Jerusalem and the Early Jesus Movement: The Q Community's Attitude Toward the Temple

251 Pages·14.029 MB·English

by  Kyu Sam Han

l i b r a r y o f n e w t e s t a m e n t s t u d i e s
JERUSALEM AND
THE EARLY JESUS
MOVEMENT
The Q Community’s Attitude Toward the Temple
KYU SAM HAN
JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
SUPPLEMENT SERIES
207
Executive Editor
Stanley E. Porter
Editorial Board
Craig Blomberg, Elizabeth A. Castelli, David Catchpole,
Kathleen E. Corley, R. Alan Culpepper, James D.G. Dunn,
Craig A. Evans, Stephen Fowl, Robert Fowler,
George H. Guthrie, Robert Jewett, Robert W. Wall
Sheffield Academic Press
A Continuum imprint

Jerusalem and the Early
Jesus Movement
The Q Community's Attitude
Toward the sTemple
Kyu Sam Han
Journal for the Study of the New Testament
Supplement Series 207
Copyright © 2002 Sheffield Academic Press
A Continuum imprint
Published by
Sheffield Academic Press Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6550
www.SheftleldAcademicPress.com
www.continuumbooks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset by Sheffield Academic Press
EISBN 9781841271835
CONTENTS
Foreword 7
Preface 11
Abbreviations 12
Introduction 15
Chapter 1
HISTORICAL SURVEY OF THE DEBATE 21
Catchpole and a Positive Assessment of the Temple 21
Kloppenborg and a Negative Assessment of the Temple 34
Chapter 2
TEMPLE AND ALLEGIANCE 44
The Meaning of the Temple as the Source of Allegiance
in Ancient Civilizations 44
The Meaning of the Jerusalem Temple in the First Century CE:
The Source of Allegiance 51
A New Methodology: Four Types of Allegiance 54
Chapter 3
ALLEGIANCE HELD AND LOST: AN ANALYSIS OF INDICATORS 58
Allegiance to Medieval Korean Temples 58
Allegiance to Greek Temples and Philosophical Criticism 71
Allegiance to the Jerusalem Temple in the Literature
of Second Temple Judaism 91
Summary and Conclusion 128
Chapter 4
Q's ALLEGIANCE TO THE JERUSALEM TEMPLE? 132
Q 4.9-12 132
Q 11.49-51 169
6 Jerusalem and the Early Jesus Movement
Q 13.34-35 183
A Reflection on the Historical Background of the Shift in
the Attitude toward the Temple 203
Chapter 5
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 208
Bibliography 214
Index of References 237
Index of Authors 245
FOREWORD
John S. Kloppenborg Verbin
It has been a working hypothesis since the beginning of serious study of
the Sayings Gospel Q in the 1960s that the document reflects the particular
perspectives of one sector of the Jesus movement in Galilee, either shortly
before the First Revolt or shortly after it. It is this location that renders
almost inevitable the question of the relationship of Q and the people it
represents to the central institutions of Second Temple Judaism, in
particular the Torah and the Herodian Temple.
Q's perspective on the Torah was the subject of several important
studies. Siegfried Schulz's monumental study, Q: Die Spruchquelle der
Evangelisten, used Herbert Braun's notion of Torah-radicalism as a model
for understanding Q's particular view of the Torah,1 and led to a
construction that Q represented a conservative, Torah-observant group of
Jewish Christians. Subsequent study has adjusted this model somewhat for
a variety of reasons: because some of Schulz's reconstructions of Q, which
favored Matthew's wordings, have been reconsidered; because Schulz's
conclusion that many of Q's Aeyco ei(Ji sayings were functionally the
equivalent of prophetic speech has been revaluated; and because more
sophisticated models for understanding the stratigraphy of Q have been
developed, allowing scholars to situate Q's interest in the Torah at very
particular compositional junctures. A series of studies culminating in
Daniel Kosch's important monograph on Q and the Torah2 seems now to
1. Siegfried Schulz, Q: Die Spruchquelle der Evangelisten (Zurich: Theologischer
Verlag, 1972); Herbert Braun, Spdtjudisch-hdretischerundfruhchristlicherRadikalis-
mus: Jesus von Nazareth und die essenische Qumransekte (BHT, 24.1-2; Tubingen:
J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 2nd edn, 1969).
2. Daniel Kosch, Die eschatologische Tora des Menschensohnes: Untersuch-
ungen zurRezeption der Stellung Jesu zur Tora in Q (NTOA, 12; Freiburg: Universi-
tatsverlag; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989). See also David R. Catchpole,
'The Law and the Prophets in Q', in Gerald F. Hawthorne, and Otto Betz (eds.),
Tradition and Interpretation in the New Testament: Essays in Honor ofE. Earle Ellis
8 Jerusalem and the Early Jesus Movement
define a consensus that Q, generally speaking, is not preoccupied with the
Torah and Jesus' relationship to it. There remains, however, dispute con-
cerning the particular compositional phase at which such texts as Q 16.17
and 11.42c should be located.
Kyu Sam Han's study of Q takes up the other important element in
understanding Q's place within late Second Temple Judaism, namely Q's
relationship to the Herodian Temple. This is a pressing area of inquiry,
especially in the light of our recognition that the Temple was not merely a
'religious' institution—not that any institutions of the ancient world were
narrowly 'religious' in the way in which Northern European and North
American discourses have tended define 'religious'—but a major eco-
nomic and political force in Jewish Palestine. The fact that a variety of
views, critical and otherwise, on the Herodian Temple were adopted by
other Jews of the late Second Temple period naturally raises the question
of how the Q people placed themselves in relation to the key institution of
Jewish life.
The investigation of Q's perspective on the Temple is fraught with
problems. In the first place, there are relatively few locations in Q that
speak directly or implicitly of the Temple and so, to some extent, Han's
study must extrapolate from rather small scraps. Second, the texts Han
investigates do not speak with the same voice, and this naturally raises the
question of how to reconcile the seemingly positive view of tithing
enunciated in 11.42c and the assumption implicit in Q 4.9-12 that the
Temple is a site where angels are likely to be present, with the rather more
hostile views of 11.49-51 and 13.34-35.
One of the singular strengths of Han's study is its comparative approach,
which lays out a spectrum of stances toward the Herodian Temple (and its
Hasmonean predecessor) in contemporary literature, and situates these in
turn in the context of attitudes towards temples and sanctuaries both in
Greece and in the Koryo kingdom of ancient Korea. It is this cross-cultural
and comparative method that allows Han to discern a variety of postures
for his 60th Birthday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Sie-
beck], 1987), pp. 95-109; Christopher M. Tuckett, 'Q, the Law and Judaism', in
Barnabas Lindars (ed.), Law and Religion: Essays on the Place of the Law in Israel
and early Christianity (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1988), pp. 90-101; John S. Kloppen-
borg, 'Nomos and Ethos in Q', in James E. Goehring etal (eds.), Gospel Origins and
Christian Beginnings: In Honor of James M. Robinson (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge
Press, 1990), pp. 35-48; Gerhard Dautzenberg, 'Tora des Menschensohnes? Kritische?-
erlegungen zu Daniel Kosch', 5ZNS 36 (1992), pp. 93-103.
Foreword 9
towards cultic sites, and in particular, to find models that may help to
account for the shift in allegiance from one cultic site to another, or away
from a central cultic shrine. Of particular interest are Han's comments on
the differing criticisms of Buddhist temples in Korea by Buddhist and
Confucian literati.
There are important methodological caveats to be observed in applying
cross-cultural observations to the situation of the Herodian Temple in
Jewish Palestine. For unlike most other temple-states, Israel had a central-
ized cult, from the time of the Deuteronomic reforms in the late seventh
century BCE. This created its own set of special circumstances, especially
for Jews living at a less than convenient distance from Jerusalem, which
was certainly the case for Galilean Jews. The economy of a temple system
normally presupposes a reciprocal exchange of tithes, sacrificial animals,
and other commodities for the 'goods and services' that the temple has to
offer. These include participation in periodic festivals and processions, and
access to a site for purposes of prayer, instruction, and the display of
votary inscriptions and monuments. The centralization of the cult in
Jerusalem would have encumbered this exchange for Jews in Judah who
lived, say, in Jericho or Hebron, but it would have been even more diffi-
cult for Galileans to enjoy a meaningful participation in the temple. It has
been estimated that a Galilean who wished to participate in one of the pil-
grimage festivals would have to count on an absence from his or her home
for at least three weeks, probably an impossibility for most living in a
subsistence level agrarian society.
It is this set of thorny problems that Han's work engages and attempts to
resolve in an intelligible fashion. Part of his solution involves distinguish-
ing between the texts of Q that adopt a rather polemical stance toward the
Temple and its officers (Q 11.49-51) and to connect these with what on
other grounds has been identified with the main redaction of Q, probably
effected in the 60s CE. Later, perhaps as Han suggests, after the First
Revolt and the destruction of the Temple, a more positive view arose,
rather akin to Matthew's view of the Temple in Mt. 5.23-24; 23.21, or
Luke's Jerusalem-centred and temple-centred construction of the cosmos.
If Han's conclusions are essentially correct, they point to the complexity
of the ideological terrain of the early Jesus movement. Far from exem-
plifying a simple, unilinear drift away from the cultural context supplied
by Second Temple Judaism, Q illustrates movements within that Judaism,
corresponding in part at least to differing situations before and after the
First Revolt.