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It is a commonplace of ancient Near Eastern worldviews that temples have cosmic significance. This understanding persists and develops in the Second Temple period, with numerous texts witnessing to a widely held belief that the Jerusalem temple reflected heaven or the universe. Scholars have largely been content either to recognize a basic relationship, or to distinguish temple-in-heaven from temple-as-universe, sometimes construing the former as "apocalyptic" and the latter as "Hellenistic." Jonathan Klawans' work represents an important articulation of this distinction. This article summarizes his contribution, and critiques it on the grounds that it remains overly dichotomous and does not do full justice to the evidence. Instead, a fresh taxonomy is proposed with four key categories, each illustrated from Second Temple and biblical texts. None of these categories is discrete; rather they demarcate a spectrum or scale of ways that ancient Jewish and early Christian writers conceptualized the heaven–temple relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous scholars have argued that in Luke-Acts the location of sacred space or divine presence passes from the Jerusalem temple to Jesus, Christian believers, or both; in Acts, this transfer is understood as integral to the universal mission. The present article argues that such studies overlook the important motif of heaven as temple, which plays a role in Jesus' trial and crucifixion and the Stephen and Cornelius episodes. Using Edward Soja's spatial theory, previous studies' binary categorisation of temple space is critiqued. The heavenly temple disrupts and reconstitutes understandings of sacred space, and thus undergirds the universal spread of the Way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]