“Jewish Intramural” in What Sense

This study compares 2 Maccabees and Luke-Acts in how their historiographies connect the temple to Israel’s restoration, critiquing the growing trend of reading Luke-Acts primarily as a Jewish work. Both texts draw on Exod 15:17, where the people are integrated into the holy place as Israel’s destiny. In 2 Maccabees, the temple serves as an indicator of the historical development of the Maccabean war, its fate contingent on the martyrs’ commitment to cultic purity. While 2 Maccabees unitarily integrates the “holy place” into the Jewish politeia , Luke-Acts binomially combines the temple with an eschatological sphere that includes gentiles qua gentiles, grounded in the belief that Jesus is the incarnate temple. This transformation reflects a self-feeding hermeneutical structure, where Luke’s perceived Jewishness involves both a shared semantic dimension and a distinct hermeneutical dimension that reconfigures conventional cultic semantics. Scholars must refine their approach to Luke’s Jewishness in light of this complexity

Biblical studies · Dimension (graph theory) · Hebrew Bible · Jewish studies · Judaism · Reading (process) · Second Temple period · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Interdisciplinary Studies: Technology, Society, and Humanities