THE SECOND TEMPLE AND ITS ‘PINNACLE’
The Hebrew Bible identifies Mount Moriah – on the eastern side of Jerusalem and above the Gihon spring and the Kidron ravine – as the location of the Temple Mount. Originally, there was a ‘threshing floor’ on the heights of Moriah, and it was there that Abraham attempted to sacrifice his son Isaac as commanded by ‘the Voice of God’. He built there a rough altar but the sacrifice was halted by ‘the Voice’ at its critical moment when, providentially, a ram was noticed trapped in a nearby bush and substituted for Isaac (Genesis 22:2, 14). But this is just one of a number of momentous ‘rites’ enacted on this ‘high place’.
There can be few locations on this Earth with such strong numinous and geomantic associations as Moriah. Some have argued that this poignant scene of Abraham’s testing – memorialised by Jews as the Akedah (the ‘Binding of Isaac’) – was a coded revelation of the site of the future Temple and its Holy adytum. This likely influenced King David, who later bought the ‘threshing floor’ for the site of the future temple.
The foundations of the First Temple are credited to David, but the construction was completed by his son Solomon. Very little is known about David as a historical figure, except that he flourished around 1,000 BC and that he had the Ark of the Covenant brought to Jerusalem. This is believed to have been the same Ark that the Israelites brought out of Egypt. The Ark had ‘rested’ at the “threshing floor of Kidron” on Mount Moriah before it was lodged in a tent outside a city gate, awaiting the completion of the First Temple,
Similarly, precise dating of the construction of the various Temples is problematical. Rabbinical sources suggest that work on the First Temple could have begun as late as 832 BC. This edifice was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar II in around 587 BC. Construction of the Second Temple began in the 6th century BC and was completed between 516 BC and 350 BC; it was partially reconstructed by Herod in 20-18 BC.
After the Jewish revolt in AD 66, the Romans claimed the city in AD 70 and destroyed most of the Second Temple. The ‘pinnacle’ that features in Jesus’s Temptation may not have been a pinnacle as we know it, resulting in arguments about the actual ‘highest point’ of the Second Temple. The Holy of Holies was located more towards the
central or northern end of this complex, where a drop from its roof into the street below was not the ‘greatest drop’. Instead, the main consensus favours the southern wall
– the location of the Royal Porch – where the height of the south-eastern corner of the wall, above the Kidron valley, impressed Josephus as having the greatest drop.
The ‘Royal Porch’, on the southern side of the Temple, was suggested by Frederick Farrar as the location of Jesus’s Temptation because it had a sheer drop of 450ft (137m) to the Kidron stream below it.1 It may be significant that this was where another Christian elder faced a life-and-death trial – the martyrdom of St James the Just. The first century Romano-Jewish historian Josephus famously referred to “a tradition” that St James – who may have been Jesus’s brother or cousin – was thrown down from this very location.
This James was a leader of the early Church in Jerusalem and, after Peter left, presided over the Council of Jerusalem,
trying to reconcile Jesus’s teachings with the Torah and bring peace between the new Christians and the Jews. Josephus wrote that, in those days, James’s actions antagonised the orthodox Jews, who petitioned the Sadducee leader to condemn and stone him. James was tricked into addressing a crowd from the top of the Temple stairs, seized and flung over the parapet, falling hundreds of feet to the court below.
A passage quoted by Eusebius (in his Church History) from Hegesippus, has more detail: they “placed James upon the pinnacle of the temple, and threw down the just man, and they began to stone him, for he was not killed by the fall. And one of them, who was a fuller, took the club with which he beat out clothes and struck the just man on the head”. James is believed to have been martyred in “62 or 69 AD”.
NOTES
1 Frederick Farrar, The Life of Christ, 1874, pp121-139.
2 Josephus, 1890, pp475-476.
good on his promise of divine assistance in moments of peril; that should he fall from a high place, the angels would intervene and save him from being dashed on the ground. The narratives of both Luke (4:10-11) and Matthew (4:6) have the devil quoting Psalm
9 1:11–12: “For he shall give his angels charge over thee… They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.” (My emphasis.) The devil implies that Jesus could, if he wished, use the passage to justify presumptuous acts. Jesus, as we know, retaliates, citing the Rabbinic injunction against bargaining with God.
Various schools of theologians have debated the nature of these incidents over centuries, including the order in which these Temptations occurred. The events themselves have been explained away or underplayed as visionary, symbolic, mythical, or a compound of those. But, as Farrar notes, “very few writers in the present day will regard the story of the temptation as a narrative of objective facts.” The main orthodox opinion on offer today is that these descriptions of mystical transportation are poetic excesses or possibly subjective expressions of his extreme fast in the wilderness. Generally, then, the scholastic consensus favours the view that the story of the ‘Temptations’ is simply a parable – albeit a significant one – in which Jesus was being tested in his understanding of his superhuman powers and the various ‘career’ paths that each would open up.
A small number of radical theorists have a different view. They point out that those same orthodox scholars have rushed past the very words which imply that the events might have occurred in the real world… words which, to a materialist and sceptical mind, must seem like embarrassing curiosities of archaic credulity. Any suggestion of levitation or teleportation, real or imagined, is ignored a priori. The pivotal mystery of the way in which Jesus is said to have arrived at, or was brought to, the top of a mountain and then transferred to the high pinnacle of the Temple (or vice versa) is thus glossed over and ignored.
Of the translocation of Jesus to ‘the pinnacle’, John Robertson (1856-1933) – an English parliamentarian, rationalist and advocate of the ‘Christ myth theory’ – thought that, for a mythologist, this detail easily falls into line as a variant of a divine contest: he compares it to “Pan and the young Zeus at the altar on the mountaintop; Pan and Apollo competing on the top of Mount Tmolus; Apollo and Marsyas; all deriving from the Babylonian figures of the GoatGod (Capricorn) and the Sun-God on the Mountain of the World, representing the starting of the Sun on his yearly course.”
For Robertson, this motif – so appropriate to Jesus at the beginning of his earthly ministry – “explains at once” both the Pagan and the Christian elements, showing how the latter can derive from “the myth-material of the Greco-Oriental World”. Robertson therefore identifies the image of a goatfooted Satan as a variant of the Goat-God Azazel: a name which “unlike other Hebrew proper names”, says the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), “is obscure”. Goat-footed Pan was not merely a satyr, says Robertson; for the Greeks, he was the actual ‘God of this world’… just as the Adversary is described in the Gospels.
Additionally, Farrar clearly considered that: “Those journeys through the air (though the sacred narrative says nothing of them)… were thoroughly in accordance with ordinary Jewish beliefs.” What could he mean by this? To begin with, the Old Testament has a number of prominent and significant references to mysterious levitation-like and teleportation-like incidents, for example those relating to Habbakuk, Elijah and Ezekiel. As these cases stray away from our discussion of Jesus, I will deal with them on another occasion. However, one tale in particular relates to our discussion of Jesus’s transportations.
In the New Testament we learn of the sudden transport of the Apostle Philip from Gaza to Azotus. Rabbinical lore, too, includes many stories of teleporting Rabbis who “shortened the way”. And the Theosophist George Mead – in his attempt to unravel what he called “this chaos of legendary
We learn of the sudden transport of Philip from Gaza to Azotus