The medieval philosopher Maimonides was truly a great philosopher as well as a Jewish theologian.  He is sufficiently so, that he deserves a listen, even from Christians who will probably reject some but not all of his philosophical speculations.

However, Maimonides is a mere man.  He does not speak under the power of inspiration of God.  Therefore, we can read what he wrote for what it is worth.  As a Christian, I do not have to provide a Christian “answer” to what a Jewish philosopher says.

Having said that, I find myself mostly disagreeing with Maimonides, but also finding his proposal not completely bogus.  Let me explain.  First of all, Maimonides is a philosopher/teacher/Rabbi.  He lived in a time more than 11 centuries after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.  By his lifetime, priestly sacrifice had been discontinued for well over one thousand years.  As a Jew, he positively HAD to explain why YHWH had brought temple worship forcibly to an end.  By the twelfth century, the Dome of the Rock–a Muslim mosque had been built on the site for nearly five hundred years!  For this reason, when Maimonides provides an explanation of why temple worship had ceased, I find myself extremely skeptical of his solution to the problem–one which he, as a Jew who rejected the work of Christ (which brought to an end the need for such a temple Hebrews 8:13), had no choice but to produce.

I do not agree that God provided temple worship to the Jews as a means to gradually “fade out” temple worship, but there may be just a grain of truth in what Maimonides proposes.  What I mean is this.  When God gave his Law to Moses and to the people on Mt. Sinai, he most likely accommodated his law to a thing which the Jews could understand.   The idea of a temple, of a blood sacrifice, and of such a sacrifice producing some sort of favor from the gods was a concept familiar to the Jews.  Is it possible that, when God provided a Law as a means to prepare the way for the eventual perfect sacrifice of Jesus, he chose to use physical means which were at least somewhat familiar to the Jews as a physical means to express an inner, spiritual reality?   Is it so crazy that he would explain to the Jews the idea of atoning sacrifice, of repentance, of justification and holiness through the use of worship at a temple?  I think not.

For this reason, I find a strand of reasonable thinking in what Maimonides said.  I see some wisdom in the proposal that God began to explain himself, first through a physical means which they were able to understand, and then later through a more spiritual and less visible means, such as that provided in the New Covenant and in the New Testament.  In fact, I find Maimonides’ ideas more conducive to the Christian idea about God than one which only sees God through the Old Testament.

I hope that my cautious acceptance of some of the concepts of Maimonides is not confusing or troubling to you.  I hope, instead, that it has been helpful.  In summary, I do not fully agree with Maimonides here.  God did not simply “incorporate” pagan practices into Jewish religion, but I believe that God may have accommodated a general idea from the ancient world and used it for his own purposes to explain to the Jews and to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah–Jesus Christ.

John Oakes