Understanding the Holy Temple Jesus Knew by Leen and Kathleen Ritmeyer helps us to envision the place where Jesus worshiped with other Jewish leaders and families, giving us a better feeling for being part of the biblical story. For instance, as our thoughts join Jesus on The Temple Porch, we might experience what He felt as a child or young man, looking up to see the gold-covered entrance with its shine rising to the height of an 18-story building.
Using realistic models, drawings, photographs, and descriptive passages to recapture the feel of the magnificent building, the authors show Jesus’ movements as He encountered various people and situations in the Temple complex. For example, as an 8-day-old infant, Jesus would have visited The Court of the Women in His mother’s arms as Mary came for the purification rite required 41 days after her Son’s birth. Then, as the authors point out, “Some thirty years later, Jesus was teaching here as an adult.”
In that same expansive open area, Jesus would also have met the woman accused of adultery, stooping down to write her name in the dust (as the law required some kind of notation) before wiping away all traces of condemnation.
In the back pages of this large, thin paperback, which Hendrickson Publishers kindly sent me to review, a “List of New Testament Links To The Temple” provides numbered headings for locations followed by bullet-pointed references to their corresponding scriptural events. For example, “11. Solomon’s Porch” includes references to Jesus’ walking in Solomon’s Colonade during Hanukkah as noted in John 10:23, and, by Acts 2, the same area had become a “Regular meeting place for believers.” Such details and an abundance of visuals help us to “be there” too.
Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, poet-writer reviewer
Understanding the Holy Temple Jesus Knew, paperback
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