Is 'Real' Judaism On Hold Without a Temple?

 QUESTION: I heard you say there are no 100% traditional Jews anymore because there’s no Temple.  I was trying to explain this to my (partially) Jewish co-worker (raised Baptist) who was thinking that maybe the temple could be spiritual or metaphorical?  Also, she made a comment about it could be inaccurate because the bible was written by men!  Can you re-explain it to me and direct me to the exact passages in the bible that talks about Temple being integral to Judaism?

RESPONSE: What the Bible is clear about is that not only were the Jews given an elaborate sacrificial system put in place to atone for sin, the location to implement this system was clearly spelled out.  Moses says that sacrifices could only be brought to the “entrance of the tent of meeting” per Lev 17:2:

“Speak to Aaron and his sons and to all the people of Israel and say to them, This is the thing that the LORD has commanded. 3 If any one of the house of Israel kills an ox or a lamb or a goat in the camp, or kills it outside the camp, 4 and does not bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting to offer it as a gift to the LORD in front of the tabernacle of the LORD, bloodguilt shall be imputed to that man. (Lev 17:2-4)

The Jews could not just make their own sacrifices wherever they wanted after the Lord had provided the Tabernacle.  But the tabernacle was mobile – it was just a tent after all – so Moses anticipates a time when they are no longer nomadic and on the move after they’ve entered the Promised Land.  So he tells also them to be ready for God to establish a permanent, non-mobile place of worship for the sacrificial system to be located. 

Deut 12:5-6: But you shall seek the place that the LORD your God will choose out of all your tribes to put his name and make his habitation there. There you shall go, and there you shall bring your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and the contribution that you present, your vow offerings, your freewill offerings, and the firstborn of your herd and of your flock. (ESV)

Now, it was literally hundreds of years between when Moses wrote that, and when Solomon built the first temple, which God sanctioned through his father David as the place he chose to “make a habitation for his Name” (2 Sam 7:12-13).  But once there, that was the place – and the only place – to fulfill the Mosaic system.

All this means that “real” Judaism is Temple Judaism.  There is nothing in the Law or Prophets that sanctions the sacrificial system to be relocated or “spiritualized”.  So what happened when the Jews were exiled and Solomon’s first Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians?  Did they just do the sacrifices some place else, or do them "metaphorically"?  No, they just stopped performing the sacrifices.  The sacrificial system was in some sense, “on hold”. 

They still did everything else that Moses commanded, obey the moral law, the ceremonial law, the food laws – but the center of the covenant, every Jew knows, is the burnt offering system to atone for sin.  And that system was suspended when the Temple was destroyed.  Then, when it was rebuilt, the Jews were ecstatic because, in some sense, their religion was restored to them (Zech 8:7-9). 

That is also why the Jewish authorities in Jesus time (when Herod’s second Temple reconstruction was completed and operational) are so anxious about Jesus stirring up the crowds.  The people wanted revolution to save their freedom, but the Jewish leaders wanted the Temple to save their religion - the latter being far more important than the former.  And they knew that too much trouble and their precious, all-important Temple would get destroyed. 

Eventually, that’s exactly what happened: the Temple was utterly leveled by Rome in 70 A.D., and for the last 2000 years all that remains are some foundation stones which can still be seen today (that’s the famous “Western Wall”).

Now, that obviously doesn’t mean that Judaism is dead totally.  After the Temple was demolished and the Jews were exiled (again), Rabbinic Judaism developed which leaned on the Rabbi’s interpretations of Moses (the Talmud) in order to encourage the practice of Judaism in the absence of Temple sacrifices and other practices which were no longer possible.  But make no mistake, even this radically reordered form of Judaism awaits the Third Temple, and now most faithful Jews believe it will take the coming of the Messiah to rebuild it.

Therefore, there is no such thing as a “spiritual/metaphorical Temple” in serious Judaism.  The idea of transferring the Temple rites to other places or other ways, was exactly what the people tried to do in early Israelite history.  They decentralized the Temple idea by taking religious rites and sacrifices to local “high places” like the pagans, and God strictly forbade it.  (1 Kings 12:31).  Good kings are judged as good or bad almost solely by whether they tolerated or eliminated such “high places”.  In the Bible, taking the central place of worship away from Jerusalem = bad.

So the Temple is not a metaphor for Jews.  When she says that, she’s just channeling her Christian roots.  That’s not a Jewish way of thinking, that’s a Christian way of thinking.  For Christians understand that all the good things God did in the Temple by making a place for his name, showing that he wanted to be “with” us by placing his literal “habitation” on earth – is all FULFILLED spiritually through Jesus who is “Emmanuel” (God with us) and who comes to dwell inside his Children by his Spirit as spiritual temples. (1 Cor 6:19)  

And most Christians take it as a great sign of God's approval on the new epoch of making "spiritual Temples" through God's perfect "Lamb" (John 1:29), that Jesus perfectly predicted the destruction of the Temple, resulting in the end of sacrifices, which remains a fact to this very day.  Thus, there is no true or original Judaism today, only 'Judaism Interrupted'.

I’m not sure what part of this she thinks could possibly be inaccurate.  

• The idea that a real temple ever existed?  
• The idea that it was the mandated center of Jewish worship for centuries?  
• The idea that Herod’s 2nd Temple was destroyed in 70 AD and devastated the Jewish people?  
• The idea that the dispersed Jews had to radically reorder their whole religion in the 2nd century to account for an absence of a Temple? 

These are all well-established historical facts.  Or does she mean that the importance of the Temple as Moses and the Prophets spell is out is inaccurate?  Well, in that case, she doesn’t have to think that Moses and the Prophets speak accurately for God, what's in question is whether Jews believe that Moses and the Prophets speak accurately for God.

And regarding the transmitters of this message being "mere men", both Jews and Christians believe a writer can convey a message accurately for God, even of that person is "just a man" IE, fallible and sinful.  Or does she think that the only thing that she would ever consider “accurate” is if God bypassed people totally and took up a pen himself and wrote something?  But now were onto the very different subject of inspiration.  And even if God wrote about the Temple himself, it would be people who would be responsible to copy that and pass the instruction along.  So basically by her logic nothing could be considered trustworthy as revelation.  In fact, by this logic you couldn’t trust any history, not just revelation, because we get all our knowledge of history from…. men!

Maybe you can help her reason backwards from the certain to the less certain.  That there was a Temple is certain (accurate).  That this Temple matters to true Judaism is also certain.  Whether true Judaism is “accurate” in that it expresses God’s actual will for mankind is what she has to decide.  But waving her hand and saying “Temple Judaism is inaccurate because fallible people probably made it up” is just sloppy thinking. 

Meanwhile, based on Jesus, we Christians believe Temple Judaism is not inaccurate, it’s just Part I missing its Sequel.

Is the Doxology From the Lord's Prayer Authentic?

QUESTION:  In an AC3 small group we were discussing the doxology at the end of the Lord’s Prayer and noting that modern translations put it in the footnotes.  Three problems I have with this.  I checked out a site defending the KJV and they think the phrase is authentic.  Could you comment on that?  Also, I’ve had instances of saying the Lord’s Prayer during a time I sensed dark spiritual forces and when I got to the doxology God unleashed real spiritual power and a stronghold was broken.  Third, I’ve heard the early Roman Catholics were super controlling and might have twisted the Word to their liking for religious purposes.

http://www.kjvtoday.com/home/is-the-doxology-to-the-lords-prayer-in-matthew-613-a-late-addition

RESPONSE: Thanks for your question and I appreciate the sentimental attachment to the whole prayer as you memorized it and used it throughout your Christian life. 

This dispute about the doxology (Matthew 6:13) is about whether it was original with Matthew or added later by a scribe or copyist.  Scribes and copyists of the Biblical writings did, in fact, make errors (we have no promise that these would all be inspired as the original authors were!).

• Some were intentional errors, where they took a phrase from another gospel (for example) and inserted it into the one they were copying because it was a parallel passage.  (Like one copyist inserted Matt 6:13b into Luke 11:4 so that the two accounts of the Lord’s Prayer would match better.)
• Sometimes the errors were simply mistakes, slips of the pen, omissions of whole lines or spelling errors (in fact this is the vast majority of them).
• Other times they are honorific, and therefore “pious errors” like when the copyist adds titles to Jesus (Lord or Christ) or God when just a simple name was in the original (Eph 3:14).
• Other times a note is made in a margin of a copy which functioned as a clarification or commentary, but a later copyist would see fit to insert the non-inspired note into the main body (1 John 5:7).

But you might ask, how do we know which reading to consider original if there is more than one reading?  This can be very difficult with all the variants.  But because there are so many hundreds of copies, they can also be cross referenced thoroughly and checked against each other (one of the benefits of having so many copies!).  Inauthentic readings show themselves by this kind of document cross referencing.  If you have a 100 renderings of a text and 90 agree, you have a clue that the other 10 probably follow a scribal error.

But there are two other textual principles that help us discern the original reading.

• One is age of the copy.  

The older is usually preferred as more reliable.  Why?  Basically, the telephone game idea is applied.  The longer a chain of communication goes along in an informal matter (and remember there’s no printing press, it’s all hand transcribed copying for most of Church history) the larger the chance of message degradation.  Thankfully, the Bible has the oldest copies compared to time of writing of ANY ancient work!

• The second principle is brevity.  

Although this article makes the case that lines are often omitted by pure oversight, generally if there’s intentional changes, an editor is going to add material, not take material away.  Why?  Because the received tradition was considered so sacred.  That’s why pious errors almost always add – the scribe is not evil, trying to destroy the message, he is devout and trying to make the message clearer.  Thus, the kinds of errors I mentioned above are common – adding titles, adding verses to harmonize similar accounts etc.

What this means is that we should prefer the older and the shorter renditions of the text as more authentic.  Are these principles foolproof?  No.  But in principle and in many other contexts, these filters, "earlier" and "shorter" have proven to be sound ways of weeding through multiple accounts that have discrepancies to find the original reading.

The article you cite, defending the doxology, admits that it is not found in the earliest two manuscripts.  So they have to argue against the commonly accepted textual principles of Earlier and Shorter.  Their theory is that the doxology was simply skipped by the copyists of the two oldest manuscripts we have.  While it’s true, whole lines are sometimes skipped, when this happens scholars can see it is usually inadvertent.  Usually because two lines look similar, beginning or ending with the same word, and so as a scribe moves from original to copy, he mistakenly skips a whole line in between.  The context usually shows such inadvertent omissions for what they are: Oversight.

To maintain that the doxology is original, you have to believe that it was omitted by accident.  Since there’s nothing theologically interesting that hangs on the doxology, no theological agenda can be inferred for leaving it out.  But there’s also no parallel structure in the lines of the text that suggests why a scribe could conceivably overlook the line by mistake.  And it’s hard to imagine the exact same omission happening to two independent manuscripts that also happen to be the oldest ones.  And it’s hard to imagine why, if it’s original, that most of the earliest Church Fathers do not include it when they quote the passage.

This is why we shouldn’t put any stock in suggesting intentional corruption from church leadership. If the image of the Catholic Church as big powerful institution, ready and able to change the Word for its own purpose ever reflected reality, it most certainly does not apply in this time period.  When the oldest copies of Matthew were being written, the Church was mostly underground and decentralized.  There was no conspiracy possible, because too many copies were being written, and no means of control over them.  That's partly why they vary so much!

So, I think it’s unwise to jettison the sound principles of Earlier and Shorter simply to defend a version of the Bible translated in the 1600’s.  I love the KJV’s simplicity and beauty, but Christians who love the truth more, should want to know what Matthew actually wrote and defend that, not any version of that, no matter how cherished for sentimental reasons.

The website you cited is committed to defending the whole the King James Bible, every one of its renderings.  But this bias to protect King James’ translation at all costs and at every point, compromises objective scholarship.  For example, the doxology is just one instance of the KJV relying on documents that break the earlier/shorter rules.  The most highly disputed reading in the KJV is 1 John 5:7.  The so called “Johannine Comma” is basically a direct reference to the Trinity.  Which would be cool, but it’s not in any manuscript of 1st John made before the 12th century.

This is such a late variant that almost no scholars, believing or skeptical, think John wrote that phrase.  To defend this late addition as authentic proves that their bias for a specific version of the Bible has overruled their love for the Bible.  And that gives us reason to question why they’re arguing against accepted principles (Earlier and Shorter) anywhere else, like with the doxology in Matt 6.

Their blanket policy of defending the KJV begins to equate the King James Version of the Bible with Holy Spirit inspiration, which is very dangerous indeed.  In other words, it puts the level of authority for King James and his translation team on par with the Apostle Paul or Peter himself!  Why then cannot I claim this same level of authority to pick and choose the copies I deem favorable, and come up with RST – Rick’s Standard Translation?!  No, we need objective, logically sound, common principles that apply to textual criticism regardless of our rooting interest for this or that translation.

Of course, no one faults the KJV for passing on some non-authentic additions to the text.  They were working with the best text they had.  And not a single case of interpolation that the KJV passes on, affects Christian doctrine.  The Lord’s Prayer for example, teaches nothing different with or without the doxology.  It simply adds force to the call to honor the Father when we pray, which the prayer already included with “Our Father... hallowed be thy name…”

Also, using the doxology in public is not heretical or anything like that, so long as we know it was likely not original with Jesus – and yet using it can unite us, not so much with Jesus, but with the millions of Christians in the Church over the centuries who prayed Jesus prayer and from early on (from the 5^th century) often added this line to express our wonder and praise in response to his instruction.

As for your personal sense of spiritual power in the doxology, you may have discerned spiritual power for all sorts of reasons.  First, is your faith in Jesus. The spiritual power inside of communion and baptism, for example, is not the magic of the rite, but the faith the person brings to the rite which God responds to in grace and power. Remember, Jesus just warned us in the sermon (Matthew 6:7) about praying repetitive phrases thinking they somehow make you heard or blessed by the magic or amount of words.

Second, the phrase itself is actually scripture, even if it wasn't part of Jesus teaching here originally. See, the doxology sounds allot like a prayer from David: 

“Praise be to you, Lord, the God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting.  Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.  Wealth and honor come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all.  Now, our God, we give you thanks, and praise your glorious name". 1 Chronicles 29:10-13

Sound familiar?  Read the bolded phrases in reverse order.  You are praying scripture, when you pray the doxology, it's just probably not what Jesus originally taught in Matthew 6. Like I said earlier, the scribes were devout Christians and many of their errors were inserting other scripture into scripture.

So the bare facts about the doxology in the Lord’s Prayer are these:  the oldest copies do not have it and neither do the oldest church fathers who comment on the passage. But if it feels right and powerful, that’s probably because it is a rough summary of David's beautiful and powerful prayer from another part of God's powerful Word.