Third: as vessels of God’s spirit, these special ex-pagan gentiles, Paul claims, resemble God’s temple itself. “Don’t you know that you are God’s temple, for God’s spirit dwells in you? . . . God’s temple is holy/separated/dedicated, as you are.” “Your body is the temple of holy spirit.” “We are the temple of the living God.”

Theologians will sometimes point to these verses to argue that, for Paul,the physical, Jewish temple back in Jerusalem has been replaced or surpassed by this new, “spiritual” and metaphorical “temple,” the diaspora Christian communities. Given that, since 70 C.E., no temple in Jerusalem has stood, this claim can seem to be simple common sense.

 

But that is not what Paul says. Paul writes before 70. He never imagined a world without the temple. On the contrary: Paul praises his new communities by comparing them to this institution, which he valued supremely. Had he valued the temple less, he would not have used it as the defining image for his assemblies. Mid-first century, then, on the topic of the temple, Paul’s thinking is not “either/or” but “both/and.” God’s spirit dwells both in Jerusalem’s temple and in the “temple” of the believer and of the community. As the Jesus of Matthew’s gospel will declare, two generations or so after Paul, “He who swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells in it”—that is, by the god (sic) of Israel. - Paula Fredricksen