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Sunday 14 March 2010

Given the usual assumption that Jesus and ‘Judaism’ belong in the category of religion and not politics and economics, Christian interpreters tend to downplay, depoliticize, or explain away his dramatic confrontation in Jerusalem. Jesus is thus usually seen as (only) a religious reformer, attempting to purify the Jewish religion centered in the Jerusalem Temple. But the Temple, along with its high-priesthood, stood at the political-economic as well as the religious head of Judean society in general and was an integral institution of the imperial order, from the Temple’s origins under the Persians until its destruction by the Romans in 70 C.E. Thus we can hardly continue to pretend that Jesus’ demonstration against the Temple was only a religious ‘cleansing’ or merely an attack on the cultic/ritual religion of bloody sacrifice to prepare the way for the more ’spiritual’ worship of Gentile Christianity. Richard Horsley

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