Garry Wills and the Destruction of the Temple

What Paul Meant

What Paul Meant by Garry Wills occupied much of my attention this morning. It is a sequel to his book, What Jesus Meant, which I have not read. Wills is a popularizer of religion, and as a book of faith it is not normally the type of thing I would look at; but Wills' scholarship is never without interest. There was a copy in the dollar bin, so, given my recent reading of Momigliano on Josephus, I thought, might as well take the plunge.

With Josephus so recently on the brain, I found this clarifying:

[I]t is often said that Jesus' claim in the Gospels that he is the Temple, replacing the old meeting place between God and man, is an invention that grew up only after the actual destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. But here is Paul saying the same thing almost two decades before the destruction of the physical Temple in Jerusalem. He is in perfect accord with the sayings of Jesus, and proves that this tradition was in circulation among the Brothers well before the Temple was destroyed--and even more clearly before the Gospels were written.

That gives you a feel for the text. Wills returns again and again to the point that Paul's letters are the closest thing we have (in time) to the living Jesus, and he mounts a vigorous defense (of Paul) with that forming the hinge of his argument. Seven letters of Paul, apparently. The critical apparatus is good—or I mean scholarship (there is no index)—but it is more personal testament embellished by historical detail than a treatise in history. As an interpretive effort, it contains an appendix called "Translating Paul" which seems a helpful exposition of nuance.