was the re-institution of vectigal urinae, yup, a urine tax, not for taking a leak but for buying urine! Huh? Well, public toilets also were a collection place for pots to piss in from lower classes, and the urine was used for its ammonia content in tanning and laundering. Yes, laundering. There's a great story Suetonius records that when his dad re-instituted the tax his son Titus said "Dad, that's just gross" (or words to that effect in Latin) whereupon Vespasian held up a coin and asked Titus if that seemed gross, and when Titus said No, Vespasian said pecunia non olet, money doesn't stink. The phrase is still used to distinguish money from its source, and I think the term for a public toilet in French and Italian is a Vespasian; why Spanish did not get this I do not know! Marx himself in Das Kapital uses the phrase to identify the phenomenon that from money itself one cannot tell how the person with money got it or from what trade it came.
Vespasian is remembered for his role in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, though his son Titus finished the job, but, he should also be remembered for his role allowing the creation of a form of Judaism that could survive the destruction and is the form in which we know Judaism now, so it's not so ironic after all that Josephus thought highly of him.
As the destruction neared, everyone understood that this would end everything if it happened. There wouldn't even be a "captivity" somewhere. So, a Pharisee named Yohanan ben Zakkai tried hard to get the Jewish side to stand down, and when they wouldn't, he arranged a secret meeting with Vespasian to save what he could from the now inevitable destruction. He asked Vespasian only for sparing the town of Yavne (Jamnia) and its teachers, as well as Gamaliel's descendants and a physician to attend a Rabbi Zadok who had been fasting 40 years that things might not end this way.
Zadok is an interesting name for a rabbi. Zadok is the name of the high priest of the First Temple of Solomon and David and from whom the priestly party in the Second Temple, the Sadducees, were named and claimed legitimacy, and who accepted only the Torah (first five books of anyone's Bible, the books of Moses). The teachers and scholars in local synagogues, the rabbis, had no Biblical office, accepted the Prophets and Other Writings as well as oral tradition and the ability to make further rulings as necessary, and weren't so sure a Temple built under foreign authority was all that legitimate. These are the Pharisees, which means "ones set apart", as in for teaching and study.
Vespasian granted his request. Upon which, Yohanan told him he would be emperor. Yohanan saw Rome as the fourth of the four world powers prophesied in Daniel 7:23, and saw Vespasian as fulfilling the prediction of Isaias 10:34 that the holy house would fall into the hands of a king. About three days later, word arrived that Vitellius, the current emperor, was dead and the Senate had named Vespasian emperor. Vespasian had never supported Vitellius in his overthrow of Otho, the previous emperor, who committed suicide when he lost, and Vespasian's forces defeated Vitellius' forces and killed him, whereupon the Senate proclaimed Vespasian emperor 21 December 69, though communications being what they were at the time, it would be some time before he knew. That's why Vespasian left for Rome and the actual destruction was carried out under Titus, his son.
The school and centre at Jamnia has enormous ongoing influence. With the Temple, priesthood and sacrifices gone, the religion revealed by God in the Hebrew Bible was now impossible to do, so what do we do? Jamnia, be it an actual council or a centre of activity, answered this challenge, and the answer turned the Judaism of the Pharisees into the rabbinical Judaism we have now.
Yohanan issued nine edicts which modified the observance of observances commanded in Torah so they could be done outside Jerusalem and the Temple and its priests, which were now destroyed. The gathered rabbis also instituted an observance called Tisha B'Av (the ninth of Av, which falls between mid-July to mid-August in the now-standard Gregorian calendar), patterned after Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) with a complete fast and four other prohibitions, and the Book of Lamentations, composed after the destruction of the first Temple and attributed to Jeremias, though the Bible itself is not clear on that. Regardless, its use laments the destruction of both Temples, which happened on the same day, the ninth of Av, and other calamities that later befell the Jews on or around that day are often added too now.
Lamentations is an extraordinary book. It both accepts that the destruction was a just response by God to the sins and faithlessness of the people, and notes that maybe the punishment could have been not so harsh. It accepts that God has been gracious in the past, and notes that this does not guarantee he will be gracious now or in the future. It accepts that this may mean that God has rejected his people, but hopes that based on the past he will be gracious again. The church uses it too, as part of a night service called Tenebrae, which existed from at least C9 until early in my lifetime, when in 1955 Pope Pius XII changed Holy Week services into what they are now. Tenebrae as held now in some churches on Good Friday is loosely based on the original Tenebrae but does not use Lamentations. (Maybe I can talk my pastor into it one of these days, although a traditional Lutheran Tenebrae on Good Friday evening with the Seven Last Words or a Passion reading is the most gripping service we have so I'll be quite happy if we stick with that.)
The most far-reaching of all of Yohanan's work is this: what is to replace the sacrifices that bind Man to God now that the place and people to perform them are gone? Based on Osee, oh sorry, Hosea (the name means "salvation") 6:6, which is, "For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings", he concluded and persuaded the others to conclude that our mitzvoth (prayer and good deeds, especially the 613 commands of the Law of Moses in Torah), replace the sacrifices going forward until such time as the Temple is restored, the Third Temple.
Now.
So here we are, now. Is there gonna be a Third Temple? Depends on who you ask.
Orthodox Jews say yes and pray for it daily. Orthodox? What's that? While all Judaism since the destruction of the second Temple comes from Yochanan et al. at Jamnia, in mid-C19 Germany a movement coalesced around Abraham Geiger (1810-1874) called Reform Judaism, which rejected traditional rabbinic Judaism as really the product of exclusion, a ghetto mentality, incompatible with modern life, but did not see it as a rejection but reclaiming the ongoing spirit of rabbinic Judaism from its shell, much as Ezra and the 120 Men of the Great Assembly had done. Each synagogue was a temple, not just one in Jerusalem, so there is no need to restore it or the sacrifices which reflect a primitive time out of which we have grown. A middle ground between the two emerged in Germany around Zecharias Frankel (1801-1875) known as Conservative Judaism, and its position on the Temple and sacrifices is typical: yes to rebuilding the Temple, no to the sacrifices and references to sacrifice are removed from the Amidah and other prayers. Both of these movements are now primarily found in the United States, where many Jews now view being Jewish as more a social and ethnic thing and among those who have a formal affiliation Reform is the biggest.
On top of that, even if the Temple is to be rebuilt, there's a big problem. The space is taken. Right on top of the site of both temples is the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine begun by the fifth Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (646-705). While the motives behind building it are disputed by historians, its significance is clear: it's from this site Muhammad's "Night Journey" around 620 through the heavens is held to have happened, beginning with the silver domed al-Aqsa mosque next to it, which is the third holiest site to Muslims of any kind. All indications are, it ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
Finally, there's another option as to the current significance of the Temple and its sacrifices. What if the third temple, so to speak, has already happened? What if the full and final sacrifice has already been offered? What if that's why there is no reason to mourn the Temple, what it was there for has been fulfilled? What if that answers the questions of Lamentations, yes we are justly rejected by God for our faithlessness but yes, he will be merciful again, this time to the extent of paying the price himself, becoming incarnate as a human in Jesus of Nazareth to be priest, sacrifice, temple and all? What if we are just like the lame beggar in Acts 3, who was put by one of the Temple gates to beg, and encounters Peter and John on their way in for Minha (afternoon service)?
Peter, John, the Temple and Jesus are physically gone. Being a beggar is the same. He couldn't go to where God was, so God came to where he was. It's still like that. We can't go to where he is, so he comes to where we are, priest, sacrifice, Temple and all, as the Office of Holy Ministry rightly preaches the Word and rightly administers the Sacraments of Baptism into his death and Communion in his Body and Blood given for our salvation.
Wir sein Pettler (modern German: Wir sind Bettler). Hoc est verum.
Vespasian was all for the Empire. We saw that the huge transition from a Republic to an Empire meant Rome was discarding some essential Roman ideas and principles, and the Empire was thus quite un-Roman. So, by the time Rome defined the Roman Catholic Church by imperial decree and made it the state religion in 380 (Cunctos populos) the state church was quite in line with the distinctly un-Roman characteristics of the Empire. Its further development after the Empire faded and the "Holy" one came about was also quite in line with that, and even now this former state church retains the nature of the state church though the state is gone. In short, the Catholic Church is in no way the catholic church.
Third Temple?
Third Temple?
Vespasian is remembered for his role in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, though his son Titus finished the job, but, he should also be remembered for his role allowing the creation of a form of Judaism that could survive the destruction and is the form in which we know Judaism now, so it's not so ironic after all that Josephus thought highly of him.
As the destruction neared, everyone understood that this would end everything if it happened. There wouldn't even be a "captivity" somewhere. So, a Pharisee named Yohanan ben Zakkai tried hard to get the Jewish side to stand down, and when they wouldn't, he arranged a secret meeting with Vespasian to save what he could from the now inevitable destruction. He asked Vespasian only for sparing the town of Yavne (Jamnia) and its teachers, as well as Gamaliel's descendants and a physician to attend a Rabbi Zadok who had been fasting 40 years that things might not end this way.
Zadok is an interesting name for a rabbi. Zadok is the name of the high priest of the First Temple of Solomon and David and from whom the priestly party in the Second Temple, the Sadducees, were named and claimed legitimacy, and who accepted only the Torah (first five books of anyone's Bible, the books of Moses). The teachers and scholars in local synagogues, the rabbis, had no Biblical office, accepted the Prophets and Other Writings as well as oral tradition and the ability to make further rulings as necessary, and weren't so sure a Temple built under foreign authority was all that legitimate. These are the Pharisees, which means "ones set apart", as in for teaching and study.
Vespasian granted his request. Upon which, Yohanan told him he would be emperor. Yohanan saw Rome as the fourth of the four world powers prophesied in Daniel 7:23, and saw Vespasian as fulfilling the prediction of Isaias 10:34 that the holy house would fall into the hands of a king. About three days later, word arrived that Vitellius, the current emperor, was dead and the Senate had named Vespasian emperor. Vespasian had never supported Vitellius in his overthrow of Otho, the previous emperor, who committed suicide when he lost, and Vespasian's forces defeated Vitellius' forces and killed him, whereupon the Senate proclaimed Vespasian emperor 21 December 69, though communications being what they were at the time, it would be some time before he knew. That's why Vespasian left for Rome and the actual destruction was carried out under Titus, his son.
The school and centre at Jamnia has enormous ongoing influence. With the Temple, priesthood and sacrifices gone, the religion revealed by God in the Hebrew Bible was now impossible to do, so what do we do? Jamnia, be it an actual council or a centre of activity, answered this challenge, and the answer turned the Judaism of the Pharisees into the rabbinical Judaism we have now.
Yohanan issued nine edicts which modified the observance of observances commanded in Torah so they could be done outside Jerusalem and the Temple and its priests, which were now destroyed. The gathered rabbis also instituted an observance called Tisha B'Av (the ninth of Av, which falls between mid-July to mid-August in the now-standard Gregorian calendar), patterned after Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) with a complete fast and four other prohibitions, and the Book of Lamentations, composed after the destruction of the first Temple and attributed to Jeremias, though the Bible itself is not clear on that. Regardless, its use laments the destruction of both Temples, which happened on the same day, the ninth of Av, and other calamities that later befell the Jews on or around that day are often added too now.
Lamentations is an extraordinary book. It both accepts that the destruction was a just response by God to the sins and faithlessness of the people, and notes that maybe the punishment could have been not so harsh. It accepts that God has been gracious in the past, and notes that this does not guarantee he will be gracious now or in the future. It accepts that this may mean that God has rejected his people, but hopes that based on the past he will be gracious again. The church uses it too, as part of a night service called Tenebrae, which existed from at least C9 until early in my lifetime, when in 1955 Pope Pius XII changed Holy Week services into what they are now. Tenebrae as held now in some churches on Good Friday is loosely based on the original Tenebrae but does not use Lamentations. (Maybe I can talk my pastor into it one of these days, although a traditional Lutheran Tenebrae on Good Friday evening with the Seven Last Words or a Passion reading is the most gripping service we have so I'll be quite happy if we stick with that.)
The most far-reaching of all of Yohanan's work is this: what is to replace the sacrifices that bind Man to God now that the place and people to perform them are gone? Based on Osee, oh sorry, Hosea (the name means "salvation") 6:6, which is, "For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings", he concluded and persuaded the others to conclude that our mitzvoth (prayer and good deeds, especially the 613 commands of the Law of Moses in Torah), replace the sacrifices going forward until such time as the Temple is restored, the Third Temple.
Now.
So here we are, now. Is there gonna be a Third Temple? Depends on who you ask.
Orthodox Jews say yes and pray for it daily. Orthodox? What's that? While all Judaism since the destruction of the second Temple comes from Yochanan et al. at Jamnia, in mid-C19 Germany a movement coalesced around Abraham Geiger (1810-1874) called Reform Judaism, which rejected traditional rabbinic Judaism as really the product of exclusion, a ghetto mentality, incompatible with modern life, but did not see it as a rejection but reclaiming the ongoing spirit of rabbinic Judaism from its shell, much as Ezra and the 120 Men of the Great Assembly had done. Each synagogue was a temple, not just one in Jerusalem, so there is no need to restore it or the sacrifices which reflect a primitive time out of which we have grown. A middle ground between the two emerged in Germany around Zecharias Frankel (1801-1875) known as Conservative Judaism, and its position on the Temple and sacrifices is typical: yes to rebuilding the Temple, no to the sacrifices and references to sacrifice are removed from the Amidah and other prayers. Both of these movements are now primarily found in the United States, where many Jews now view being Jewish as more a social and ethnic thing and among those who have a formal affiliation Reform is the biggest.
On top of that, even if the Temple is to be rebuilt, there's a big problem. The space is taken. Right on top of the site of both temples is the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine begun by the fifth Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (646-705). While the motives behind building it are disputed by historians, its significance is clear: it's from this site Muhammad's "Night Journey" around 620 through the heavens is held to have happened, beginning with the silver domed al-Aqsa mosque next to it, which is the third holiest site to Muslims of any kind. All indications are, it ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
Finally, there's another option as to the current significance of the Temple and its sacrifices. What if the third temple, so to speak, has already happened? What if the full and final sacrifice has already been offered? What if that's why there is no reason to mourn the Temple, what it was there for has been fulfilled? What if that answers the questions of Lamentations, yes we are justly rejected by God for our faithlessness but yes, he will be merciful again, this time to the extent of paying the price himself, becoming incarnate as a human in Jesus of Nazareth to be priest, sacrifice, temple and all? What if we are just like the lame beggar in Acts 3, who was put by one of the Temple gates to beg, and encounters Peter and John on their way in for Minha (afternoon service)?
Peter, John, the Temple and Jesus are physically gone. Being a beggar is the same. He couldn't go to where God was, so God came to where he was. It's still like that. We can't go to where he is, so he comes to where we are, priest, sacrifice, Temple and all, as the Office of Holy Ministry rightly preaches the Word and rightly administers the Sacraments of Baptism into his death and Communion in his Body and Blood given for our salvation.
Wir sein Pettler (modern German: Wir sind Bettler). Hoc est verum.
We are beggars. This is true.
