One of the chief negotiators of the Oslo accords, Saeb Erekat, states bluntly the current position of the Palestinian Authority: �For Islam, there was never a Jewish temple at Al Quds [Jerusalem].�1 This is one of the reasons why the Palestinians wouldn�t accept a compromise about Jerusalem during the Camp David negotiations. I was floored when I read this. What a whopper!
To say that there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem is a breathtaking revision of the past. It means that the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity are a pack of lies, since the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament have abundant descriptions and testimony about the Jerusalem Temple�built by Solomon, restored by various Israelite kings, sermonized at by Jeremiah and other prophets, destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and rebuilt by the Jewish returnees from the Babylonian Exile. In the New Testament, Jesus visits the Temple precincts, overturns the tables of the moneychangers and predicts the Temple�s destruction. According to Erekat�s claim, all this is false, and so too the abundant testimony outside of the Bible, including Iron Age inscriptions referring to the �Temple of Yahweh,� Josephus�s detailed description of the Temple, the briefer accounts of Tacitus and other Roman historians, the picture of the Jerusalem Temple on coins of the Second Jewish Revolt, and more.
But, perhaps unacknowledged by the revisers of history, according to this position not only is the Bible a lie, but so is the Quran, the sacred scripture of Islam, and so are the authoritative Islamic commentaries on the Quran.
The current issue also has lots of other goodies, including an article by William H. C. Propp on Who Wrote Second Isaiah? and a review by Sidine White Crawford of James C. VanderKam and Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Go check it out.
UPDATE: Mark Goodacre comments on the issue.
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