The Hidden Assumption Behind Future Sacrifices (Part 3): If Temple Sacrifices Remain Valid, Why Did God End Them?
In Part 1, I argued that D. Thomas Lancaster’s case for the continuing validity of the Aaronic priesthood ultimately depends upon his protos/deuteros framework. According to Lancaster, the protos refers to this present world and the Levitical order, while the deuteros refers to the World to Come and Messiah’s priesthood. My concern was that Hebrews 8 never explicitly establishes those categories. Rather, they appear to function as an interpretive framework brought to the text rather than derived from it.
In Part 2, we turned to Hebrews 9, the central passage upon which Lancaster builds his argument. There I argued that the author’s focus remains on the covenantal contrast between the old and new covenant administrations rather than on a symbolic map of two cosmic ages. While Hebrews acknowledges that the Levitical sacrifices genuinely sanctified for the purification of the flesh, the argument ultimately moves toward the superiority and sufficiency of Christ’s priestly work. The question is not whether the Levitical system possessed real efficacy, but whether Hebrews presents it as an ongoing covenantal means of access to God alongside the priesthood of Christ.
We now come to Hebrews 13, where the implications of the discussion become even more concrete. Here the author exhorts his readers to go to Jesus “outside the camp” and reminds them that “we have an altar” from which those serving the tabernacle have no right to eat. These statements raise an important question: does Hebrews envision two parallel systems operating side by side, or does it call believers to identify exclusively with the crucified and exalted Messiah? It is to that question that we now turn.
What does this mean for Jerusalem Temple?
Hebrews 13:9–14 (Hebrews, 263–272) is one of the weakest places for Lancaster’s protos/deuteros framework. Throughout his argument, Lancaster tries to maintain that the Levitical priesthood and the greater priesthood of Christ operate side by side in different spheres (267). But when we come to the end of Hebrews, the author seems to press the audience toward a much sharper contrast.
The key text is Hebrews 13:10: “We have an altar from which those who worship at the tabernacle do not have a right to eat.” That is not the language of two parallel systems peacefully operating alongside one another. It is the language of exclusion and contrast. The author first warns his readers not to be led away by strange teachings related to foods. Then he says, “We have an altar.” In other words, the place of true access to God is now found in Christ. Those who continue to officiate in the tent do not have the right to eat from this altar.
This is precisely where Lancaster’s framework struggles. Hebrews 13 is calling the readers to make a choice. Christ suffered outside the gate; therefore, they are called to go to him outside the camp and bear his reproach. The movement is away from the existing cultus and toward Christ. Lancaster attempts to avoid this conclusion by warning against reading the Eucharist as a replacement for Levitical sacrifices (which, I think, is a misguided move in Lancaster’s exegesis, as he is anachronistically importing later Eucharistic/sacramental debates into Hebrews 13) (268). But that is not the immediate issue. The question is whether Hebrews contrasts the altar believers now have in Christ with the altar associated with those who continue serving the tent. On that point, the text appears quite clear.
P. W. L. Walker’s reading of Hebrews 13 is quite instructive as it maintains the contextual boundaries of the immediate issues of the audience, rather than a protos/deuteros framework Lancaster is forced to maintain. Walker argues that Hebrews 13 refers to those currently involved with the Jerusalem Temple, “the adherents of that old cultus,”¹ and that the contrast was not an abstract theological idea but a live and costly issue for the readers. He further argues that “Jesus had inaugurated a new temple system, symbolized by the term ‘altar,’ which stood in stark contrast to the temple system associated with the ‘tent’.”² The two systems were mutually exclusive, not a parallel system of worship.
That reading seems to account for the force of Hebrews 13 better than Lancaster’s. Therefore, the issue at hand was not about the danger of losing access to the Temple, as Lancaster claims (269). The author does not tell his readers to maintain loyalty to both the earthly altar and Christ’s altar. He tells them to go to Christ outside the camp. The contrast is horizontal and concrete: remain centered on the Temple or go to Jesus outside the gate. Lancaster interprets the exhortation to “go to him outside the camp” as a call to accept expulsion from the Temple and exclusion from its privileges (270). While that reconstruction is possible, it goes beyond the explicit claims of the text. Hebrews speaks of reproach, suffering, and identification with Jesus outside the camp, but it never explicitly states that the readers were facing expulsion from the Temple. The distinction is important because the former is textual while the latter is inferential.
Apostolic Temple Participation and the Question of Continuity
Lancaster, in his book Sacrifices,³ addresses three difficulties with canceling sacrifices. Difficulty two is pertinent to our discussion, in that he argues that the Apostolic participation in Temple sacrifices is a strong testimony to their ongoing validity. I will grant that this argument has a surface-level strength. However, his argument is not primarily exegetical at this point but historical. He contends that if Christ’s death truly rendered the Temple, priesthood, and sacrifices obsolete, the earliest disciples apparently never understood that to be the case.
Beginning with Jesus himself, Lancaster observes that Jesus consistently honored the Temple throughout his earthly ministry. He called it “my Father’s house” (Luke 2:49; John 2:16), regularly taught within its courts, attended its festivals, and zealously defended its sanctity by driving out the money changers. Even his prophecy of the Temple’s destruction was accompanied by sorrow rather than celebration. For Lancaster, this demonstrates that Jesus never treated the Temple as an institution whose theological significance had already expired (Sacrifices, 34).
The same pattern, he argues, continues in the apostolic community. After the ascension, the disciples “were continually in the temple blessing God” (Luke 24:53). Throughout Acts they gathered daily in the Temple, attended the stated hours of prayer, taught in Solomon’s Portico, and persisted in preaching there despite official opposition. Lancaster therefore concludes that “The Temple became the locus of the apostolic community.” Rather than distancing themselves from Temple worship, the earliest believers centered their communal life around it (Sacrifices, 34–35).
Lancaster next argues that even Stephen should not be understood as opposing the Temple. The accusations that Stephen spoke against Moses and the Temple, he notes, are explicitly identified in Acts as false testimony. Stephen’s speech, in Lancaster’s reading, functions as a defense of the Temple’s divine origin while simultaneously exposing Israel’s historical pattern of rejecting God’s appointed deliverers. Thus, Stephen’s martyrdom cannot be used as evidence that the earliest believers regarded the Temple itself as obsolete (Sacrifices, 35).
Building on this, Lancaster characterizes the Jerusalem church as essentially a “Temple sect.” The believers did not establish a separate religious institution but continued to assemble in the Temple precincts. He even suggests that the designation ekklesia (“assembly”) may have arisen from the Temple gathering itself. Their communal lifestyle, he argues, reflected a desire to remain in Jerusalem because the Temple remained the center of worship and apostolic instruction. As he summarizes, “The Temple drew the apostolic community together. The believers were a Temple sect” (Sacrifices, 36).
The strongest component of Lancaster’s historical argument concerns the continued offering of sacrifices. He argues that Acts presents this as entirely unremarkable. “Not only did the believers congregate in the Temple and participate in the prayer services at the times of sacrifice,” he writes, “but they also continued to bring sacrifices.” Paul himself traveled to Jerusalem “to present offerings” (Acts 24:17), participated in Nazirite purification rites, and even financed the sacrifices of four additional Nazirites (Acts 21:23–26). James and the Jerusalem elders encouraged this participation specifically to demonstrate that Paul continued “living in observance of the law” (Acts 21:24). According to Lancaster, Luke narrates these events “matter-of-factly as if believers offering sacrifices in the Temple was nothing unusual” (Sacrifices, 37).
From this evidence Lancaster draws a broader theological conclusion. If Christ’s death had truly abolished the Levitical worship system, he argues, the apostles themselves appear not to have understood it. He asks, “If the death and resurrection of the Messiah had canceled the Levitical worship system, why did the apostolic community still engage in that worship system? Why did Paul bring sacrifices? Why did the apostles continue to assemble in the Temple?” These questions form one of the principal historical pillars supporting his broader contention that the Temple, priesthood, and sacrifices retained continuing covenantal validity even after Christ’s death and resurrection (Sacrifices, 38). The question, however, is whether apostolic participation actually proves the continuing validity of the Levitical system.
Does Apostolic Participation Prove Covenant Validity?
Below I will argue that a redemptive-historical transition better accounts for the Apostolic participation in Temple sacrifices. Although Lancaster’s appeal to Acts deserves careful consideration, it is important to recognize what the book actually says. Acts consistently portrays the apostles maintaining a significant presence in the Jerusalem Temple after Christ’s resurrection. They gathered there daily (Acts 2:46), attended the appointed hours of prayer (Acts 3:1), taught publicly in Solomon’s Portico (Acts 3:11; 5:12), and continued proclaiming the gospel in the Temple despite official opposition (Acts 5:20–21, 42). These passages establish the Temple as the primary setting for apostolic worship, prayer, and evangelism during the church’s earliest years.
Only later does Acts explicitly mention sacrificial activity, namely Paul’s participation in the Nazirite purification rites (Acts 21:23–26) and his statement that he came to Jerusalem “to present offerings” (Acts 24:17). Lancaster rightly observes that the Greek word prosphora (“offerings”) ordinarily refers to sacrificial offerings. The question, however, is what that participation signifies. Lancaster concludes that it demonstrates the continuing covenantal validity of the Levitical system, but that conclusion does not necessarily follow. One might infer that Temple participation ordinarily included sacrifices, yet that remains an argument from silence, and the burden rests on Lancaster to show that Acts intends its readers to draw that theological conclusion. A redemptive-historical reading better explains the evidence: the apostles continued participating in the Temple during a period of covenantal transition, not because the Levitical system remained an enduring means of access to God, but because the old covenant order had not yet reached its appointed end.
The New Testament consistently presents the apostolic age as a period of covenantal transition. Jesus repeatedly prepared his disciples for the passing of the old order (Matt. 21:33–46; 23:37–39; 24:1–2), while Hebrews describes the first covenant as “becoming obsolete and growing old” and “ready to vanish away” (Heb. 8:13). Likewise, Paul directs believers to identify not with the earthly Jerusalem but with “the Jerusalem above,” the heavenly city that belongs to the new covenant (Gal. 4:26). John later describes his own generation as living in “the last hour” (1 John 2:18), language that reflects the closing of one covenantal administration and the establishment of another. The same trajectory reaches its climax in Revelation 21, where John’s vision, drawing on Ezekiel’s temple imagery (Ezek. 40–48), presents the eschatological New Jerusalem as a city with no temple, “because the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev. 21:22).
Within that historical setting, continued Temple participation should not be surprising. Throughout Acts, the apostles preached Christ in the very place where Israel gathered. If they were to obey Christ’s command to be his witnesses, not only to the ends of the earth, but also in Jerusalem (Acts 1:8), then, “some Christians at least needed to stay in Jerusalem and maintain their involvement with the Temple.”⁴ They attended the hours of prayer (Acts 3:1), taught daily in Solomon’s Portico (Acts 3:11; 5:12), and continued proclaiming the gospel in the Temple despite opposition (Acts 5:20–21, 42). The Temple remained the natural place to confront Israel with the claim that Jesus was her promised Messiah.
This also explains Paul’s own conduct. His missionary principle was, “To the Jews I became as a Jew… I have become all things to all people, so that I may by every possible means save some” (1 Cor. 9:20–22).⁵ Likewise, he tells us that he hoped through his ministry “to make my own people jealous, and thus save some of them” (Rom. 11:13–14). As Walker observes,
In Christ, [Paul] had argued, there was no distinction between ‘Jew and Greek’ (Gal. 3:28) and the ‘dividing wall of hostility’ had been broken down (Eph 2:14). But the very structure of the Jerusalem Temple militated against this truth. It embodied and proclaimed something which Paul believed no longer truly pertained in God’s purposes. There was something bitterly ironic in Paul’s being arrested on a charge of bringing a Gentile into the Court of Israel (Acts 21:28)—something which he had not done, but which strictly would have been the logical outworking of his theological position.⁶
Walker not only acknowledges Paul’s continued Temple participation but also provides a redemptive-historical explanation for it. Rather than treating Temple participation as evidence of the continuing covenantal validity of the Levitical system, he understands it within the missionary context of the apostolic witness to Israel.
Richard Bauckham elaborates on the disastrous failure when Paul attempts to demonstrate his loyalty to common Judaism by taking part in temple rituals, in that “the visiting Jews from Ephesus make a natural mistake (Acts 21:27–29).”⁷ Paul’s opponents, Bauckham argues, misunderstood the implications of his gospel. Because Paul insisted that Gentiles were included in God’s covenant people “as Gentiles, without becoming Jews,” they naturally assumed that this meant Gentiles should also be admitted into the Jerusalem Temple. Thus, they “jump to the conclusion that Paul actually has defiled the sanctity of the temple by taking Trophimus the Ephesian into the court of the Israelites” (cf. Acts 21).⁸ Bauckham, however, contends that Paul’s theology pointed in a different direction. Gentile inclusion did not require access to the earthly Temple because “the eschatological covenant people had its own new temple, the community itself, in which Gentiles could have access to God equally with Jews.”⁹ He notes that this understanding becomes explicit in Ephesians 2:11–22 and 1 Peter 2:4–10, where the church is portrayed as God’s new temple. Paul’s participation in Temple rites, therefore, need not be understood as evidence that he regarded the Levitical system as a continuing covenantal means of access to God. Rather, it reflects his consistent missionary strategy of removing unnecessary barriers while calling Israel to recognize that her Messiah had come.
The larger trajectory of the New Testament points in the same direction. Rather than perpetuating the Temple as the permanent center of God’s redemptive work, the apostles increasingly apply Temple, priesthood, and sacrificial imagery to Christ and his people. Believers become “a holy priesthood” (1 Pet. 2:5), the church becomes “the temple of God” (1 Cor. 3:16–17; Eph. 2:19–22), and Christ himself is presented as the once-for-all sacrifice and great high priest who ministers in the heavenly sanctuary (Heb. 9–10). The language of continuity is therefore accompanied by a profound transformation. The old covenant institutions were not abandoned arbitrarily, but fulfilled in the person and work of Christ.
To restate what’s been argued above, apostolic participation in the Temple does not by itself establish the continuing covenantal validity of the Levitical system. It is equally, and I would argue better, explained as the activity of the apostles during a unique redemptive-historical transition in which the gospel was first proclaimed to Israel before the old covenant order reached its divinely appointed conclusion. Furthermore, it is quite telling of this divine-appointed conclusion that “Nowhere in early Christian literature is there any trace of an expectation of an eschatological temple still to come in the future: this common Jewish expectation was evidently replaced from the beginning of Christianity by the belief that the community itself was the eschatological place of God’s presence.”10 In other words, the earliest Christian writers interpreted the Temple’s significance not as something awaiting future restoration, but as something fulfilled in Christ and his covenant people. In conclusion, the historical evidence, therefore, is entirely compatible with temporary Temple participation during the apostolic period without requiring the conclusion that the Levitical system remained an enduring covenantal means of access to God.
Concluding Thoughts
Taken together, these three studies suggest that the primary question is not whether the Levitical sacrifices once possessed genuine covenantal efficacy. Hebrews itself affirms that they did. Nor is the question whether the apostles continued participating in the Temple for a time. Acts plainly records that they did. The real question is whether the New Testament presents those institutions as continuing covenantal means of access to God after the priestly work of Christ.
I have argued that it does not. Rather than depicting two priestly systems operating indefinitely side by side, Hebrews consistently moves the reader toward the superiority, finality, and exclusivity of Christ’s priesthood. The old covenant is described as becoming obsolete and nearing its appointed end (Heb. 8:13); the earthly sanctuary gives way to the heavenly reality (Heb. 9); and believers are ultimately called to leave the old cultus and go to Christ “outside the camp” (Heb. 13:13). Likewise, the broader witness of the New Testament increasingly identifies Christ and his people—not the Jerusalem Temple—as the dwelling place of God, the true priesthood, and the locus of acceptable worship.
For that reason, I remain unconvinced that Lancaster’s appeal to apostolic Temple participation or his protos/deuteros framework establishes the continuing covenantal validity of the Levitical priesthood. His proposal is thoughtful and internally coherent, but it depends upon theological categories that, in my judgment, Hebrews itself never explicitly develops. A covenantal, redemptive-historical reading better accounts for both the argument of Hebrews and the trajectory of the New Testament as a whole.
Romans 11:33
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1. Peter W. L. Walker, Jesus and the Holy City: New Testament Perspectives on Jerusalem (Eerdmans, 1996), 206.
2. Walker, Jesus and the Holy City, 206.
3. D. Thomas Lancaster, Sacrifices from a Messianic Jewish Perspective, 2nd ed., What About? (First Fruits of Zion, 2024), 31–40.
4. Walker, Jesus and the Holy City, 299.
5. Richard Bauckham, “The Parting of the Ways: What Happened and Why,” Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology 47.1 (1993): 145, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393389308600139, writes, “Paul did not actually oppose participation in temple worship, while his principle of becoming as a Jew in order to win Jews (1 Cor 9:20) makes his behaviour according to Acts 21:26 entirely credible.”
6. Walker, Jesus and the Holy City, 300.
7. Bauckham, “The Parting of the Ways,” 146.
8. Bauckham, “The Parting of the Ways,” 146.
9. Bauckham, “The Parting of the Ways,” 147.
10. Bauckham, “The Parting of the Ways,” 144.
11. Israel Perkins Warren, The Parousia: A Critical Study of the Scripture Doctrines of Christ’s Second Coming (Hoyt, Fogg & Donham, 1879), 109–11.
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