The Temple as national bank

I am not in communion with Laurent Guyénot. Honestly? I worry about him this year. But last year he did pretty well with Hitler (despite himself) and better with Robespierre (before botching the sequel). I owed to myself a look at his Vridar-esque "take" on the Second Temple and Christian origins. I'll start with Kapital.

After Herod's death, the Jews didn't own a state; they lived in Rome's Judaean Province. Yes yes, technically Herodians had Damascus; but that city has since the Late Bronze Age been an Aramaean city, and the goddess of its main Temple - now identified with Greek Leto - was very much active over the whole first century. (This Temple is a mosque today... sort of. The Assads maintain it as a common shrine to Yohanan Baptiser, also for Christians and presumably for Mandaeans. You know who isn't welcome there? Jews, that's who.)

I used to say the core question internal to al-Islâm isn't "Church And State" so much as "Mosque And Army". For first-century Judaism, Guyénot moots whether the issue was Temple And Bank. And no, we are not channelling Marx ... this time. (Much less Weingarten.) This is basic Iron-Age economics (apparently still a novelty in 2014 but not now).

If a Jew wanted a loan in Judaea, to serve a Jewish cause, he (or she) would prefer to borrow from a Jew. Say you wanted to open a synagogue. Say you just wanted an aqueduct for your suburb of Hebron. No Greek or Roman would lend to you. A Jew might. But the Jew in Hebron might not have the full means to fund your project. For some Jewish projects you needed real sheqels. You needed Sadducee sheqels.

Jews out in Hebron might not have wholly understood the justice in the system. They just knew they were paying taxes and not getting a say in where those taxes went; they were paying interest on loans, to people of Jewish culture yes, but ... focus on that "-ish". The Sadducees, as Sigmund Freud famously pointed out, were tribally Levites, not B'nai Jehudah. They were culturally at least as much Egyptian as Canaanite. You couldn't even raise the issue in Roman Judaea; Jerusalem wealth was backed, ultimately, by Roman swords. The same issues were raised under the Seleucids and, one suspects, the Persians.

This, then, marks the context for the apocalyptic preachers. In Hebron, or in the Galilee for that matter, a rural Jew might preach the evangel from Isaiah 58-61, to overthrow the Romans and to nullify the Temple debts. Another, more urban Jew, if he had some Romans' ears, might - more humbly - preach to overthrow the Sadducees only; with the same end goal. Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson propose two phases in the same Jew's career which is what we read from Saint Mark.