Comparison Of E. P Sanders Jesus And Judaism

E.P Sanders’ Jesus and Judaism offers to us, the most historically accurate image of Jesus of Nazareth, research and scholarship has to offer. Through the establishment of his intentionality towards, and his relationship with his contemporaries in Judaism, within which, Sanders places him a firm part of, in ancient Palestine. Sanders insisted that "a good hypothesis about Jesus' intention and his relationship with his contemporaries . . . should offer a connection between his activity and his death." This initial establishment then gives rise to “two questions: the reason for his death (did his intention involve an opposition to Judaism which led to death?) and the motivating force behind the rise of Christianity (did the split between the …show more content…
During the time of Jesus’ life, thousands upon thousands of people would come annually to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices to God because the Temple was the only place where sacrifices could be offered. Taking into account the distances some of these people would have had to travel, it is understandable that to avoid their sacrifice being tainted on the way, animals would be made available at the temple for sacrifice, there would also need to be a coin exchange for common currency given the large numbers traveling from outside Jerusalem, therefore the Temple was only doing what it had been doing for hundreds of years, and Sanders believes it was quite unlikely that Jesus’ action was a response to these practices, more so, Sanders posits that Jesus’ action in the temple was demonstrative. As a practicing Jew, Jesus would have had a working knowledge of and understood the divine commandments from God through Moses regarding sacrifice in the Temple. As the Son of God, Jesus would not go against the practices dictated by His Father. If Jesus had intended to purify the temple he no doubt would have used water (Sanders, 70) instead he overturned tables, representing destruction. In the second chapter of the Gospel of John after Jesus overturned the tables and was questions by the Jews about his actions He answered them saying: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Jesus’ destruction was to lead toward restoration (Sanders, 71). From this understanding of the Temple incident Sanders concludes that Jesus publicly threatened the destruction of the Temple. From this declaration Jesus displays his believed in the arrival of the Eschaton, which would bring a new Temple to be given from God. In other words, the Temple incident prophesied the coming