Part of Jesus’ charge against his fellow-Jews was that Israel as a whole had used its vocation, to be the light of the world, as an excuse for a hard, narrow, nationalist piety and politics in which the rest of the world was to be, not enlightened, but condemned. We can see something of this attitude both in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the tendency to violent revolution throughout the period in which Jesus lived. The Temple had been intended to symbolize God’s dwelling with Israel for the sake of