The distant temple
The priesthood in ancient Israel was exercised in the Temple in Jerusalem. For many people, this was distant and inconvenient. There was also the growing feeling that the priesthood was elitist.
As a result we see the growth of the synagogue as a local place for studying the Scriptures, for worship and for ritual purification. The advantage of the synagogue was that it was not a ‘sacred space’ and so could be open to all who were well-disposed, including those non-Jews known as the “God-fearers”.
The synagogues also tended to be more liberal and inventive, especially in remoter parts of the Jewish world. At Alexandria in Egypt, the synagogue produced an alternative Bible, in Greek, the so-called ‘Septuagint’, adding some extra books which were intended to attract people tempted to dabble with Egyptian religions – even though these, by heightening the role of ‘Wisdom”, seemed to come dangerously near suggesting that there were two gods.
After Judaism was threatened by the pagan Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes (165BC) and only saved by the revolt of the orthodox known as the Maccabees, some of the Maccabees’ descendants took power into their own hands, assuming the priesthood to which they were not entitled, and ruling as virtual kings. There had not been a monarchy in Israel since the exile in Babylon. Now the priesthood began to behave as a political class – witness their rôle in the persecution of Jesus.
For the legitimate priesthood, this was too much. They abandoned Jerusalem and headed for the desert, determining to live an ascetic life among the so-called “Essenes”. They took their library with them, storing it in a cave. In 1947 this library would be discovered by a shepherd boy, preserved in jars in the dry desert air; we call those contents the “Dead Sea Scrolls”.
And it was in this atmosphere of turmoil, in a remote part of the Holy Land far away from the Temple, and with people eager to hear what novelty might come from the lips of preachers in the synagogue, that there was born a revolutionary who was neither Temple priest nor synagogue rabbi. His name was Jesus of Nazareth.