Temple Theology: An Introduction [Paperback]

Barker is not only an independent scholar in the field of Life of Jesus research, but also a Methodist minister as well, which might come as a surprise, since her writing is challenging and revolutionary. Her scholarship is refreshing in the fact that she writes both narrowly as an exegete but also broadly as a historian and which is unique in this field, although none the less challenging and refreshing. Her field of interest covers not just `Life of Jesus' research but also the history and tradition of the Davidic first temple cult and the origins of what became Christianity through to the time of Jesus and beyond.
This particular title may be considered as a general introduction to her work and was originally presented as a series of lectures given at Heythrop College, London University in 2003. It is a surprise to learn from her research that Christianity is older than Judaism, but her arguments (which are extensively explained and argued in great detail in her other writings) are solid and clear. Her argument being that Christian theology developed very quickly because it had evolved out of a preceding and fully formed and earlier faith - one which was not Judaism or the faith of the second temple, but the theology of the first, Davidic temple, and to which Jesus and his followers were the successors. She is therefore also parenthetically refuting the usual assumption that a mature Christian theology necessarily developed gradually through a confluence with Greek philosophy and culture.
Unlike many academics in this field - and one thinks here of writers such as Dominic Crossan - Barker does not project concepts framed within her/our culture upon the culture that she is researching. Consequently she attempts to explain the researched facts rather than falling into the trap of taking preconceptions drawn from our culture and projecting them upon the one under investigation.
This is intended as an introduction to Barker's extensive and ongoing work, much of which is very detailed and challenging to read. Read this one first! Cutting edge.

Having read most of Margaret Barker's works, she follows her same modis operandi in spelling out the Old Testament symbolism to gain a more clear understanding of Christianity. Where many Scholars assume that the first Christians had a very simple and undeveloped faith that evolved due to Greek influence, Barker shows that the Jewish Christian perspective was well developed and built off a much older tradition. This is a very short book and written in lay terms making it accessible to all readers. It focus' on Creation, Covenant, Atonement and Wisdom. The understanding of these Jewish concepts would change in the hands of the Greeks, but by understanding how they were seen through Jewish eyes, we have a much more clear understanding of what the first Christians were thinking and how they saw the Temple as a central pillar in their faith.

In May of 2003, Margaret Barker was invited to give the Cardinal Hume lectures at Heythrop College, University of London. These four lectures serve as the basis for her tenth book, Temple Theology: An Introduction. She comments that the invitation to do the lectures "gave me the opportunity to pause and look at my work. For many years I have been absorbed in a quest to discover the meaning of the temple...I have often been reminded how far I have traveled (or even strayed!) from the mainstream. In these lectures I describe something of the view from this point on the journey, and speculate about what may lie over the horizon, and how this could affect our perception of Christian origins." In this volume of about 100 pages, she provides an overview of her views for general readers.

The forward by the Principal of Heythrop College shows the significance that an academic Christian sees in her work. He quotes her declaration that "Temple theology is the original context of the New Testament. It knew of incarnation and atonement, the sons of God and the life of the age to come, the day of judgement, justification, salvation, the renewed covenant and the Kingdom of God." He is clearly impressed by Barker's solutions to several puzzles regarding Christian beginnings, and by her claim that Jesus "is the author and finisher of the faith, rather than the early communities, a supposition which has been fashionable for some time." There has been steady increase of attention given to her work in the form of numerous reviews, invitations to speak in prestigious forums, a term as the president elect of the Society for Old Testament Study, an invitation to head up a project at Cambridge to study the Temple, and her position as editor of a line of academic books for an English publisher. Even more recently, Temple Theology was shortlisted for the 2007 Michael Ramsey Prize for theological writing.

The interest in her work by many mainstream Christians is understandable. She awakens the sense of real possibilities in the Christian message. She subverts the authority and arguments of skeptical scholars via her mastery of a vast range primary sources, an impressive critical tools, and an uncanny ability to draw connections between texts. She also draws the ire of some orthodox scholars by her insistence that the Old Testament has been edited, that key backgrounds to the New Testament have been lost, and observation of "the curiously [...] refusal on the part of Christian scholars to believe the claims of the first Christians." But while the question of Christian origins remains her focus, it is her solution to those questions that makes her work of extreme interest. Consider this comment from Barker's introduction:

"One thing has become clear: the original gospel message was about the temple, not the corrupted temple of Jesus' own time, but the original temple which had been destroyed some six hundred years earlier. All that remained were memories, and the hope that one day, the true temple and all it represented would be restored. Jesus was represented as the high priest from the first temple; Melchizedek returned to his people. The restoration of the first temple was the hope of the first Christians, and to set them, their writings, and their presentation of Jesus in any other setting misrepresents the original gospel...people who thought in this `temple' manner also wrote and read the rest of the New Testament. If we read it in any other way, we are reading our own meaning in to the texts, and are not connecting to the original teachings of the Church."

In Barker's work, the event and religious currents and divisions Jerusalem around 600 B.C.E. become the key to the origins of Christianity. Of the implications of her 1992 book, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God, Robert Price wrote:

"This is what we mean by "paradigm shift." In reading Margaret Barker's wide-ranging investigation one feels the tectonic plates shifting and coming together in a new configuration, or perhaps rather a very old one, as we see the outlines of primal Gondwanaland restored again. Barker strips off the blinders of the canonical redactors of the Old Testament, a job we thought we'd long ago completed."

Barker is not merely adding details to a conventional paradigm of Christian origins, the history of Israel, and the transmission of sacred texts, but is offering a substantially new paradigm. She understands that:

"A new paradigm alters everything, and its value cannot be assessed by the extent to which it agrees with, and is compatible with the paradigm that it seeks to supercede. It has to be judged on the extent to which it offers an explanation of the evidence."

What is her explanation? In outline, this is very simple, though in detail, the arguments call upon a wide range of primary sources. The first temple stood in Jerusalem for over 400 years, from the days of Solomon to its destruction by the Babylonians in the reign of Zedekiah. But the real destruction of the temple took place at the hands of Josiah, and a group that conventional scholarship calls the Deuteronomists. It was the heirs of the Deuteronomists that returned from the Exile in Babylon to rebuild the temple, and who chose to exclude from the priesthood those who had not been part of the Exile.

The Hebrew scriptures as we know them were preserved, edited and transmitted by the priests and scribes of the second temple, the very people whom the 'long exile' tradition condemned as apostates who had altered the Scriptures. `Sinners will alter and pervert the words of righteousness in many ways... and lie and practise great deceit and write books concerning their words' (1 Enoch 104:10; 1 Enoch 98.15-991 is similar.) This Enoch text was regarded as Scripture by the early Christians.

She not only finds passages in 3 Isaiah and Proverbs that appear to condemn the Second Temple, but looks to the Dead Sea Scrolls and "Other pre-Christian texts" that "preserved the voices of the long exile and of hostility to the second temple, yet these texts were only preserved by Christian scribes."

With such sources, and against this historical framework, in Temple Theology, she explores four key temple themes. In the chapter on "Creation" she looks at the patterns of the temple, and the symbolism of the Holy of Holies. The second chapter discusses the various covenants described in the Bible, noting that only the covenant mentioned in Jer. 31.34 mentions forgiveness of sins. She compares the two versions of the fourth commandment ( Exod. 20.11 and Deut.. 5.14-15) to emphasize the two different theologies. "The one appears to the natural order of things, living in harmony with the pattern of creation, and the other to history." The third essay, "Atonement," looks to the world of the first temple to "set atonement in the its original context." She argues that "When we think about atonement, and the Day of Atonement whose ritual centered on the high priest, it is important to remember that the high priest had been the LORD, the Son of God Most High, long before the Christians used those terms." The final essay, "Wisdom," discusses the Queen of Heaven rejected during the time of Josiah and how her memory persists in various places.

For those curious about Barker's work, Temple Theology provides a worthy, concise, and very readable introduction. And when looking at our own scriptures again in light of her framework, we can see far more than we have. After reading Barker, we have to read everything over again because we see everything with new eyes.

Kevin Christensen