A Tale of Two Temple Destroyers
Part Two: Jesus and Vespasian
In the first of this four-parter, we looked at five similarities between the public ministry of Mark’s Jesus and the Emperor Vespasian. Now we turn to a sixth theme which is shared by both of their careers: the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
6. The Temple
Perhaps the most striking similarity between Vespasian and Mark’s Jesus is that both were believed to stand behind the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE.
Historically speaking, Vespasian was instrumental in Jerusalem’s downfall. He had been personally entrusted with quelling rebellion in Judea by Nero in 68 CE. And just two years later, the city and Temple were ravished by his son, Titus, who had been placed in charge of a Roman legion by his now-Emperor father.
The ruin of Jerusalem was not an incidental moment in Vespasian’s career. It was the emblem of his propagandistic machine, blazoned across the Empire to legitimate his reign.1 To commemorate his victory, Vespasian threw a huge military triumph, erected monuments, and minted a set of coins showing the submission of the Jews.
Vespasian’s triumph over Jerusalem would arguably have caused a theological crisis for some early Jesus followers. Particularly for Gentile converts to the fledgling movement, it would have raised the question: Was YHWH – the God of the Jews – really in control of world history, or was it Vespasian and Rome?
Writing under the shadow of this propaganda, it makes good sense that Mark devotes so much of his text to the Temple and its demise. It was imperative that he counter the notion that Vespasian and the Roman gods were stronger than YHWH.
How then does Mark rebut the notion that Rome had defeated YHWH? In a stroke of genius, he claims that Jesus got there first. A generation before Vespasian, God’s appointed Messiah had recognised the Temple was corrupt and had prophesied its total destruction. This is the concern which dominates Mark 11-13.
Mark 11-13: The Temple’s Destruction
Throughout this unit, a number of scenes foreshadow the Temple’s demise.2 When Jesus first arrives at the Temple, he observes its corruption. Famously, his response is ‘to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.’
This scene is often dubbed the 'cleansing of the Temple’ – the idea being that Jesus wanted to restore the Temple to its proper use. But if that is the case, it is unclear why Jesus removed not only the sellers but the buyers. It seems like this is a prophetic action to stop the machinations of the Temple entirely – an omen of its destruction.
Even more ominously, this scene is surrounding by two episodes about a fig tree – a common image of Israel. When Jesus first sees the tree, he curses it so that it no longer bears fruit. And when he steps out of the Temple, it has withered altogether. With Mark’s favourite method of ‘sandwiching’, the withering of the fig tree gives meaning to Jesus’ symbolic action within the Temple: it will come to sudden ruin.
Following this scene, Mark builds on this motif with Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants, who fail to offer fruit for their landlord. The landlord (God) even sends his own son (Jesus) to collect the fruit, but they kill him. As a result, the landlord takes the tenants (the Jerusalem authorities) and gives their land to others (the Romans).
Finally, Jesus is clear about the Temple’s destruction. When his disciples marvel at its construction, Jesus replies, ‘Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down…’ For Mark, it is clear that God’s appointed messiah, Jesus – not Vespasian – was ultimately in control of the Temple’s destruction.
In support of this rhetorical strategy – that it was God, not a foreign power, who was responsible for the Temple’s destruction – we might note that Mark was not the first biblical author to ‘defend’ YHWH in this way. Isaiah makes the same move, claiming that it was not the Babylonians who were responsible for the first Temple’s destruction, but God:
“Who gave up Jacob to the spoiler, and Israel to the robbers? Was it not the LORD, against whom we have sinned, in whose ways they would not walk, and whose law they would not obey? So he poured upon him the heat of his anger and the fury of war; it set him on fire all around, but he did not understand…’ (42:24-25)
Jesus’ Death & The Temple’s Destruction
We can see that – according to Mark – the Temple’s demise was ultimately the work of the Lord, prophesied by his Messiah. Vespasian and Titus were mere pawns in his cosmic plan. But why did God allow Rome to destroy Jerusalem in the first place?
Ancient Jewish literature disagrees about the precise cause.3 According to Vespasian’s own court-historian, Flavius Josephus, the Lord’s departure from Jerusalem was the result of the Zealots’ murder of the high priests, Ananus and Jesus Ben Gamla; while for the Baruch tradition, it was more generally the ‘sins’ of the people; and for other rabbinic authors it was due to sacrilege and bloodshed.
What all of these traditions agree on however, is that prior to the Temple’s destruction, the Lord left the Temple, and his departure was embodied in a host of visible and auditory signs. Foreboding voices were heard that the Lord is leaving the Temple; light and darkness appears around the Temple and the city; and – perhaps most hauntingly of all – the Temple’s gates and doors swing open, preparing the way for Rome.4
These signs are vital for understanding Mark, for as Nathanael Vette has recently demonstrated, Mark draws upon similar set of omens in depicting Jesus’ death.5
Thus, just as the Western light goes out in the rabbinic tradition, so darkness covers the land; as a voice is heard that the Lord is abandoning the Temple, so Jesus cries out that God has abandoned him; and as omens surround the Temple, so the Temple curtain is torn in two. Vette sets out these similarities in the following table:
Mark not only seems aware of the omens which portended the Temple’s destruction; he links them to Jesus’ death. In doing so, “the gospel tradition makes the sacrilegious bloodshed of the Messiah’s death the cause of the city’s destruction.”6
With these omens then, Mark provides a final variation of his leitmotif: it was not Vespasian or Rome but Jesus and his death which was the final cause of the Temple’s demise.
For a full analysis of this propaganda in relation to Mark’s setting, see Adam Winn, Reading Mark’s Christology under Caesar: Jesus the Messiah and Roman Imperial Ideology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018), 29-50.
See Adam Winn, Mark’s Christology, 131-150.
See Nathanael Vette, “The Omens at Jesus’ Death (Mark 15:33-39) and the Divine Abandonment of the Temple before Its Destruction in 70 CE,” JBL 142 n.4 (2023): 657-675 (665-669).
For an analysis, see Vette, “Omens at Jesus’ Death,” 665-669.
See Vette, “Omens at Jesus’ Death,” 657-675.
Vette, “Omens at Jesus’ Death,” 673.