174 Hanna Stettler renewed Israel. We therefore need to consider what importance Jesus assigned to it. There are several hints in the synoptics that Jesus did not attack the Temple cult from the outset: Jesus often taught in the Temple (Mark 14,49 parr.; cf. Luke 19,47; 21,37). According to Matthew, Jesus, like his Jewish contemporaries, regards the Temple as God’s dwelling place (Matt 23,21) and as “the holy place” (24,15). Matthew reports Jesus’ saying about bringing one’s d˛ron (in the LXX mostly for qorban or mincha) to the Temple (Matt 5,23). This presupposes that the followers of Jesus still offer certain sacrifices in the Temple. According to Luke, Jesus, when he is 12 years old, declares the Temple to be his “Father’s house”, where he is to be (2,49). On the other hand, Jesus holds the Temple tax to be dispensable (unlike the Pharisees who were strongly in favour of it) (67). He asks Peter all the same to pay it for the two of them, in order “not to give offence to them” (Matt 17,27). Here, as in Matt 8,4, Jesus is depicted as fulfilling cultic obligations for the sake of the Temple priests, even though he considers them to be obsolete or (in the case of the Temple tax) even criticizes them. Only towards the end of his time on earth, when the conflict with his opponents came to a point, did Jesus question the sacrificial cult in principle. As J. Ådna puts it: In the presence of God’s eschatological action in and through his Son and representative, Jesus, the religious leaders, and with them the whole nation, are called to disengage from the old cultic order and to open up to the imminent kingdom of God. The Temple action symbolically puts an end to the sacrificial cult and points to the new ‘house of prayer’, which due to the perfect salvation that the basileia entails no longer serves for making atonement (68). Jesus’ Temple logion (Mark 14,58), which he may have uttered during the cleansing of the Temple (69), expresses his claim to be “the messianic builder of the eschatological Temple on Zion, which is part (67) According to W. HORBURY, “The Temple Tax”, Jesus and the Politics of His Day (ed. E. BAMMEL – C.F.D. MOULE) (Cambridge 1984) 282-283, “it is best to take the ‘sons’ as Israel in general, rather than Jesus and his followers in particular, since the unadorned description of other Jews as foreigners which the latter would imply does not occur elsewhere in Jesus’ teaching”. This would imply that Jesus was generally critical of the Temple tax, and did not just deny the necessity to pay it for himself, the Son of God. (68) ÅDNA, Jesu Stellung zum Tempel, 433 (translation mine). (69) Cf. ÅDNA, Jesu Stellung zum Tempel, 151-152 (translation mine).