Temple as Palimpsest: Remembering the House of God in Early Christianity

Cultural memory constitutes the way that cultures remember their past to define themselves in the present. Recent work in this area of study analyzes how a given culture’s memory is not confined to its specific cultural origin but often travels into other cultures and shapes their notions of cultural memory. This article explores how ancient Jewish memory of the Jerusalem Temple travels into Christian circles and shapes the cultural memory of Christians in the second and third centuries. Despite the destruction of the temple in 70 c.e., its importance is like the undertext of a palimpsest: The temple is clearly visible in shaping the theology and ecclesiology of early Christians. This phenomenon is evident in three very different texts: 1 Clement , the Second Apocalypse of James , and the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter . Though these three sources differ in many respects, they share a common appeal to the temple to form communal identity. In other words, the Jerusalem Temple determines the legitimacy of various Christian institutions in these texts, even if the texts’ authors are not Jewish and do not accept most temple traditions. Thus, the importance of the Jerusalem Temple should be considered in future scholarship on authority, heresy and orthodoxy, and the social makeup of second- and third-century Christianity.