Temple Mysticism: An Introduction

Preface

Temple mysticism underlies much of the Bible, but it has not been formally acknowledged. I have wanted for some time to collect key texts and ideas, and thus try to recover the ancient system from the scattered fragments that remain, from the echoes and from the shadows.

It soon became clear that much of the system was implicit, and had to be recovered from the underlying assumptions of familiar texts. Doubtless many other texts were lost or suppressed, but there was also oral tradition. Some teachings were not written down even by the literate, because they were secret; others were not written down because they were the collective memory of people who were not literate. The people in Egypt who challenged Jeremiah’s theology (Jer. 44.15–23) were refugees from first temple Jerusalem, and they saw things very differently from Jeremiah or his later editors. They did not write down their ‘theology’, and we have only hints as to what it was. It is not our place, with the wisdom of hindsight and the viewpoint of later orthodoxy, to say who was ‘right’ and who was ‘wrong’.

The Enoch tradition, even though we have it in written form, condemned writing as an invention of the fallen angels (1 Enoch 69.9–10). The ancient high priests, among whom ‘Enoch’ had his roots, were the only ones with access to the holy of holies and its meaning (Num. 17.7). The laity did not even enter the temple, and so they did not see the furnishings, they did not watch the rituals and they did not hear the sacred words and teachings. These three represent the elements of an ancient mystery religion: the things shown, deiknumena, the things done, drōmena, and the things spoken, legomena. The accounts of the mystery religions, however, are from sources written later than the Hebrew scriptures, and Clement of Alexandria was no innovator when he described Christianity, the heir to the original temple, as a mystery religion.

When the cult of the first temple was destroyed at the end of the seventh century BCE, the priesthood was scattered, and their teachings went with them. Elements of the older ways spread far and wide. They survived in systems that would be labelled ‘gnostic’ and in texts that would be labelled ‘non-canonical’. By apportioning labels like this, the evidence was filtered, and an artificial construct was presented as the religion of ancient Jerusalem. The parts of early Christianity that differed from it were deemed the influence of Greek philosophy, especially Platonism. This, as we shall see, was a serious distortion.

There was an early Eucharistic prayer: ‘As this broken bread, once dispersed over the hills, was brought together and became one loaf, so may thy church be brought together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom’ (Didache 9). I hope this little book will help gather together the scattered fragments of temple mysticism that gave the original vision of the kingdom and flowered to become what we know as Christianity.

My thanks, as always, go to my family who understand computers, to the staff of the Cambridge University Library, and to my friends. I should like to dedicate this book to one of those friends, who may not agree with every word of it.

Margaret Barker

Introduction

Temple mysticism is the key to understanding Christian origins, but there is no single text or passage in the Bible that answers the question: What is temple mysticism? We have to reconstruct it from the gaps in our understanding of Christian origins, rather like working out what part of the picture would have been on the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. The difference is that we do not have the picture on the lid of the jigsaw box, and so cannot be certain what the missing piece – or rather pieces – looked like. One missing piece would be a simple matter. Indeed, some of the pieces already put into the puzzle may be in the wrong places, or even in the wrong puzzle.

Temple mysticism is a hypothesis. We outline what seems to have been the case and then see how much of the evidence fits the proposed picture, how many texts make more sense and cohere better if they are read in this way. There can be no proof, but temple mysticism does give new answers to important questions: who did Jesus think he was and what did he think he was doing; how did the Christians understand their new faith; and how did they express this in their worship?

As a brief introduction to the subject and the method, I shall examine some well-known texts in the light of temple mysticism. The texts are from Isaiah, the prophet whom Jesus quoted more than any other scriptures, and from John, who was close to Jesus and would have understood him as well as anyone. Tracing just this one line of texts gives remarkable results; and there is a whole Bible waiting to be reread.

Isaiah

In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his robe filled the temple. John explained to the readers of his Gospel that Isaiah had seen Jesus in glory (John 12.41). Isaiah saw six-winged seraphim standing above the throne and he heard them calling out to each other: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ The sound made the whole building shake, and the prophet was overcome with the sense of his own sin and unworthiness: ‘For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of Hosts’ (Isa. 6.1–5).

Isaiah’s vision is the earliest dateable evidence for temple mysticism – the death of Uzziah has been put anywhere between 759 and 739 BCE – and this brief account includes enough detail to establish that temple mysticism, as known in much later sources, was a feature of the first temple in the eighth century BCE. John identified the enthroned figure of Isaiah’s vision as Jesus in glory, showing that Jesus’ closest disciples understood him in the context of temple mysticism, and, indeed, identified him as the figure at the very centre of the mystical vision.

Temple mysticism, however, has been eclipsed in the study of the Hebrew scriptures by another movement which came to dominate both the ancient transmission and collection of the scriptures and much of the modern scholarship devoted to their study. Deuteronomy denied that the LORD could be seen, and in the Deuteronomists’ account, when the commandments were given to Moses ‘you heard the sound of words, but saw no form’ (Deut. 4.12). The other version of Moses receiving the commandments says that he and others saw the God of Israel (Exod. 24.10), and we can only assume that the writer of Deuteronomy was contradicting this. Seeing the LORD – temple mysticism – was both controversial and, apparently, suppressed.

In the investigation proposed in this book, which of necessity is text-based, the suppression of ancient source material is a huge problem. Some evidence can still be detected, but the process of recovering temple mysticism is far from easy.

Let us begin with Isaiah’s vision. The prophet saw the LORD enthroned and heard him speak. This must have been in the holy of holies, whose other name was the debir (1 Kings 6.5, 16 etc.; 2 Chron. 4.20; Ps. 28.2). As often happened with temple terms, the first Greek translation (the Septuagint, hereafter LXX) simply transliterated the word as dabeir, but later versions translated it as ‘oracle’, the place where the LORD spoke.¹ The LORD appeared to the high priest in the incense cloud above the mercy seat (Lev. 16.2), and the LORD spoke to Moses ‘from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the testimony’ (Exod. 25.22; also Num. 7.89). In the desert tabernacle, which is the setting for these verses, the mercy seat with its two cherubim was behind the veil, that is, in the holy of holies (Exod. 40.20–21), and it had the same function as the throne which Isaiah saw in the temple. His contemporary Hezekiah prayed ‘O LORD of Hosts, God of Israel, who art enthroned above the cherubim …’ (Isa. 37.16). The ark under the mercy seat was the footstool of the throne. David had planned to build a temple ‘for the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and for the footstool of our God’ (1 Chron. 28.2); and the psalmist sang of bringing the ark to Jerusalem, ‘Let us go to his dwelling place; let us worship at his footstool’ (Ps. 132.7).

Whether or not Isaiah was literally in the holy of holies is not relevant; he saw the LORD enthroned there. Since it was only the high priest who could enter the holy of holies, and then only once a year on the day of atonement (Lev. 16.2–5), it is significant that Isaiah associated his vision with purging his sin. A seraph took a burning coal from the incense altar and purified the prophet’s ‘unclean lips’. Isaiah had the experience of a high priest, and so it is likely that he was a high priest and received his vision on the day of atonement.

Isaiah saw that the edges of the LORD’s robe, his ‘train’, filled the hēkal, the outer part of the temple which corresponds to the nave of a traditional church. In temple cosmology, this part of the temple represented the visible creation, and so Isaiah saw the LORD’s train extending from the throne in the holy of holies and out into the material world. The Lxx of Isaiah has ‘the house was filled with his glory’, showing that the train of the LORD was a way of describing his glory, and the Aramaic translation² also says that the hēkal was filled with the brightness of the glory.

Elsewhere this word ‘train’ was used for the skirts of the harlot city (Lam. 1.9; Jer. 13.26; Nahum 1.9), but also for the edges of the high priest’s robe. The Priestly writer in Exodus described pomegranates and golden bells that decorated the ‘train’ of the high priest’s robe (Exod. 28.33–34; 39.24–26), and since Isaiah’s vision was set in the temple, it is likely that the ‘train’ of the LORD’s robe was like that of the high priest. The earliest prescription for the high priest’s garments was that they were ‘for glory and for beauty’ (Exod. 28.2), and for centuries the memory persisted that the robes of the high priest had been cut from the LORD’s robe of heavenly glory.³

Isaiah also saw seraphim, whose name means ‘burning ones’. Elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures, the seraphim are snakes: ‘a flying serpent’ (Isa. 14.29; 30.6; also Deut. 8.15). The story of Moses and the fiery snakes uses various words for ‘snake’ including seraph, and it seems that the bronze snake on a pole, which Moses set up to protect the people, represented a seraph (Num. 21.6–9). Jesus compared his own ‘lifting up’ on the cross to the lifting up of this seraph, but the original significance of his saying is lost. The seraph/bronze snake was still used in worship in the time of Isaiah, until it was destroyed by Hezekiah, the last of the kings under whom Isaiah prophesied (2 Kings 18.4; Isa. 1.1). Each of the seraphim that Isaiah saw had six wings, and so Isaiah described the holy of holies as filled with fiery beings. The Targum described them as ‘servants’. The seraphim in the holy of holies are not mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, and so perhaps they appear under another name.

The seraphim were calling out, and this is another feature of the mystics’ experience. The visions were never silent. As they saw the glory, so they heard the sound of the holy of holies. Isaiah described the song as

         Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts;

         The whole earth is full of his glory.

The message of the heavenly beings was that the glory of the LORD filled the earth, and it was one of the fundamentals of temple mysticism that only those who had glimpsed the glory in heaven could see the glory on earth. The song of the seraphim (hereafter ‘the Sanctus’) was heard by John when he too stood in his vision before the throne (Rev. 4.8), and it became a part of the Christian liturgy. This is a vivid reminder that Christian liturgy has its roots in temple mysticism, the worshippers joining with the heavenly beings in the holy of holies.

    Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee, and saying:

    Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most High.⁴

Isaiah saw the temple filled with smoke, perhaps in reality the smoke of incense that the high priest took with him into the holy of holies, but the prophet described it with a word that implies the LORD’s anger, ‘ashan, as in ‘O LORD of Hosts, how long will you be angry, smoke, against the prayers of your people?’ (Ps. 80.4, my translation). His reaction was fear and a sense of his own great sin, a sin committed with his lips. The detail is lost, but a sin of the lips does imply false teaching, something that he shared with his people: ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.’ The seraph purified his mouth with a burning coal from the altar, and then the Lord asked: ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Isaiah replied: ‘Here am I! Send me.’ Presumably the purified prophet would deliver the true teaching.

The temple mystics were messengers from heaven to earth; their vision was not just a private ecstasy, but always a call to be the bearer of revelation. This explains the enigmatic words to Aaron and his sons, the high priestly family: ‘And you and your sons with you shall attend to your priesthood for all that concerns the altar and that is within the veil; and you shall serve’ (Num. 18.7). They were the servants of the LORD, with access to whatever lay beyond the veil in the holy of holies, and this included the teachings from and about the holy of holies. Malachi reminded the negligent priests of his own time that they had been called to be ‘messenger[s] of the LORD of Hosts’ (Mal. 2.7). Messengers from heaven are more commonly called angels – it is the same word in Hebrew – and so the temple mystics were angels on earth.

Hecataeus, a Greek writing about 300 BCE, described the Jewish high priest in just this way: for the Jews, he said, their high priest was an angel of God’s commandments, and when he spoke to them, they immediately fell to the ground and worshipped him as he explained the commandments to them.⁵ Jesus ben Sira, a Jerusalem Jew writing about 200 BCE, said something very similar of the high priest Simon:

How glorious he was … as he came out of the house of the veil! …⁶

          When he put on his robe of glory

          And clothed himself with superb perfection

          And went up to the holy altar

          He made the court of the sanctuary glorious …

(Ben Sira 50.5, 11)

It has sometimes been said that Matthew was wrong to describe Jews worshipping Jesus, for example, after he calmed the storm on Galilee (Matt. 14.33). No Jew would have ‘worshipped’ another human being, and so Matthew must have been reading later beliefs back into his telling of the story. But if people recognized Jesus as an angel on earth – and they did – then Matthew’s account could have been accurate.

The message Isaiah had to deliver is the only clue as to what the false teaching had been. The people would hear and not understand, see and not perceive, and the reason for this must have been the rejection of Wisdom, since Wisdom gave understanding and perception. Next there is an oracle in what is called chiastic form, using wordplay that is characteristic of temple discourse.

A Make the heart of this people fat,

  B And their ears heavy,

    C And shut their eyes;

    C Lest they see with their eyes,

  B And hear with their ears,

A And understand with their heart,

And turn and be healed.

The centre of this oracle is loss of sight, in this case, spiritual blindness. There is another account of these events in a brief, stylized history preserved in 1 Enoch: ‘all who live in it [i.e. the temple] shall be blinded, and the hearts of all of them shall godlessly forsake Wisdom, and in it a man shall ascend …’⁷ The priests in the temple lost their ‘sight’ and forsook Wisdom, and Isaiah ascended, presumably to stand before the heavenly throne.

The wordplay in this oracle reveals both sides of the prophet’s message, but is completely lost in translation. The heart means the mind, and ‘fat’, shemen, is a word whose various forms can mean either fat in the sense of prosperous and arrogant, or the anointing oil, as prescribed for use in the tabernacle (Exod. 30.24) or for anointing the king, ‘the oil of gladness’ (Ps. 45.7). The wordplay implies the contrast of an anointed mind or an arrogant mind. ‘Heavy’, kabōd, is the same word as ‘glory’, and the wordplay implies the contrast of ears that hear the glory or are deaf to it. ‘Shut’ is literally ‘smeared over’, sha‘a‘, a word that sounds very like sha‘ah, meaning ‘look to’ the LORD (e.g. Isa. 17.7; 31.1), and so the wordplay contrasts eyes that look to the LORD with eyes that are smeared over and cannot see. Now eyes that were smeared with holy oil were symbolically opened, and so in the ideal state, the mind and the eyes would be anointed and the ears would hear the glory. All this had been lost due to false teaching, and the punishment for those who followed the false teaching was to live with what they had chosen. They would be deprived of understanding, and so of repentance and healing. Most of this has also been lost in translation.

How long would this last, asked Isaiah, and here we see another characteristic of the temple mysticism texts: they are often damaged and no longer readable. Sometimes it is possible to reconstruct them by comparing other ancient translations such as the Greek, but often there is very little that can be restored. This ‘damage’ to temple texts is so frequent that it cannot have been coincidence. Here, Isaiah hears the heavenly voice warning that the loss/rejection of Wisdom will continue until the land is desolate, until ‘the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land’, a line whose Hebrew can also mean: ‘And great is the Forsaken One in the midst of the land.’ The history in 1 Enoch says that Wisdom had been forsaken, and so it is likely that Isaiah received an oracle about the restoration of Wisdom, when perception would return. The final verse of Isaiah’s call vision – now incomprehensible – has ‘a tenth’ remaining, the stump of an oak tree and the holy seed. This was formerly a description of Wisdom under her ancient names and symbols, the one in whom was the holy seed. ‘A tenth’ is a word very similar to Ashratah, one of her ancient names, the tree was her symbol, and she was the ‘mother’ of the Messiah, the holy seed.

Recovering temple mysticism is not easy, but this brief reading of Isaiah’s call vision shows how much of the style and the later elements can be detected even in the eighth century BCE: the vision of the LORD, the glory, the throne, the heavenly beings, the song, the human standing before the throne to receive teaching, and Wisdom lost and restored, and the wordplay. These also appear in the book of Revelation, especially if the Greek text is returned to the Hebrew or Aramaic of the original: the song of the heavenly beings round the throne; the servants standing in the holy of holies before the LORD enthroned; the tree of life and the river of life restored, both symbols of Wisdom; and the bitter wordplay contrasting what was with what should be, the present reality and the vision.

John

John quoted this oracle about lost perception to explain why some people did not accept the teaching of Jesus, and he linked it to another passage in Isaiah, his poem about the Servant that was re-used by a later disciple and is now found in the middle