2012.12.19 | Margaret Barker, Temple Mysticism: An Introduction. London: SPCK, 2011. 192 pp. ISBN: 978-0281064830.
Review by Matthew Twigg, University of Oxford.
Any review of Margaret Barker’s Temple Mysticism needs to take adequate account of its overall position in her wider corpus. Since the late 1980s, Barker has published a series of monographs developing what she calls “temple theology”; that is, the idea that the roots of early Christianity, and indeed the New Testament, are both indebted to and built upon forms of worship and theology stemming from the First Temple cult of Judaism. Temple Mysticism is therefore, only the latest instalment in what Barker treats as a lifelong vocation to establish the First Temple essence of early Christianity.
As in Barker’s other works, temple mysticism (i.e. seeing the Lord in a Temple setting) is presented as a hypothesis, as opposed to an overtly demonstrable brute fact of New Testament theology.
Biblical and Early Christian Studies 