What Is a Temple?

Hugh W. Nibley

Those Church Fathers, especially of the fourth century, who proclaim the victory of Christianity
over its rivals constantly speak of the Church as the competitor and supplanter of the Synagogue,
and modern authorities are agreed that in ritual and liturgy the Christian Church grew up “in the
shadow of the Synagogue.” [1] This is a most significant fact. While the Temple stood the Jews had
both its ancient ordinances and the practices of the Synagogue, but they were not the same. The
Temple was unique, and when it was destroyed the Synagogue of the Jews did not take over its
peculiarly sacred functions—they were in no wise authorized to do so. [2]

The Loss of the Temple

Is it not strange that the Christian Church should take its ritual and liturgy from the Synagogue
rather than the Temple? The ready explanation for that was that the Temple had been destroyed
by God, the Old Law abolished, and a spiritual Temple—a much higher and finer thing—had taken
its place. [3] But if God had abandoned the Temple, he had no less abandoned the Synagogue—
why copy it? If a “spiritual” Temple was so much superior to the crass physical thing, why did the
Christians go out of their way to borrow equally physical Jewish and Gentile rites and practices of
a much lower origin? Those same churchmen who expressed a fastidious disdain for the crude and
outmoded rites of the Temple at the same time diligently cultivated the rites of the Synagogue (at
best a second-class Temple) with a generous and ever-increasing intermixture of popular pagan
practices. [4] Plainly the Christian world was not satisfied with the rhetorical abstractions of a
purely spiritual successor to the Temple. But if the boast of the Church was that it took up and
continued where the Old Law left off, why did it not continue along the line of the Temple rather
than of the Synagogue? [5]

The answer is, as we shall see below, that the Primitive Church did just that, while the later Church,
by all accounts a totally different thing, tried to and failed, attempting for a time to establish its
own substitutes for the Temple. St. Jerome argues that if the Jews had the Temple, the Christians
have the Holy Sepulchre, and asks, “Doesn’t the Holy Sepulchre of the Lord appear more venerable
to you?” [6] This was no empty rhetoric. The Christians of the fourth century looked upon the Holy
Sepulchre in dead earnest as the legitimate successor of the Temple. The great bishops of the
time protested loudly but in vain against the fixed idea that to be really saved a Christian had to
visit Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, [7] and many modern studies have shown that the
appointments and rites of the Holy Sepulchre represent a conscious attempt to continue the ways
of the Temple. [8] Only later was the doctrine cultivated that any church might be considered as
equivalent to the Temple, and it never proved very convincing. St. Ambrose was the first Christian
writer to call a church a temple, and the editors of the Patrologia, commenting on this, remind us
that a church is definitely not a temple in the sense of Solomon’s Temple. [9] Rome itself, after
centuries of bitter rivalry, was unable to supplant Jerusalem as the supreme object of the pilgrim’s
desire. [10] Early Christian liturgies reveal a constant concern to reproduce physically something
as near as possible to the Temple rites of Jerusalem. The bulk of the liturgy is taken up with the
Davidic Psalms, the old ritual texts of the Temple; from the introit to the acclamation of the final
Psalm (Ps. 150), the imagery is that of the Temple; the priests are regularly referred to as Levites,
and the Bishop (though his office and title derive from the Synagogue and not the Temple) is
equated with Aaron the High Priest. Students of Christian ritual and liturgy agree today that no
church possesses anything near to the original rites and ordinances of the Primitive Church; they
point to the “gaping holes” in Christian ritual, and describe at length how through the centuries
these have been filled with substitute material from Jewish, classical, and Germanic sources. [11] It
was not a satisfactory arrangement: the shadow of the Temple never ceased to disquiet the
churchmen, who almost panic at the suggestion that the Jews might sometime rebuild their
Temple. [12] For since the traditions of conventional Christianity are those of the Synagogue, they
could no more compete with a true Temple than the Synagogue itself could.

What Makes a Temple? The Cosmic Plan

Though the words Synagogue, Ecclesia, and Temple are commonly employed by the Doctors of the
Church to designate the religions of the Jews, Christians, and Pagans, respectively, still the
authorities do not hesitate to apply the word Temple both to the Temple of the Jews and to their
own churches. [13] If there are unholy temples, there are also holy ones: what makes a temple
different from other buildings is not its sacredness, but its form and function.

What is that form? We can summarize a hundred studies of recent date in the formula: a temple,
good or bad, is a scale-model of the universe. The first mention of the word templum is by Varro,
for whom it designates a building specially designed for interpreting signs in the heavens—a sort
of observatory where one gets one’s bearings on the universe. [14] The root tem- in Greek and Latin
denotes a “cutting” or intersection of two lines at right angles, “the point where the cardo and
decumanus cross,” hence where the four regions come together, [15] every temple being carefully
oriented to express “the idea of pre-established harmony between a celestial and a terrestrial
image.” [16] Eusebius expressed the idea clearly long ago when he said that the Church was “a
great Temple, which the divine Word . . . had established upon earth as the intellectual image of
the celestial pattern, . . . the earthly exemplification of celestial regions in their revolutions, the
supernal Jerusalem, the celestial Mt. Zion,” etc. [17] Varro himself says that there are three
temples, one in heaven, one on earth, and one beneath the earth. [18] In the universal temple
concept these three are identical, one being built exactly over the other, with the earth temple in
the very middle of everything representing “the Pole of the heavens, around which all heavenly
motions revolve, the knot that ties earth and heaven together, the seat of universal dominion.” [19]
Here the four horizontal regions meet and here the three worlds make contact. Whether in the Old
World or the New, the idea of the three levels and four directions dominated the whole economy of
the temples and of the societies which the temples formed and guided. [20]

The Temple at Jerusalem, like God’s throne and the Law itself, existed before the foundations of
the world, according to the Talmud. [21] Its middoth or measurements were all sacred and
prescribed, with strict rules for orientation. [22] Its nature as a cosmic center is vividly recalled in
many medieval representations of the City of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, which are shown
as the exact center and navel of the earth. [23] It was in conscious imitation of both Jewish and
Christian ideas that the Moslems conceived of their Kaaba as not only the centre of the earth, it is
the centre of the universe. . . . Every heaven and every earth has its centre marked by a sanctuary
as its navel. . . . At each of them the same ceremonies are carried out that are carried out at the
Kaaba. So the sanctuary of Mecca is established as the religious centre of the universe and the
cosmic significance of any ritual act performed there is clearly demonstrated. [24]

What is bound on earth is bound in heaven.

From the Temple at Jerusalem went forth the ideas and traditions which are found all over the
Jewish, Christian, and Moslem worlds. Thus the earliest Christian rites and buildings show a
marked concern for orientation, commenting on which Voelkl observes:

It is usual for people to locate themselves with reference to some immovable point in the universe.
. . . The dogmatic tendency of the first centuries which created the “holy line” pointing East . . .
reached its final form in the mystical depths of Scholasticism. [25]

What began as tangible reality petered out in the abstractions of the schoolmen, but the source of
the idea is unmistakably the Temple.

The Place of Contact

As the ritual center of the universe, the Temple was anciently viewed as the one point on earth at
which men could establish contact with other worlds. This aspect of the Temple idea has been the
object of intense research in the past decade. It is now generally recognized that the earliest
temples were not, as formerly supposed, dwelling places of divinity, but rather meeting places at
which men at specific times attempted to make contact with the powers above. “Though in time it
became the dwelling of the divinity,” according to Contenau, “originally it may have had the aspect
of a temple of passage, a place of arrival. . . .” [26] The temple was a building which the gods
transversed to pass from their celestial habitation to their earthly residence. . . . The ziggurat is
thus nothing but a support for the edifice on top of it, and the stairway that leads from the same
between the upper and lower worlds. [27]

In this respect it resembled a mountain, for “the mountain itself was originally such a place of
contact between this and the upper world.” [28] A long list might be made of holy mountains on
which God was believed to have talked with men in ancient times, including “the mountain of the
Lord’s house.” [29] A great many studies have appeared in the 1950s describing the basic idea of
the temple as a sort of antechamber between the worlds, and particular attention has been given
to the fact that in both Egypt and Mesopotamia temples had regular wharves for the landing of
celestial barks. [30]

An investigation of the oldest temples, those represented on prehistoric seals, concludes that
those high structures were also “gigantic altars,” built both to attract the attention of the powers
above (the burnt offering being a sort of smoke signal, as it were) and to provide “the stairways
which the god, in answer to these prayers, used in order to descend to the earth. . . . He comes
bringing a renewal of life in all its forms.” [31] From the first, it would seem, men built altars in the
hopes of establishing contact with heaven, and built high towers for the same purpose (see Gen.
11:4).

As the pivot and pole of the universe, the Temple is also peculiarly tied to the North Star, around
which all things revolve. [32] At the same time, it is the place of meeting with the lower as well as
the upper world, and the one point at which passage between the two is possible. [33] That is why
in the earliest Christian records the gates and the keys are so closely connected with the Temple.
Scholars have often noted that the keys of Peter (Matt. 16:19) can only be the keys of the Temple
with its work for the dead. [34] Many studies have demonstrated the identity of tomb, temple, and
palace as the place where the powers of the other world are exercised for the benefit of the human
race. [35] In the fourth century there was a massive and permanent transfer of the pilgrim’s goal
from temples to tombs, though the two had always been connected. [36] Invariably the rites of the
Temple are those of the ancestors, and appropriately the chief character in those rites is the first
ancestor and father of the race. [37]

Naturally the Temple at Jerusalem has been studied along with the rest, and it has been found that
its rites fit easily and naturally into the general pattern. [38] Professor Albright, while noting that
Solomon’s Temple was not of pagan origin, describes it as a point of contact with the other world,
presenting “a rich cosmic symbolism which was largely lost in later Israelite and Jewish
tradition.” [39] That is, the farther back we go in time, the more uniform is the concept of the
Temple among the ancients as a whole, with everything pointing to a single tradition. Albright duly
comments on the twelve oxen as the cosmic symbol of the circle of the year and the three stages
of the great altar as representing the three worlds. [40]

The Ritual Drama

The rites of the Temple are always a repetition of those that marked its founding in the beginning
of the world, telling how it all came to be in the first place. The foundation of the sanctuary
coincides with the foundation or creation of the earth itself: “The first fixed point in the chaotic
waters . . . is the place of the sanctuary, which becomes the earthly seat of the world-order, having
its palladium in throne and altar. The foundation of the sanctuary, therefore, coincides with the
creation.”[41] After a lifetime of study Lord Raglan assures us that when we study all the rituals of
the world we come up with the discovery that the pristine and original ritual of them all, from
which all others take their rise, was the dramatization of the creation of the world.[42] And
Mowinckel sums up the common cult pattern of all the earliest civilizations: “It is the creation of
the World that is being repeated.”[43]

This creation drama was not a simple one for, as the above authorities remind us, an indispensable
part of the story is the ritual death and resurrection of the King, who represents the founder and
first parent of the race, and his ultimate triumph over death as priest and King, followed by some
form of hieros gamos or ritual marriage for the purpose of begetting the race.[44] All this has
become stock-in-trade of students of comparative religion today, but at the beginning of the
century nobody knew anything about it. We find this now familiar “Year-Drama” with its familiar
episodes wherever we turn—in the Memphite Theology of Egypt (recently held to have had great
influence on the Hebrew religion), in the well-documented Babylonian New Year’s rites, in the
great secular celebration of the Romans, in the ritual beginnings of Greek drama, in the temple-
texts of Ras Shamra, in the Celtic mythological cycles, or in the Medieval Mystery plays.[45] And if
we ask why this drama is performed, we always get the same answer, according to Mowinckel:
“Because the Divinity—the First Father of the Race—did so once in the beginning, and commanded
us to do the same.” [46]
The Temple drama is essentially a problem-play, with a combat as its central theme. The combat at
the New Year takes various mimetic forms throughout the world—games, races, sham-battles,
mummings, dances, plays, etc.—but the essential part is that the hero is temporarily beaten and
overcome by death: “The King . . . is even trampled upon by the powers of chaos, but he rises again
and puts the false king, the false Messiah, to death.” [47] This resurrection motif is absolutely
essential to the rites, the purpose of which is ultimate victory over death.

The Initiation
But the individual who toiled as a pilgrim in a weary land to reach the waters of life that flowed
from the Temple was no mere passive spectator. He came to share in all the blessings of
knowledge and regeneration. It was not just the symbolic immortality of a society that was sought,
but the personal attainment of eternal life and glory by the individual. [48] This the individual
attempted to achieve through a process of initiation. “Initiation,” writes Professor Rostovzeff, “is
notoriously a symbol of death, . . . the symbolic act of death and rebirth, resurrection.” [49] The
essence of the great rites that marked the New Year (in Israel as elsewhere the one time when all
were expected to come to the Temple) was “transition, rite de passage, succession of lives,
following the revolutions of Nature”—though it should be noted that the revolutions of nature
definitely did not furnish the original pattern for the thing. [50] The actual initiation rites have
been studied often and in detail, and found to exhibit a very clear and consistent pattern. We can
give but one illustration here, taken from a short but remarkable writing by Bishop Cyril of
Jerusalem, a particularly valuable witness, since he is the last Church Father to be in close contact
with the old Jerusalem rites.

The general impression one gets from reading the long discussions in the Talmud is that people in
the Temple at Jerusalem spent most of their time at baptisms and ablutions. Certainly baptism is
one specific ordinance always mentioned in connection with the Temple. “When one is baptised
one becomes a Christian,” writes Cyril, “exactly as in Egypt by the same rite one becomes an
Osiris.” Not only does Cyril recognize the undeniable resemblance between the Christian and non-
Christian rites, but he also notes that they have the identical significance, which is initiation into
immortality. [51] The baptism in question, Cyril explains, is rather a washing than a baptism, since
it is not by immersion. It is followed by an anointing, which our guide calls “the antitype of the
anointing of Christ himself,” making every candidate as it were a Messiah. [52] Elsewhere he
describes this rite specifically as the anointing of the brow, face, ears, nose, breast, etc., “which
represents,” he says, “the clothing of the candidate in the protective panoply of the Holy Spirit,”
which however does not hinder the initiate from receiving a real garment on the occasion. [53]
Furthermore, the candidate was reminded that the whole ordinance “is in imitation of the
sufferings of Christ,” in which “we suffer without pain by mere imitation his receiving of the nails
in his hands and feet: the antitype of Christ’s sufferings.” [54] Bishop Cyril further insists that
Moses and Solomon had both been duly baptized in this manner: “After being washed in water, he
(Moses) was anointed and called a Christ, because of the anointing which was a type. When
Solomon came forth to be king, the High Priest anointed him, after a bath in Gihon. This again was
a type. But with us these things are not a type but a reality.” [55] From his last remark it is plain
that the early Christians actually performed the rites described. The Jews once taught that when
Michael and Gabriel lead all the sinners up out of the lower world, “they will wash and anoint them,
healing them of their wounds of hell, and clothe them with beautiful pure garments and bring
them into the presence of God.” [56] These things are often referred to in the earliest Christian
writings, but were soon lost in a manner we must now describe.

Loss and Diffusion of the Temple Ordinances

No one can consider the temples and their ancient rites (at which we have merely hinted in these
pages) without asking how they came to be both so widespread and so corrupt in the world. Let us
first consider the question of corruption.

1. It can be shown that both the Jews and Christians suffered greatly at the hands of their enemies
because of the secrecy of their rites, which they steadfastly refused to discuss or divulge. [57]
When the key to the ordinances was lost, this very secrecy made for a great deal of
misunderstanding and above all opened the door to unbridled fraud: every Gnostic sect, for
example, claimed to have the lost rites and ordinances, the keys and the teachings, as they had
been given to the Apostles and Patriarchs of old. [58]

2. It is doubtful if a religious organization ever existed which did not have its splits and factions.
Now a common cause of schism, among both Jews and Christians, was the claim of a particular
group that it alone still possessed the mysteries. [59] Hence from early times many competing
versions of the true rites and ordinances have been current.

3. Even in good times, the rites like the doctrines inevitably become the object of various
conflicting schools of interpretation and become darkened and obscured as a result. Indeed, it is
now generally held that mythology is simply an attempt to explain the origin and meaning of
rituals that men no longer understand. [60] The clouding and corruption of ritual is apparent in the
oldest texts known, [61] and painfully so in Jewish and Christian literature. The Talmud tells of a
pious Jew who left Jerusalem in disgust, saying, “What answer will the Israelites give to Elijah
when he comes,” and asks why the scholars don’t agree on the rites of the Temple. [62] For in
Jewish and Christian tradition alike, it is Elijah who is to come and restore the rites of the Temple in
their purity.

4. The early Fathers had a ready explanation for any suspicious resemblances between Christian
and non-Christian practices. The former, they explained, had come down from the ancient
Hebrews and were thus really much older than their pagan counterparts, which had been
borrowed or stolen from them. Actually there is a great deal of evidence for the widespread
usurpation of the Temple rites at a very early time. One would hardly expect people to view their
own highest rites as stolen and their highest god as a usurper, yet wherever we look that is what
we find. Every major mythology tells of the great usurper who rules the world and who upon
examination turns out to be the father and founder of the race! [63]

Since we cannot here treat them individually, we must be content to note that the archetype of all
usurpers is Nimrod, who claims kingship and priesthood by right of “the cosmic garment of Adam,”
which his father Ham stole from Noah. [64] When in turn Esau, that other great hunter, by a ruse
got this garment from Nimrod, he sold it as a “birthright” to Jacob, and then tried to get it back
again “and force his way into the Temple,” according to the Leptogenesis. [65] Early Jewish and
Christian traditions report that Nimrod it was who built the Tower of Babel, the first pagan temple,
in an attempt to contact heaven; it was he who challenged the priesthood of Abraham; it was he
who built the first city, founded the first state, organized the first army, ruling the world by force;
he challenged God to an archery contest and, when he thought he had won, claimed to be no less
than God’s successor. [66] The interesting thing is that all his activities center around the Temple,
whose rites and whose priesthood he boldly attempts to seize for himself.

5. The same comparative studies that discovered the common pattern in all ancient religions—a
phenomenon now designated as “patternism”—have also demonstrated the processes of diffusion
by which that pattern was spread throughout the world—and in the process torn to shreds, of
which recognizable remnants may be found in almost any land and time. It would now appear that
the early Fathers were not far from the mark in explaining the resemblances: the rites do look alike
wherever we find them, however modern Christians may insist on denying the fact, for they all
come from a common source. [67] The business of reconstructing the original prototype from the
scattered fragments has been a long and laborious one, and it is as yet far from completed. Yet an
unmistakable pattern emerges more clearly every day. This raises the question of priority: How did
the Mormons get hold of the Temple idea?

The Question of Priority

Let the reader study some photographs of the Salt Lake Temple, a structure whose design the
Mormons believe to have been revealed to the Prophet Brigham Young. Consider how perfectly
this edifice inside and out embodies the Temple idea. The emphasis on the three levels is apparent
at once; the orientation is basic—every pioneer community, in fact, was located and oriented with
reference to the Temple as the center of Zion; the crenelated walls and buttresses are familiar
from the oldest monumental temples as “the pillars of heaven”; the series of stars, moon, and
sunstones on the buttresses indicate the levels of celestial glory; at the lowest point in the Temple
is a brazen sea on the back of twelve oxen, and there are the waters through which the dead, by
proxy, pass to eternal life, the Gates of Salvation; on the center of the west towers is the North Star
and its attendant constellation, a symbol recognized throughout human history as depicting the
center of time and the revolution of the universe; the battlements that impart a somewhat grim air
to the building signify its isolation from a hostile world; on the main tower the inscription in gold
“Holiness to the Lord” serves notice that this place is set apart from the world of mundane things,
as do the gates that shut out all but a few; yet the Temple itself is a reminder that none can receive
the highest blessings without entering its portals—so that the whole human race shall eventually
repair hither, either in the flesh or by proxy. Within the building, as many visitors have seen before
its dedication, are rooms obviously appointed for rites rehearsing the creation of the world, the fall
of man, and his final exaltation. [68]

But it is the actual work done within the Temple that most perfectly exemplifies the Temple idea.
For here all time and space come together; the barriers vanish between this world and the next;
between past, present, and future. What is bound here is bound beyond, and only here can the
gates be opened to release the dead who are awaiting the saving ordinances. Here the whole
human family meets in a common enterprise; here the records of the race are assembled as far
back in time as they go for a work performed by the present generation to assure that they and
their kindred dead shall spend the eternities together in the future. All time becomes one and the
worlds join hands in this work of love, which is no mere mechanical bookkeeping. The work of the
Temple is exciting, and through the years has been rewarded and stimulated by many marvelous
blessings and manifestations. In a very real sense all humanity participates in the same work of
salvation-for we cannot be saved without our fathers, nor they without us. It is a grandiose
concept. Here for the first time in many centuries men may behold a genuine Temple, functioning
as a Temple should—a Temple in the fullest and purest sense of the word.

Are we to believe that this uniquely perfect institution was copied from any of the thousand-and-
one battered remnants of the Temple and its ordinances that have survived in the world? The
fundamental nature and far-reaching implications of the Temple idea are just beginning to dawn
upon scholars in our own day; nothing was known about them a hundred years ago-indeed, it was
not until the end of the nineteenth century that Christian churches, in competitive zeal to return to
the ways of the Primitive Church, began to orient their buildings. [69] Throughout this brief study
we have indicated that surviving remnants of the Temple concept and rites may be found wherever
there is religion and cult in the world. It is not surprising, therefore, that merely by looking about
him one may discover all sorts of parallels to Mormon—or any other!—practices. Thousands of
American Indians and Pacific islanders, including many of the greatest chiefs and wise men, have
become Mormons in their time and engaged in the work of the Temple. They have been quick to
detect the often surprising parallels between the rites of the Temple and the traditions and
practices of their own tribes—though those have been guarded with the greatest secrecy. Far from
being disaffected by this discovery, these devoted workers have rejoiced that at last they could
understand the real meaning of what they had inherited from their fathers, corroded as it was by
time and overlaid with thick deposits of legend and folklore. Among the first to engage in the
Latter-day Temple work were many members of the Masons, a society that “is not, and does not
profess to be, a religion,” [70] but whose rites present unmistakable parallels to those of the
Temple. Yet, like the Indians, those men experienced only an expansion of understanding. [71]

So universally is religious ritual today burdened with the defects of oddness, incongruity,
quaintness, jumbled complexity, mere traditionalism, obvious faking and filling in, and contrived
and artificial explanations, including myths and allegories, frankly sensual appeal, and general
haziness and confusion, that those regrettable traits have come to be regarded as the very
essence of ritual itself. In contrast we find the Latter-day Saint rites, though full, elaborate, and
detailed, to be always perfectly lucid and meaningful, forming an organic whole that contains
nothing incongruous, redundant, or mystifying, nothing purely ornamental, arbitrary, abstruse, or
merely picturesque. No moral, allegorical, or abstruse symbolism has been read into these rites; no
scholars and poets have worked them over; no learned divines have taken the liberty to interpret
them; they have never been the subject of speculation and theory; they show no signs of invention,
evolution, or elaboration. Josiah Quincy said that the Nauvoo Temple “certainly cannot be
compared with any ecclesiastical building which may be discerned by the natural sight,” [72] and
architects have said much the same about the Salt Lake Temple. That is high, if unconscious,
tribute, advertising the clear fact that in establishing their Temples the Mormons did not adopt
traditional forms: with them the Temple and its rites are absolutely pristine. In contrast the church
and temple architecture of the world is an exotic jumble, a bewildering complex of borrowed
motifs, a persistent effort to work back through the centuries to some golden time and place when
men still had the light.

In the fourth decade of the nineteenth century the idea of the Temple suddenly emerged full-
blown in its perfection, not as a theory alone, but as a program of intense and absorbing activity
which rewarded the faithful by showing them the full scope and meaning of the Plan of Salvation.
Notes

[1] O. Marucchi, Handbuch der christlichen Archaeologie (Einsiedeln: Benzinger & Co., 1912), p. 25.

[2] On the uniqueness of the Temple, Megillo I, xi (L. I. Goldschmidt, Der Babylonische Talmud [Haag:
M. Nijhoff, 1933] III, 567f.).

[3] A very common theme. Thus Eusebius says (Eccl. Hist. X, 4, 69) that the Church is the
intellectual image of the Temple. Moses entering and leaving the Holy of Holies is for St. Gregory
“the mind as it enters and leaves a state of contemplation”; the gold on the garment of the High
Priest is the gleam of intellect, etc. (Epist. xxv, in Migne, Patrologiae Latinae 77:474, 471).

[4] St. Ambrose is a good example. See H. Leclerq, in F. Cabrol & H. Leclerq, Dictionnaire
d’Archaeologie Chretienne et de Liturgie VI, 485–88.

[5] An instructive parallel is furnished by Islam, where the Mosque follows the pattern of the
Synagogue, as Christian churches do, while the Kaaba, a wholly different institution, represents
the Temple (see below, note 24); E. Lambert, “Le Synagogue de Dura-Europos et les Origines de la
mosque,” Semitica III (1950): 67–72.

[6] St. Jerome, Epist. xlvi, in Migne, Patrol. Lat. 22:486.

[7] Thus Gregorius Nyssenus, Epist. ii, in Migne, Patrol. Graec. 46:1012, 1016.

[8] See below, note 23. When St. Helen built the great church “at the very spot of the Sepulchre” to
contain the wood of the cross, she actually called it “the New Jerusalem, in opposition to the old
one, which had been deserted,” Socrates, Eccles. Hist. I, 17.

[9] Ambrose, Epist. xx, n. 2, discussed in Migne, Patrol. Lat. 11:307f.

[10] H. Hubert, in Revue de I’Hist. des Religions, 1899, pp. 246f. St. Maximus, Homily 72, in Patrol. Lat.
57:405–6, expresses the sense of competition.

[11] The “gaping hole” (“trou beant”) is H. Leclerq’s expression, op. cit. VI, 480. On the filling in, L.
Duchesne, Origines du Culte Chretien (Paris: Fontemoing, ed., 1898), pp. 8ff.; and more recently, J.
Lechner & L. Eisenhofer, Liturgik des romischen Ritus (Freiburg: Herder, 1953), pp. 5–6, 191ff.

[12] The ardent desire to lay the ghost of the Temple once and for all is apparent in Cyprian, Adv.
Judaeos, in Patrol. Lat. 4:716f., 739, 741; Lactantius, De vera sapientia IV, xiv, ibid. 6:487; Athanasius,
De incarnat. verbi, in Patrol. Graec. 25:165; Epiphanius, Adv. haeres. 1, 2, 24, ibid., 41:392–93; Basil,
Comment, in Isaiam ii, ibid., 24:249, etc.

[13] It is rare to call a church a temple, but it causes no offense. Zeno was opposed to building
imposing churches “because such a thing is not a real temple; . . . the faithful people are the real
Temple of God” (Lib. I. Tract, iv, in Patrol. Lat. 11:356). Athanasius says the true Holy of Holies is
Heaven itself, not those “temples of churches erected by men” (Quaestiones in Epist. Pauli, in
Patrol. Graec. 28:769). Socrates reports that a pagan temple (naos) was converted into a Christian
church (Hist. Eccl. IV, 24). But the terms are used freely and interchangeably.

[14] Varro, Ling. Lat. VII, 6–9; discussed by S. Weinstock, “Templum,” in Romische Mittheilungen
XLVII (1932): 100–101. Cf. A. Jeremias, Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur (Leipzig, 1913),
pp. 146, 185.
[15] O. Richter, in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencycl. d. Altertumswissenschaft XVI, i, 563; Jeremias, loc. cit.

[16] A. Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im Lichte des Alten Orients (Leipzig, 1916), 3rd ed., pp. 49ff.

[17] Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. X, 4, 69.

[18] Ling. Lat. VII, 8.

[19] A. Jeremias, in C. De la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte (Tubingen, 1925) I, 513. The
concept is fully discussed by E. Burrows in his chapter in S. H. Hooke, ed., The Labyrinth (London:
SPCK, 1935).

[20] It should be borne in mind that ancient society was sacral in structure. One of the best
discussions of the Temple concept is by Zelia Nuttall, The Fundamental Principles of Old and New
World Civilizations (Peabody Museum Papers, vol. 2, 1901).

[21] Pesachim IV, iv (Goldschmidt, II, 512).

[22] Erubim V, i (Goldschmidt II, 186–90). “Middoth, or the Measurements of the Temple,” Palest.
Explor. Fund Quart., 1886, pp. 92ff., 224ff.; 1887, pp. 60ff., 116ff.

[23] “The Middle of the World, in the Holy Sepulchre,” Pal. Expl. Fund Quart., 1888, pp. 260ff. For
illustrations, K. J. Conant and G. Downey, “The Original Buildings at the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem,” Speculum 31 (1956): 1–48.

[24] G. E. von Grunebaum, Mohammedan Festivals (New York: Schuman, 1951), p. 20.

[25] L. Voelkl, “Orientierung im Weltbild der erster christlichen Jahrhunderte,” Rivista di Arceologia
Cristiana XXV (1949): 155.

[26] G. Contenau, Le Deluge Babylonien, etc., p. 246.

[27] A. Parrot, Ziggurats et Tour de Babel (Paris: A. Michel, 1949), p. 208.

[28] Contenau, loc. cit.

[29] H. Frankfort, Birth of Civilisation in the Near East (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), p. 56, n. 5. P.
Amiet, “Ziggurats et ‘Culte de Hauteur’ des Origines a l’Epoque d’Akkad,” Revue d’Assyriologie XLVII
(1953):23–33.

[30] A. Parrot, “La Tour de Babel et les Ziggurats,” in La Nouvelle Clio IV (1950):159; Herb. Ricke,
“Bemerkungen zur Aegyptischen Baukunst des alten Reiches,” I, in Beitr. zur Aeg. Bauforschung U.
Altertumskunde, Heft 4 (Zurich, 1944).

[31] Amiet, op. cit., p. 30; A. Parrot, Ziggurats, etc., p. 209; especially see H. J. Lenzen, Die
Entwicklung der Zikurrat von ihren Anfangen bis zur Zeit der III Dyn. von Ur (Leipzig: Harrassowitz,
1941), for the altar idea.

[32] H. Kees, Aegypten (Munich: Beck, 1933), p. 298; A. Jeremias, Handbuch, etc., pp. 33, 53, 125,
236, 343; for Israel, R. Eisler, Jesus Basileus ou Basileusas (Heidelberg, 1930), II, 670.

[33] E. Burrows, “Problems of the Abzu,” Orientalia I (1932):231–56, and in Hocke, op. cit., pp. 49ff.
The concept is very familiar to classical students, Daremberg-Saglio, Dictionnaire III, 2021f.; O.
Richter, in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencycl. XVI, i, 561–63.
[34] The classic study is Kohler’s in Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft VII (1906):215ff.; more recently
O. Cullmann, Urchristentum und Gottesdienst (Zurich: Zwingli-Ferlag, 1950), 274f.; Aug. Dell, “Mt.
16:17–19,” in Ztschr. f. NT Wiss. 15 (1914):27ff.; H. Gunkel, Zum Religionsgeschichtliche Verstandnis
des Neuen Testaments (Gottingen, 1903), p. 73, n. 7; A. Sulzbach, “Die Schlussel des
Himmelreiches,” Ztschr. f. NT Wiss. IV (1903): 190–93.

[35] A. Moret, Histoire de I’Orient (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1941) I, 218–37, 365, 377. The theme
is treated at length in Hooke, op. cit.

[36] This is strikingly depicted in John Chrysostom, Sermo post redi tum, in Patrol. Graec. 52:440.

[37] A convenient presentation of this much-treated theme is Otto Huth, Janus (Bonn, 1932),
passim.

[38] The chapter by A. R. Johnson in S. H. Hooke, Labyrinth, is devoted to this theme.

[39] W. F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1942), pp. 154–
55, 88–89, 167.

[40] W. F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1942), pp. 154–
55, 88–89, 167.

[41] A. J. Wensinck, “The Semitic New Year and the Origins of Eschatology,” in Acta Orientalia I
(1922):160.

[42] Lord Raglan, The Origins of Religion (Thinker’s Library; London: Watts, 1949), pp. 58–69.

[43] S. Mowinckel, Religion und Kultus (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck, 1953), p. 76.

[44] Hooke, op. cit., pp. 99–107; Wensinck, op. cit., pp. 160, 183; Mowinckel, op. cit., pp. 73–76

[45] T. Gaster, Thespis, Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Near East (New York: Schuman, 1950),
compares the ritual dramas of Ras Shamra, the Hittites, Egyptians, Greeks, Hebrews, English
Mummer’s plays and Christian hymns.

[46] Mowinckel, op. cit., p. 94.

[47] Wensinck, op. cit., pp. 184–85.

[48] Illustrated by the Babylonian formulae, e.g., “If he go to the house (temple) of the Seven, he
will attain perfection.” “If he go to the city of Babylon, trouble of a day, peace of a year,” etc., given
by T. G. Pinches, in Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, X, 12.

[49] M. I. Rostovzeff, Mystic Italy (New York, 1927), pp. 76–78. An initiation is “really a
preenactment of death and of the rising which it is desired should follow death,” A. P. Elkin, The
Australian Aborigines (Sydney, 1st ed.), p. 159.

[50] This important fact is emphasized by C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Literature (Rome: Pontif. Inst. Bibl.,
1949), p. 57.

[51] St. Cyril, Catechesis xxi, Mystagogica iii, in Patrol. Graec. 33:1088. J. F. Maternus, in Patrol. Lat.
12:1031, also comments on the perfect identity of Christian and Egyptian initiation rites, and
attributes it to the plagiarism of the latter.

[52] Cyril, op. cit., 1077f.

[53] Ibid., 1089; on the real garment, 1078; cf. Tertullian, De bapt., c. 13.

[54] Ibid., 1081.

[55] Ibid., 1093, 1068.

[56] R. Akiba, cited by S. A. Horodezky, in Monatsschr. f. Gesch. u. Wiss. des Judentums LXXII, 505.

[57] Thus Minucius Felix, Octavius, 9–10.

[58] H. Nibley, The World and the Prophets (Salt Lake: Deseret Book Company, 1954), pp. 59–62.

[59] This fact is noted in Theodosius, Selecta de religione decreta, in Patrol. Lat. 13:533–37.

[60] Gaster, op. cit., p. 49: “The function of Myth is to make articulate the durative significance of
the ritual.” C. Gordon, op. cit., p. 7: “As a rule, when a ritual is associated with a myth or legend, the
ritual is the older, for the myth or legend tends to be an explanation of the already existing ritual.”

[61] Even in the Pyramid Texts the “others say” formula occurs. “The two plumes on his head are
Isis and Nephthys . . . but others say that the two plumes are the two very large uraei . . . and yet
others say that the two plumes are his eyes,” etc. E. A. W. Budge, Papyrus of Ani (New York:
Putnam’s, 1913) III, plate 7, line 32.

[62] Pes. VI, iii-iv (Goldschmidt II, 573). In his famous letter to Gubbio in A.D. 416, Innocent I
complains that “when everyone feels free to observe . . . whatever practices he likes, we see
established observances and ways of celebrating of diverse nature. . . . The result is a scandal for
the people who, not knowing that the ancient traditions have been altered by human presumption,
think . . . that the Apostles established contradictory things. . . .” Patrol. Lat. 20:551f.

[63] That is why, e.g., the Priestly Corporation of Heliopolis had to sit in judgment yearly to clear
the dubious title of Pharaoh and Osiris (R. Anthes, in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 13 [1954]:49–
50, 191f.); that is why the kingly title in Mesopotamia “carried in some degree the taint of
usurpation, especially in early times” (H. Frankfort, op. cit., p. 80); and why Prometheus can call
Zeus himself a sham and a usurper (Aeschylus, Prometh. Bound, lines 937–43, 953–63); and why
Loki can alarm Othinn and the gods by threatening to reveal their secret-that they are frauds
(Poetic Edda, Lokasenna).

[64] For a preliminary account see H. Nibley, Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites (Salt
Lake: Bookcraft, 1952), pp. 160–64. “Cosmic garment” is the designation of A. Jeremias, Das Alte
Testament, etc., p. 159.

[65] Quoted in R. Eisler, op. cit., I, 525; cf. Book of Jasher XXVII, 2, 7, 10; VII, 24–27.

[66] H. Nibley, in Western Political Quarterly II (1949):339ff.

[67] From the first the emergence of the pattern has alarmed Catholic divines, whose explanation
of the widespread uniformities of ritual and liturgy has been that they exist only in the
imaginations of scholars. Thus W. Paulus, “Marduk Urtyp Christ?” Orientalia, no. 29 (1928); J. de
Fraine, “Les Implications du ‘patternism,’” Biblica 38 (1956):59–73. While the ancients freely
admitted the parallels and explained them as borrowings by the heathen from remnants of earlier
dispensations of the gospel, the modern Catholic church, denying all dispensations but one,
ignore the teachings of the Fathers and leave “patternism” unexplained.

[68] For the most recent illustrations, see Improvement Era 59 (April 1956):228ff.
[69] L. Voelkl, in Riv. Arch. Crist. 25 (1949):155. How little aware even scholars are of the Temple
concept in our own day is apparent from Brother S. B. Sperry’s “Thoughts on Ancient Temples and
Their Functions,” Improvement Era 58 (1955):814ff. If a modern Mormon student knows so little of
the ideas here discussed, what are the chances of the Elders of over a hundred years ago knowing
anything at all about them?

[70] E. L. Hawkins, in Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, VI, 120.

[71] Hawkins, loc. cit., describes Freemasonry as “a peculiar system of morality, veiled in allegory
and illustrated by symbols.” Pending the exhaustive study that the subject deserves, we will only
say here that an extensive reading of Masonic and Mormon teachings and history should make it
clear to any reader that the former is the shadow, the latter the substance. The one is literal, the
other allegorical.

[72] J. Quincy, Figures of the Past (Boston: Little, Brown, 1901), p. 389.