I recently heard this apologetic claim. The argument is that strange phenomena were recorded in the Second Great temple right after Jesus death, and that the coincidence is too big. The claim is made by scholar Robert l. Plummer in a a paper called Something awry in the temple? The rending of the temple veil and early jewish sources that report unusual phenomena in the temple around ad 30. Here is the important part:
In Tractate Yoma 6:3 we read: “It has been taught: Forty years before the destruction of the Temple the western light went out, the crimson thread remained crimson (for the record, it used to turn white), and the lot for the Lord always came up in the left hand. They would close the gates of the Temple by night and get up in the morning and find them wide open. Said [to the Temple] Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, “O Temple, why do you frighten us? We know that you will end up destroyed. For it has been said, ‘Open your doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour your cedars!’ ” (Zech 11:1)
My question is, how much truth is there to this?
I hadn’t heard of this before, but from what I’ve read, there seems to be such a tradition. The problem, of course, is that it was written down centuries after the events it describes. They were to be seen as omens of what was to befall the Temple.
For anyone interested, the paper’s available ** you do not have permission to see this link **
Of course Plummer’s arguments stand or fall on their own merits but it should be pointed out that he teaches at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, my own erstwhile, “almost”, alma mater. He is required to sign a doctrinal statement of approved beliefs to do so, and these beliefs are very very conservative, even fundamentalist. I will read the article. It’s hard to imagine these traditions were not influenced in some way by Christian thinking though.
Robert said
BJH1960 said
I hadn’t heard of this before, but from what I’ve read, there seems to be such a tradition. The problem, of course, is that it was written down centuries after the events it describes. They were to be seen as omens of what was to befall the Temple.
For anyone interested, the paper’s available here.Thanks, Bruce. Plummer treats the Talmudic sources as more important than Josephus; while these are presented as based on older oral traditions, they are notoriously difficult to date. They should not be presumed to be early. …
And if the “Criterion of Inconvenience” is taken seriously, treating Talmudic sources as accurate representations of much earlier oral tradition entails a quite dramatic “Convenience” in that the appeal to a older oral tradition serves to anchor the authority of Talmudic sources in the tradition that Moses passed along two bodies of law, one of them passed in written form and the other passed as an oral tradition.
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