Acts 21 as the Backdrop for Eph 2:11–22
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One New Temple
Acts 21 as the Backdrop for Eph 2:11–22
One striking image in the New Testament is that of a new temple in Christ. Ephesians 2 connects this new temple with the bringing together of Jew and gentile in shared worship to God. ⁹⁸⁷ Although the theology of this multicultural temple is most obvious in this passage, it develops not only Paul’s earlier theology of ethnic reconciliation in Christ (which we may observe, for example, in Romans), but Jesus’s and Paul’s own challenges to the traditional temple’s ethnic barriers (as in Mark 11:17; John 4:20–24; and Acts 21:27–29). ⁹⁸⁸
Paul’s Experience with the Divided Temple (Acts 21:27–29)
Paul’s image of a temple uniting Jew and gentile (Eph 2:11–22) challenged the ethnically segregated reality of the temple standing in his own day. The ancient Israelite temple separated priests from laity, but not gentiles from Jews or women from men (1 Kgs 8:41–43; 2 Chron 6:32–33).
By the time of Jesus and Paul, however, Herod’s temple separated these groups to fulfill a stricter understanding of purity regulations.⁹⁹⁰ The outer court was now divided into the court of Israel (for Jewish men); on a lower level outside it, the court of women, for Jewish women; and on a lower level outside that, the outer court beyond which gentiles could not pass. Strategically posted signs, attested both in Josephus and archaeology, warned gentiles that those who passed this point would be responsible for their own immediate execution.⁹⁹¹ Judeans normally were not allowed to execute death sentences directly, but violation of their temple constituted the one exception!⁹⁹²
Both Paul and his audience would have been well-aware of this symbol of Jewish-gentile division at the very heart of divine worship.⁹⁹³ In Acts 21:27, some Jewish people from the Roman province of Asia saw Paul exiting the temple. Much of the Jewish community in Ephesus, that province’s most prominent city, felt that they had reason for animosity against Paul. In 19:9, he split their synagogue; in 19:33–34, they were blamed for a riot that was reacting against his monotheistic preaching.
They had also seen him in Jerusalem with Trophimus, a gentile they recognized from Ephesus (21:29). Knowing Paul’s commitment to gentiles as well as Jews (19:10), they draw a faulty conclusion: they accuse Paul of having violated the temple’s sanctity by bringing a gentile inside (21:28). A riot quickly ensues,⁹⁹⁴ and God ironically uses the Roman garrison on the Temple Mount to protect Paul, even though the garrison commander wrongly initially presumes Paul the instigator of the unrest.
Paul’s ensuing speech to the crowd⁹⁹⁵ is in Aramaic and offers abundant common ground with his audience (e.g., 22:12). They patiently listen to his testimony about Jesus, perhaps because of the culturally sensitive witness of the Jerusalem church (cf. 21:20). Paul could have built on this hearing as Peter did in 2:37–41, summoning people to repentance. Paul, however, will not leave out his call to the gentiles (22:21–22), and the riot resumes.
Why does Paul insist on talking about gentiles, even when it risks alienating a hostile crowd?⁹⁹⁶ Judean nationalism had been on the rise since Judea had briefly had its own king (41–44 CE) and suffered abuses under subsequent Roman governors. At the time depicted in the narrative, Judea’s revolt against Rome (66–73 CE) is less than a decade away.
The Jerusalem church successfully identified with their culture in proclaiming Christ to them (21:20), but they were not prophetically warning their culture that their nationalism was leading them toward cultural destruction. Rejecting Paul’s provocative message of God’s plans for gentiles, like neglecting Jesus’s warning (Luke 19:41–44; 21:20–24), entailed failing to recognize their hour of visitation (Luke 19:44). Strife between Rome and Judea would lead to Jerusalem’s destruction.
Paul’s insistence on defending divine interest in gentiles ironically leads to several years in Roman custody. He is held for up to two years in Caesarea, Rome’s capital for Judea (Acts 24:27), then sent to Rome.
Rome’s prisoner reminds Asian believers
On what I currently think the likeliest background for Ephesians, Paul writes to the churches of the Roman province of Asia, starting in Ephesus, from custody in Rome (Eph 3:1; 4:1; 6:20). (Ephesians circulated in Roman Asia beyond Ephesus, but that was probably the center of his audience.)⁹⁹⁷ Because both Trophimus and Paul’s accusers were from the area of Ephesus, believers in and around Ephesus know why Paul writes to them from Roman custody. He was accused of having taken a gentile beyond the temple’s dividing wall, and he had refused to play down his calling to gentiles.
Thus for Paul, and for his audience, there could be no greater symbol of the division between Jew and gentile than this dividing wall in the temple. Yet in Eph 2:14–15, Paul declares that this barrier, developed from biblical regulations dividing Jews from gentiles, has been shattered by Jesus Christ! “For he himself is our peace, who forged both [Jew and gentile] into one and abolished the dividing barrier, annulling the enmity . . . ” Paul offers this startling claim (cf. also 1 Cor 12:13; Gal 3:28) in a milieu full of mutual hostility between these groups. Just a few years after these words, Jews and Syrians began massacring each other in the streets of Caesarea,⁹⁹⁸ and less than a decade later Romans devastated Jerusalem, burning its temple and enslaving its survivors.
Yet with a vision to the future, Paul goes on to speak here of a new temple. Others envisioned a new, eschatological temple,⁹⁹⁹ and sometimes also a present, spiritual temple;¹⁰⁰⁰ but gentiles were excluded.¹⁰⁰¹ For Paul, however, Jewish and gentile Jesus-followers together become a holy temple, God’s household, the dwelling of the Spirit (2:19–22).
Paul’s conceptualization of this new temple probably reflects antecedent teaching by Jesus himself, who both predicted the temple’s destruction¹⁰⁰² and posed theological challenges to the separation there (Mark 11:17, although Luke, like Matthew, omits “for all the nations”).¹⁰⁰³ The Gospels also offer some additional indications that Jesus considered a new, spiritual temple, or at least offered the raw material (cf. e.g., Luke 19:40, 44; 20:17–18)¹⁰⁰⁴ that coalesced into an early Christian consensus about this image (cf. e.g., 1 Cor 3:16; 6:19; 1 Pet 2:4–8; Rev 3:12; 13:6). Nevertheless, this passage in Ephesians also relates concretely to the situation of Paul the prisoner as depicted in Acts.