midnattsfunderingar

"This, indeed – confusing for us in a world where the word 'Judaism' refers to a 'religion' in our modern sense – seems to have been what Ioudaismos meant: not simply the practise of a 'religion', but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life and its defence against attack whether from the outside (as in the case of Mattathias) or inside (as in the case of Saul of Tarsus)." (N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, s. 89).

"In worldwiew terms, ancient Jewish praxis and symbol ran closely togheter, precisely because the symbols were what they were. I was going to write that the Torah was hardly a symbol that you would hang on your wall (to make the point that Torah is something you do, not merely an ornament, like the fish-sign that a modern western Christian sticks on a car); but then I remembered that of course hanging things on the wall was precisely one of the things which devout Jews were commanded to do, and which they do to this day, so that mezuzoth greet you and your going out and coming in. But the point remains: Torah is a symbol which by its very nature is about praxis. Torah, the greatest of all divine gifts for a Jew, was not about grand religious abstractions but about precise patterns of behaviour." (Ibid, s. 90f).

 

"When we come to the Jerusalem Temple, there is a certain amount to add to what was said in NTPG. There has recently been an explosion of interest in the Temple and what it stood for, and there are several ways in which what I said earlier should now be expanded as part of the context for understanding the mindsef of a zealous first-century Pharisee. The temple in Jerusalem was the focus of the whole Jewish life and way of life. A good deal of Torah was about what to do in the Temple, and the practise of Torah in the Diaspora itself could be thought of in terms of gaining, at a distance, the blessings you would gain if you were actually there – the blessing, in other words, of the sacred presence itself, the Shekinah, the glory which supposedly dwelt in the Temple but also dwell 'where two or thre study Torah [...]. The temple was not simply a convenient place to meet for worship. It was not even just the 'single sanctuary', the one and only place where sacrifice was to be offered in worship to the one God. It was the place above all where the twin halves of the good creation intersected. When you went up to the Temple, it was not as though you were 'in heaven'. You were actually there. That was the point. Israel's God did not have to leave heaven in order to come down and dwell in the wilderness tabernacle or the Jerusalem Temple. However surprising it may be for modern westerners to hear it, within the worldview formed by the ancient scriptures heaven and earth were always made to work together, to interlock and overlap. There might in principle be many places and ways in which this could happen, but the Jewish people had believed, throughout the millennium prior to Jesus, that the Jerusalem Temple was the place and the means par excellence for this strange and powerful mystery." (Ibid, s. 96f).