temple

HOW DID THE CORUPTION IN THE SECOND TEMPLE IN ISRAEL
STILL AFFECT LIFE TODAY?

This question must be looked at from two viewpoints. First how it affects the world in general and second how it affects the Jewish community today.
Corruption in the Second Temple in Israel affected not only the religious element of society but also the entire social environment. It is because those elements, which were the base of the corruption, created such a divide within the Jewish community, that our lives today are affected by events that date back to the time of the Second Temple.
 To understand this I need to review the three primary Jewish sects that were around during this time period. Starting around the time of the Maccabean revolt, two primary Jewish sects emerged. These were the Sadducees and the Pharisees. A third primary sect called the Essenes emerged later toward the end of that century. The most famous Jewish historian who lived during the time of the Second Temple was Flavius Josephus. In his book Antiquities 13.171 he wrote;
“Now at this time there were three schools of thought among the Jews, which held different opinions concerning human affairs; the first being the Pharisees, the second bring the Sadducees and the third that of the Essenes.” (VanderKam, 24)

The Sadducees were the upper echelon of Jewish society. As the Greeks/Romans were in power and introduced concepts such as Hellenization, the Sadducees openly embraced it. The Sadducees were mostly associated with the Temple as they were the priests that maintained and did all sacrificial rites within the Temple. In addition, they only recognized the Written Torah (as given by Moses at Sinai).


“This was a time when the contrast became more polarized between the non-priestly, popular rabbinic type of Judaism (Pharisees) which was close to the life of the mass of peasants and artisans and the more conservative tendencies of the powerful and wealthy priesthood, whose interests were allied with those of the aristocracy and landowners. With the destruction of the Temple the Sadducees lost their social and ideological center and no more is heard of them.” (Werblowsky and Wigoder p340)

On the other hand, the other sect was the Pharisees, who became the primary social movement of the Jewish people during and after the destruction of the Second Temple. As opposed to the Sadducees, the Pharisees rejected Hellenization. Knowing that the possibility existed that the Temple could be destroyed, they incorporated many rites and services into the written Torah (known as Mosaic law) in order for the Jews to survive in the Diaspora (the Jewish population living outside the land of Israel) without the temple as the center of Jewish religion. In addition to introducing new rituals and services into the Jewish religion, they also introduced new and different interpretations of the written law and this became known as the oral law. The Pharisees demanded that this oral law and traditions, be observed with same strictness associated with the Written Torah.
“It was the oral tradition that in effect, converted the Bible into the Torah – the doctrine that informed and reflected every aspect of the way of life and aspirations of the Jewish nation. The rule of Torah in the Second Temple cannot be comprehended without the understanding of the development of Halakah. It formed the main part of the oral tradition and encompassed all aspects of the Jews personal and communal conduct. (Ben-Sasson, p.283).
 The most notable Jewish historian of the time, Josephus, claims that the Pharisees had the support of the Jewish people at large. The Pharisees represented the common man as opposed to the Sadducees whose interest were more in line with the aristocrats and the wealthy.



The Essenes were the third primary sect during this time period. The Essenes broke off from the Sadducees, as they believed the priests in the Temple were corrupt and were defiling the Temple. The sect lived out in the desert in an area called Qumran. It was in the caves of Qumran that the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and these scrolls gave history a good view of how this sect lived.
“In their remote cave retreats, the Essenes developed a new, curiously Judaic creed that diverged from both Sadducee and Pharisee Judaism, yet resembles both. Though rejecting the Pharisees Oral Law, the Mishna, they supplemented the Written Law (the Torah,) with their own interpretation noted in the Scrolls”. (Diamont, p159).
 It was during the time and destruction of the Second temple that Jesus lived. Jesus did not reject Judaism, but rather embraced it from a very religious perspective and indeed told his followers to strictly adhere to it. Jesus rejected both the Sadducees and the Pharisees.  In regard to the Sadducees, he believed they had turned the Temple into a commercial enterprise and thus the famous scene in the Gospels when he turns over the tables of the moneychangers accusing them of turning the Temple into a den of thieves. The problem Jesus had with his orthodox counterparts, the Pharisees, was he believed they were more concerned with ritual than spirituality and called them hypocrites.
After this introduction, I can now answer the question of how corruption in the Second Temple, still affects our lives today. From a wide perspective, the corruption in the Second Temple brought about what was to become the introduction of Christianity to the world. The development of this new sect (soon to become a religion unto itself) not only affected to Jewish religion but how religion and worship changed throughout the world.
It is important to note that it was the apostle Paul who truly took up the cause of Jesus and the message he preached. It was through Paul’s preaching’s and philosophy that truly brought about the divide between Judaism and Christianity.



“It would be easy to argue that after Jesus himself, Paul was the most important figure in the history of Christianity. It was Paul’s missisionary work that helped transform the followers of Jesus from a small Jewish sectarian movement in Palestine to a worldwide religion comprising both Jews and Gentiles. It was his theological reflections on the death and resurrection of Jesus that came to form the heart of the Christian message for all time. And it was his writings that were to play such an enormous role in the canon of the new Christian Scriptures, the New Testament, of whose twenty seven books, thirteen are attributed to Paul”. (Ehrman p122)

In regard to how the corruption in the Second Temple affected the Jewish community then and how it still has an impact on this community today, I refer back to the Pharisees who I mentioned above.
As I stated earlier, the Pharisees became the primary social movement of the Jewish people during and after the destruction of the Second Temple.
“The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e. was a major turning point in the history of Judaism, ending the institution of animal sacrifice and the primary cultic service to God for the past one thousand years or more. Because the temple had been part of the complex of government destroyed along with Jerusalem, the entire machinery of the state had to be reconstituted. It fell to the Pharisees to accomplish this task. During the refurbishing of Pharisaic institutions for a new national purpose, the institutions of rabbinic Judaism were born. This left the rabbis more and more in charge of the people” (Segal p 128)
The Judaism that observant Jews today follow is Rabbinic Judaism. The forefathers of Rabbinic Judaism were the Pharisees. The reason for the Pharisees rise to power is directly linked to the corruption that took place in the Temple by the Sadducees. The Sadducees no longer exist and neither do the Essenes. But the Judaism and Christianity, which do exist today, are direct results from the corruption that took place 2,000 years ago.