Webb
This is a fascinating theological question that bridges two major religious traditions. Let me investigate across the Christian and Jewish documents to see how the Church Fathers and early Christian sources identified Jesus with the Third Temple, and how this contrasts with Jewish messianic expectations.Steps6 completed
This is a rich theological territory with a fundamental clash of interpretive frameworks. Let me lay out what the documents reveal.
The Jewish Messianic Expectation: A Physical Temple
The Jewish expectation, grounded in the Hebrew prophets, is that the Messiah will be a Davidic king who builds the physical Temple in Jerusalem. The documents surface this expectation clearly. In the Zohar, the distinction is drawn sharply: the First Temple and Second Temple were ultimately human constructions and thus impermanent, but the third Temple “will be revealed in the world” as God’s own work — “Hashem builds Jerusalem… He WILL BUILD and no other” . The Zohar explicitly states that “a third Temple is not mentioned in the Torah” in the ordinary sense — it is a heavenly structure that God will bring down .
The Church Fathers were aware of this Jewish expectation and debated against it. Athanasius (NPNF2_Vol04) frames the Jewish position as one of “trifling” — insisting the Jews are still waiting for a Messiah who has already come, because “when did prophet and vision cease from Israel, save when Christ came?” . The signs they point to: Jerusalem no longer stands as a Jewish city, the temple is destroyed, the sacrifices have ceased — all evidence, in their view, that the “Holy of Holies” has already arrived and made the shadow-copy obsolete .
The Church Fathers’ Threefold Identification of Jesus as the Temple
1. Jesus’ Physical Body as the True Temple (The Literal-Christological Reading)
This is the foundational layer. The Church Fathers fixate on John 2:19-21 — Jesus’ statement “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” — and the Evangelist’s clarification that “He spake of the temple of His body” . Practically every major Father addresses this passage.
Origen (ANF_Vol9, pp645-651) develops this at length. He notes that Jesus “could have exhibited a thousand other signs” but specifically chose the temple sign, because it connected His body to the whole history of God’s dwelling among Israel . Augustine (NPNF_Complete) takes this further, observing that the Jews literally counted the 46 years of Herod’s temple construction while Jesus spoke of raising “the temple of His body” in three days — “Flesh they were, fleshly things they minded; but He was speaking spiritually” .
Chrysostom (NPNF2_Vol03) highlights why Jesus used the word “temple” rather than “body”: “He did not say destroy this ‘body,’ but ‘temple’ that He might show the indwelling God. The Jewish temple contained the Law; this temple contains the Lawgiver” .
The logic is this: if the Jerusalem temple was where God’s presence (Shekinah) dwelt, then Jesus’ body — in which “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, where “dwelt” literally means “tabernacled”) — is the replacement temple. The type (stone building) gives way to the reality (the incarnate Word). Athanasius writes that “the Word fashioned for Himself His house” in Mary’s womb, citing Proverbs 9:1 — “Wisdom builded herself an house” — as a prophecy of the incarnation .
2. The Church as the Temple (The Ecclesiological Reading)
The Fathers expand the temple image from Jesus’ individual body to the corporate body of believers. This is where the “third temple” language gets its most radical reinterpretation.
Origen is the clearest exponent. He writes that both “the temple and the body of Jesus” are “types of the Church” — built of “living stones, a spiritual house for a holy priesthood” . The destruction of this temple happens through persecutions, but “the temple will be raised again” — and this resurrection of the Church is tied to the “third day” of the new creation . He explicitly connects this to 1 Peter 2:5 (“Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house”) and the Pauline image of the Church as the body of Christ .
Athanasius echoes this: the temple that Wisdom (Christ) built is “which house are we” (Hebrews 3:6) — the community of believers . The stone temple was merely “the image” of this reality, and “on the appearance of the Truth, the image ceased” .
The third temple, then, is not a building in Jerusalem but the worldwide assembly of believers in Christ. The Fathers saw this as already fulfilled in the spread of the Gentile church — a temple “not made with hands” , built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ as the cornerstone.
3. The Eschatological Temple (The Apocalyptic Reading)
A third strand identifies the temple with Christ’s resurrected body as the firstfruits of the general resurrection — and thus the Temple becomes the entire redeemed creation.
Origen (NPNF_Complete, p4541) develops this in a remarkable passage: “the third day will rise on the new heaven and the new earth, when these bones, the whole house of Israel, will rise in the great Lord’s day, death having been overcome. And thus the resurrection of the Saviour from the passion of the cross contains the mystery of the resurrection of the whole body of Christ” . The Temple is ultimately the eschatological dwelling of God with humanity — not a building at all, but a transformed cosmos.
Cyril of Jerusalem (NPNF_Complete) connects this to Antichrist: the Antichrist will come and “make great account of the Temple” to deceive the Jews, “making it supposed that he is the man of the race of David, who shall build up the Temple which was erected by Solomon” . For Cyril, any attempt to rebuild a physical temple is a sign of the Antichrist’s deception, not the Messiah’s work.
The Key Contrast: Two Irreconcilable Frameworks
| Jewish Expectation | Church Fathers’ Christological Reinterpretation |
|---|---|
| Messiah is a Davidic king | Messiah is the incarnate Word of God |
| He builds a physical stone temple in Jerusalem | He raises His own body — the “temple not made with hands” |
| The temple is a place where God dwells | Jesus IS the dwelling place of God, and believers are built into Him |
| Third temple = future literal building | Third temple = the resurrected body of Christ + the Church + the new creation |
| Temple is central to national restoration | Temple is transcended — universal, not localized |
The Argument from Cessation
A particularly sharp argument comes from Athanasius, Origen, and Justin Martyr: the temple’s destruction in 70 AD (and the failed rebuilding under Julian the Apostate in the 4th century) proved that God had abandoned the physical sanctuary. Athanasius puts it bluntly: “For it is a sign, and an important proof, of the coming of the Word of God, that Jerusalem no longer stands, nor is any prophet raised up nor vision revealed to them” . The Zohar itself concedes that a merely human-built temple cannot last — “Unless Hashem builds the house, they who build it labor in vain” — and the Fathers seized on this logic .
Josephus (Complete Works) also notes that the Jewish temple Herod rebuilt was actually the “third” of their temples (after Solomon’s and Zerubbabel’s) — but the Fathers reinterpreted the entire sequence as a typological progression toward Christ .
What’s Striking — And What’s Missing
What’s remarkable is how thoroughly the Church Fathers shifted the category. They didn’t argue about the third temple; they argued that the entire temple paradigm had been superseded. The question “Did Jesus build the third temple?” is, from their perspective, a category error — He is the temple, and the Church is the temple, and the new creation will be the temple. The physical rebuilding is not merely unnecessary but, for some Fathers, a sign of Antichrist.
What’s missing from the documents I found is any serious engagement by the Fathers with the detailed rabbinic literature on the third temple. The Fathers knew the Jewish objection — they debated with Jewish interlocutors — but they tended to argue from prophecy fulfillment (cessation of prophecy, destruction of Jerusalem, conversion of Gentiles) rather than from detailed exegesis of the Ezekiel temple vision or post-exilic prophets. The Zohar’s expectation that God Himself must build the third temple echoes some Fathers’ claims, but from opposite conclusions: for the Zohar it means the third temple hasn’t come yet; for the Fathers it means Christ (as God incarnate) has already built it in His resurrection and the Church.
