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Margaret Barker Biblical scholar |
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Margaret Barker Biblical scholar |
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Margaret Barker |
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On this page: Overview and works pre-1987 · The Older Testament (1987) · The Lost Prophet (1998) · The Gate of Heaven (1991) · The Great Angel (1992) · On Earth as it is in Heaven (1995) · The Risen Lord (1996) · Commentary on Isaiah (1996) · The Revelation of Jesus Christ (2000) · The Great High Priest (2003) · Temple Theology (2004) · An Extraordinary Gathering of Angels (2004) · The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom (2007) · Temple Themes in Christian Worship (2008) · Christmas, The Original Story (October 2008) · Creation (2009) · Temple Mysticism (2011) Although she did
not publish any book until 1987, she had at that time been engaged for
many years on the study of the Jerusalem temple and the apocalypses,
accumulating the material which became the basis for subsequent books.
The results of the research into temple mythology and symbolism proved
to be more significant than she could have anticipated when the work
began, and she finds herself redrawing the map of biblical studies and
particularly of Christian origins. She is concerned at the gulf that has
opened up between biblical scholarship and the churches. Barker's first book, published in 1987
was The Older Testament. The Survival of Themes from the Ancient
Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and early Christianity (London: SPCK
1987, reprinted Sheffield: Phoenix Press 1985). This was a study of the
Enochic tradition, written long before Enoch became fashionable, and the
ideas were first published as ‘Some Reflections on the Enoch Myth’ in
The Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 1980. She proposed that
the Enochic mythology was that of the first temple, the pre-Deuteronomic
and pre-Mosaic religion of Jerusalem. With a basic pattern established,
she was able to detect several places in canonical texts where an older
tradition had been suppressed and rewritten, and a comparison of ancient
versions suggested that this tension between the older mythology and the
newer Mosaic monotheism was a living issue well into the second temple
period. It was crucial for understanding the roots of Christianity. She
offered new readings of Isaiah, later developed as the Isaiah section in Eerdman’s Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids and Cambridge UK, 2003),
and new readings of Deuteronomy and Job, making her initial proposals
about temple symbolism and divine names. Her subsequent study of the
early Enochic material and the Parables of Enoch has shown them to be a
deposit of high priestly tradition, many of the motifs and allusions
being drawn from the pre-Deuteronomic cult of the first temple. Of
special importance here is Robert Murray’s theory of a ‘Cosmic Covenant’
(The Cosmic Covenant, London: Sheed and ward, 1992). which underlies and
antedates the better known covenant patterns of the Old Testament. She
built on one aspect of his work to reconstruct the priestly world view
fundamental to her theory of the atonement and to any reconstruction of
the biblical view of creation. Further comparative study is revealing
more first temple elements; evidence of light mysticism, evidence of a
female divinity, [who has already been the object of much interest on
the part of other scholars, but with a very different approach and
conclusion], evidence of a concept of resurrection and evidence of a
possible antecedent to the second temple Day of Atonement ritual. Barker's second book,
The Lost
Prophet. The Book of Enoch and its Influence on Christianity,
(London, SPCK 1988, reprinted Sheffield: Phoenix Press 2005) introduced
the then virtually unknown book of Enoch to a wider public. Its teaching
on the fallen angels and the origin of evil, the vision of God, the Son
of Man and the original Cosmic Covenant, were shown to be key elements
in the earliest Christianity. She then turned her attention to temple
symbolism and published The Gate of Heaven. the History and Symbolism
of the Temple in Jerusalem (London SPCK, 1991) testing the
hypothesis that, as priestly lore tended to be conservative, Philo, the
son of a first century CE priestly family, was more likely to have drawn
his temple symbolism from the ancient tradition than from a recent
fashion for Hellenisation. Using evidence from the deutero-canonical and
pseudepigraphic texts, Qumran and rabbinic material, as well as early
Christian texts and liturgies, she proposed: that apocalyptic writing
was the temple tradition; that temple buildings were aligned to
establish a solar calendar, thus explaining the astronomical texts
incorporated in 1 Enoch; that the temple symbolism of priest and
sanctuary antedated the Eden stories of Genesis; that the temple
buildings depicted heaven and earth separated by a veil of created
matter; that the throne visions, the basis of the later Merkavah
mysticism, originated as high priestly sanctuary experiences, first
attested in Isaiah but originating in the royal cult when king figures
passed beyond the temple veil from earth into heaven, from immortality
to the resurrected state, and then returned; that the Day of the
Lord/the Day of Judgement was the myth of the Day of Atonement and that
atonement was the rite of healing and recreation rather than
propitiation; that a characteristic concept of time and eternity was
crucial to understanding this material as the area beyond the temple
veil was beyond time; that much temple symbolism survived in Gnostic
texts, suggesting that the bitterness apparent in many of them derived
from the upheavals and exclusions which followed the establishment of
the second temple. The Great Angel, 1992 In
The Great Angel. A Study of
Israel’s Second God (London: SPCK, 1992) she tested the hypothesis
that when the early Christians read the Old Testament as an account of
the pre-incarnate Christ, they were reading in a traditional way and
were not innovators. She proposed that pre-Christian Judaism was not
monotheistic in the generally accepted sense of that word. From a
comparison of ancient versions of the OT she proposed that Israel had
known a High God and a second, national God, known as the Son of God
Most High. Since crucial textual variants arose relatively late, as can
be seen from the Qumran evidence, the second God remained a living issue
during the second temple period. The hypothesis was tested in Philo,
early rabbininc texts (building on the work of A Segal Two Powers in
Heaven Leiden: Brill, 1978, but reaching very different conclusions), in
Gnostic texts and, with unexpected success, in the Christian writings of
the first three centuries. Finally she tested the hypothesis in the New
Testament where the results convinced her that this was the key to
understanding Christian origins. She concluded that when the Christians
declared ‘Jesus is the Lord’ they were affirming that Jesus was the
final manifestation of Yahweh, the national God of Israel in the Old
Testament. Thus the origins of Trinitarian belief are pre-Christian, and
the heir to temple tradition is Christianity. The sensitive nature of
these results made further study imperative, but nothing she has
discovered since has in any way altered these conclusions. The Lord of
the Old Testament as the Lord of the New Testament was fundamental to
all her subsequent work. This book caught the attention of
Mormon
scholars [Latter Day Saints] who now take a great interest in
Margaret Barker's work. On Earth as it is in Heaven, 1995 As the Second God was a high priestly
figure in human form, she returned to temple symbolism research in order
to reconstruct more of the role of the high priest, especially in the
atonement rituals. She published these results in
On Earth as it is
in Heaven. Temple Symbolism in the New Testament (Edinburgh T&T
Clark, 1995) in effect a supplement to The Gate of Heaven. She
proposed that the high priest had been a divine figure, and not, as is
usually held, a representative of the people. The controversy
surrounding this claim to divinity was demonstrated from the variant
traditions about the high priestly vestments. He was an angel, the
manifestation of the Lord on earth, and thus the divine Son. Temple
rituals ‘were’ the realities of heaven, and atonement was the high
priest, as the Lord, absorbing the effects of evil into himself and
destroying them by dying symbolically in the vicarious death of the
goat. Thus he renewed the creation with his own blood/life. She
considered this to be the greatest but unacknowledged problem of
Christian origins, namely how the animal sacrifices of the temple
related to the human sacrifice of someone declared to be the Son of God.
Evidence in Origen confirmed that the earlier church had known the true
significance of the goats on the Day of Atonement. It was at this point
that she realised that the light mysticism of the temple was crucial for
understanding resurrection. The fourth stage of her work was assembled in outline to deliver as the Scottish Journal of Theology lectures in 1995, and published as The Risen Lord; the Jesus of History as the Christ of Faith (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1996). She applied the results of earlier temple research to the figure of Jesus and concluded that even the canonical materials described Jesus as one who lived and died within the tradition of the high priesthood. She challenged much of the scepticism of recent scholarship - hence the book’s subtitle The Jesus of History as the Christ of Faith - arguing that the texts should be read on their own terms and in the context of first century Palestine. She proposed that Jesus saw himself as one of the high priestly initiates, one of the resurrected ones, and that this mystical experience is recorded in the Gospels as his baptismal vision. After this experience he believed himself to be the Lord, the Son of God Most High, the high priest who had come to perform the final act of atonement at the end of the tenth Jubilee. Thus the whole of the ministry was the post-resurrection period, a position confirmed by material in Gnostic texts, especially the Gospel of Philip, but also in early Christian writers such as Irenaeus. Re-reading the New Testament, early Christian and early Gnostic texts with this paradigm gave remarkable results; it explained much of Paul’s salvation imagery, which derived from the older covenant beliefs; it explained the Parousia hope, as the return of the high priest from the holy of holies; it explained the origin of the belief that Jesus’ death effected atonement; it explained the form of the early baptismal liturgies; it accounted for the high priestly imagery of the Letter to the Hebrews. Evidence emerged of an esoteric tradition in the early church in which the arcana of the temple were transmitted. Her initial work in this area was published in an article ‘The Secret Tradition’, in The Journal of Higher Criticism 2.1 (1995) pp.31-67. She then wrote a commentary on Isaiah in
1996, as a part of the
Eerdman's Commentary on the Bible
project, but due to
publisher’s delays, this did not appear until 2003. She argued that
Isaiah was the crucial influence on Jesus in forming his understanding
of his mission, and that the Isaiah tradition continued to be dominant
in the early church. In origin, it had represented the world view of the
first temple, an Enochic and non- Mosaic faith, and that this was known
to the Christians who consciously looked back to the first, the true,
temple. The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 2000 She then embarked upon her most ambitious
project to date - an exposition of The Book of Revelation, showing that
it stood in the tradition of the temple apocalypses as had been
reconstructed it in her earlier works.
The Revelation of Jesus Christ,
which God gave Him to Show to his Servants what must soon take place,
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) showed that many of the visions recorded in
Revelation were known to Jesus and inspired his ministry. He spoke of
these things to the inner group of his disciples, and John was the
disciple authorised to reveal the visions and the prophecies as they
were fulfilled in the years between the death of Jesus and the fall of
Jerusalem. The ‘little apocalypses’ in the synoptic gospels are
summaries of this aspect of Jesus’ teaching, but only summaries because
the whole corpus was available in Revelation. The Letters to the Seven
Churches were sent from the Jerusalem church to Asia Minor, to warn the
young churches there against St Paul. They are the oldest material in
the NT apart from the visions of Jesus as recorded by John. The whole of
Jesus’ ministry was understood both by him, and later by his disciples,
as the ministry of Melchizedek described in the Qumran Melchizedek Text.
The great high priest was expected to appear at the start of the tenth
Jubilee and to complete the final atonement and renewal of the creation.
In the life and death of Jesus, the hopes that had been ritualised in
the Day of Atonement were being realised in history. The death of Jesus
was the first part of the great atonement, and the expected Second
Coming was his return from the holy of holies to complete the atonement
and renew the creation. John’s vision of the mighty angel in Revelation
10 was his personal vision of the return, after which John taught that
the Parousia would be delayed. The Christian prophecies in his keeping
were compiled into the Book of Revelation, and as such form a record of
the first generation in Jerusalem/Judea, but the prophecies about the
second coming were not a part of the final scheme. These were relegated
to the fragments at the end of the work. The Great High Priest, 2003 The next phase of her work appeared as The Great High Priest. The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (London and New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2003). This was a collection of papers, some previously published in journals. The catalyst for this new phase in her work had been the Liturgy of the Orthodox church, which she attended for the first time in February 1999, and realised that the ancient church had preserved temple tradition and symbolism. The volume contains a papers on:
Temple Theology, 2004
Temple Theology, London: SPCK 2004, was
developed from her 2003 Cardinal Hume Lectures in Heythrop College,
London, and shows how the restoration of the original temple and its
teaching is the key to understanding the role and teaching of Jesus. It
is the best introduction to four key areas of temple theology: Creation,
with the temple built to represent the creation, the significance of the
holy of holies and the veil. Covenant, showing that the Eternal Covenant
binding all creation together, was the covenant of the Last Supper and
thus the basis of the Eucharist. Atonement explaining the original
meaning of atonement, the blood/life of the Lord renewing the broken
bonds of the covenant of creation. Wisdom, introducing the symbols of
the almost lost Wisdom tradition of the temple: the Bread of the
Presence, the Tree of Life and the anointing oil. An Extraordinary Gathering of Angels, 2004 An Extraordinary Gathering of Angels,
London: MQP 2004, explores the world of angels, the beings of the holy
of holies and how they relate to the visible creation. By means of 170
coloured illustrations, drawn from Christian, Jewish and Muslim art,
together with an anthology of extracts from ancient and modern texts,
she describes the role of angels in the Bible and in worship, in
cosmology and cosmic harmony, as guides and guardians, and as the agents
of inspiration and revelation. The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom, 2007 The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom,
London: SPCK, 2007 describes the roots of the idea of the
Kingdom of God. She locates the original Kingdom ideas in the holy of
holies, the place of the throne, and shows how the ideals of the holy of
holies were the inspiration for the various later beliefs about the
Kingdom. She shows how fashions in scholarship have obscured much of the
ancient evidence, and then reconstructs the traditions of the high
priesthood - Enoch and Melchizedek as well as Aaron - before reading the
gospel evidence with this new paradigm. Temple Themes in Christian Worship, T & T Clark, 2008
Temple Themes in Christian
Worship, London: T&T Clark 2008, explores
the earliest links between Synagogue and Church, and questions the
‘synagogue’ roots of many Christian practices, finding them rather
in the temple. She develops the implications of the ‘Second God’,
originally set out in The Great Angel, and then locates the
origin of Christian baptism in the high priestly initiation rituals
and not in existing Jewish conversion rites. She relates the
Maranatha prayer to the ancient tradition of temple theophanies, and
expands on the significance of angels, harmony and music in the
liturgy, suggesting the original context of the Sanctus. The Wisdom
tradition is proposed as a formative influence in the Eucharist, to
be developed in a future book on Marian imagery. Christmas, The Original Story, SPCK, 2008
The story of Christmas is loved
by all Christians, and its cultural influence is felt far and wide,
not only in the art and literature of the Church but also in the
Qur’an. Much of the original story, however, is not found in the
Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and so some of the detail in Christian
art and literature is not always understood. Margaret Barker uses
her knowledge of temple tradition and Jewish culture in the time of
Jesus to set the story in its original cultural and literary
context. By examining the widely used Infancy Gospel of James, and
by uncovering layers of allusion in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke,
she reveals what the Christmas story originally meant. She then goes
on to show how this understanding can be found in later texts such
as the Arabic Infancy Gospel and legends known in mediaeval Europe. Creation. A Biblical Vision for the Environment, Continuum, 2009 Drawing on her experiences with the Ecumenical Patriarch’s Symposium Religion, Science and the Environment, she developed from Temple Theology an approach to creation theology that was both Bible-based and related to the traditional liturgies of the Church. Since most contemporary issues are very different from those facing the first Christians, she asked the question: what views about the creation and human responsibility were available to early Church, and how were they presented in the New Testament and the earliest Christian writings? Several contemporary situations were then related to these fundamental principles, drawing on material gathered by the Patriarch’s Symposium. Some contemporary Christian teaching about the environment was shown to be different from anything the first Christians would have recognised. HAH
Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch, wrote the foreword to the
book and gave his blessing to her research and writing. Temple Mysticism, Continuum, 2011 In
Temple Mysticism, she
developed ideas implicit in earlier volumes, beginning with the
Unity represented by the Holy of Holies, and how the temple mystics
envisaged the One becoming the many. They used the images of fire,
light and music, and spoke of the powers of nature as the angels who
were all part of the divine Unity. At the centre of the Holy of
Holies was the divine throne, and on this were engraved the Forms of
everything in the visible world. The Forms became angels who then
emerged to shape the visible world. This temple mysticism was
earlier than the teaching of Pythagoras and Plato, who were
dependent upon it, as then ancient sources testify. The people who
entered the holy of holies - literally and in their visions - had
access to this knowledge of the mystery of life. There are detailed
studies of Isaiah 6, the earliest example of temple mysticism in the
Old Testament; and of John 17, which shows that Jesus was a temple
mystic.
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(c) Margaret Barker 2006.