Did the Jewish Talmud unintentionally preserve a memory that points toward the death and Messiahship of Jesus Christ?
It does not “prove” Christianity by itself. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled centuries after the destruction of the Temple, and its traditions must be read with historical care.
But what it preserves is nevertheless remarkable.
The tractate Yoma 39b says that during the approximately forty years before the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70, several signs connected with the Temple ceased to occur as they had before.
The lot for the Lord ceased consistently appearing in the high priest’s right hand.
The crimson-colored strip ceased turning white.
The western lamp ceased burning continuously.
The Temple doors even began opening of themselves.
—Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 39b
Forty years before AD 70 brings us to roughly AD 30—within the historical period in which Jesus Christ was crucified.
That does not mean the rabbis who preserved these traditions were secretly confessing Jesus.
But for a Christian reading them in the light of the Gospel, the timing is difficult not to contemplate.
Because at approximately that same point in history, something happened outside the walls of Jerusalem that Christians believe changed the meaning of sacrifice forever.
The true High Priest offered the true sacrifice.
Not another goat.
Not another lamb.
Not the blood of another animal.
He offered Himself.
“But Christ, being come an high priest of the good things to come… by his own blood, entered once into the holies, having obtained eternal redemption.”
—Hebrews 9:11–12, Douay-Rheims
For centuries, the Temple had proclaimed through signs what mankind needed:
atonement,
purification,
sacrifice,
blood,
a priest,
and reconciliation with God.
Then Christ came.
And the shadow encountered the Reality.
THE CRIMSON THREAD
The detail concerning the scarlet thread is especially haunting when placed beside Scripture.
Isaiah had written:
“If your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow.”
—Isaiah 1:18
The Day of Atonement dramatized Israel’s need for cleansing.
But Hebrews tells us that the sacrifices of the Old Law could never, by themselves, accomplish the definitive purification toward which they pointed:
“For it is impossible that with the blood of oxen and goats sin should be taken away.”
—Hebrews 10:4
Then comes Christ.
“For by one oblation he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.”
—Hebrews 10:14
If the tradition preserved in Yoma remembers a change in the Temple’s signs beginning around the time of Christ’s death, the Christian cannot help hearing an echo:
What if the sign ceased because the thing signified had come?
What if the shadow was fading because the substance had appeared?
What if Heaven was directing mankind away from repeated animal sacrifice toward the one sacrifice capable of reconciling man to God?
John the Baptist had already identified Him:
“Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sin of the world.”
—John 1:29
“HATRED WITHOUT CAUSE”
There is another remarkable connection.
The Talmud asks why the Second Temple was destroyed and answers that although the people engaged in Torah, commandments, and acts of charity, there existed among them baseless hatred.
—Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 9b
Again, Christianity should not turn this into an accusation against the Jewish people. Christ Himself was Jewish. The Blessed Virgin was Jewish. The Apostles were Jewish. The first Christians were Jews.
And Saint Paul explicitly warns Gentile Christians:
“Boast not against the branches.”
—Romans 11:18
But the phrase “hatred without cause” carries an unmistakable biblical resonance.
The Psalms speak of the righteous sufferer surrounded by those who hate him unjustly:
“They that hate me without cause are multiplied.”
—Psalm 35:19
And:
“They are multiplied above the hairs of my head, who hate me without cause.”
—Psalm 68:5
Christ Himself applies this prophetic pattern to His rejection:
“They hated me without cause.”
—John 15:25
Then He stands before Jerusalem and weeps.
Not with hatred.
Not with vengeance.
With grief.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee…”
—Matthew 23:37
And as He approaches the city:
“Seeing the city, he wept over it.”
—Luke 19:41
Jesus then foretells its devastation because it had not recognized “the time of thy visitation.”
—Luke 19:44
Within a generation, Jerusalem would be surrounded by Roman armies.
In AD 70, the Temple was destroyed.
And it has never again become the center of animal sacrifice prescribed by the Mosaic covenant.
BUT THEN SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENED TO ROME
This is where the story becomes even deeper.
The Roman Empire destroyed Jerusalem.
Rome crucified Jesus.
Roman authority nailed the Messiah to a Roman cross.
Roman power later shed the blood of Peter and Paul.
And yet Christianity did not die.
Rome was conquered by the men Rome killed.
Not by armies.
Not by rebellion.
Not by swords.
By testimony.
By martyrdom.
By the Cross.
The capital of the pagan empire gradually became the city associated above all others with the Apostolic See of Peter.
The place that once displayed crucified men as warnings eventually lifted the Cross above its churches.
The city that executed Saint Peter came to venerate his tomb.
The city in which Saint Paul shed his blood preserved his memory as an Apostle.
Saint Irenaeus, writing in the second century, pointed Christians toward the Church at Rome and its apostolic succession from Peter and Paul as a powerful witness to the preservation of apostolic faith.
—St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.3.2
But we must say this carefully:
Rome did not replace Israel.
The Catholic faith does not permit Gentile triumphalism.
Saint Paul wrote his great teaching concerning Israel to Christians living precisely in Rome.
And what did he tell them?
Remember where you came from.
You are not the root.
You were grafted into it.
“Thou, being a wild olive, art ingrafted in them, and art made partaker of the root and of the fatness of the olive tree: boast not against the branches.”
—Romans 11:17–18
That is astonishing.
Christian Rome can never look back upon Jerusalem with contempt.
Because the Messiah whom Rome worships is the Son of David.
The Scriptures Rome reads came through Israel.
The Mother of God was a daughter of Israel.
The Apostles were sons of Israel.
The Eucharistic words spoken in Rome came from a Jewish Messiah celebrating Passover with Jewish disciples in Jerusalem.
And Saint Paul declares concerning Israel:
“According to the election, they are most dear for the sake of the fathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance.”
—Romans 11:28–29
So the movement from Jerusalem to Rome is not the story of one race defeating another.
It is the story of the promises given to Israel overflowing to the nations through Israel’s Messiah.
JERUSALEM WAS THE BEGINNING. ROME BECAME THE CROSSROADS.
Before His Ascension, Christ told the Apostles that they would be His witnesses:
“In Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth.”
—Acts 1:8
Notice the movement.
Jerusalem outward.
And the Book of Acts, which begins in Jerusalem, ends with Saint Paul preaching Jesus Christ in Rome.
—Acts 28:30–31
That literary movement is extraordinary.
The Gospel begins among the people to whom the promises were given.
Then it travels outward.
Jerusalem.
Judea.
Samaria.
Asia Minor.
Greece.
And finally:
Rome.
The city that represented worldly empire becomes a pulpit for the Kingdom of God.
Caesar claims lordship.
The Apostles proclaim:
Jesus is Lord.
Rome boasts in military conquest.
Christ conquers Rome through martyrs who refuse to kill their persecutors.
Rome glorifies earthly power.
Christ places at the center of history a throne made of wood upon which the King reigns with pierced hands.
AND HERE THE LETTER TO THE ROMANS BECOMES PROPHETICALLY BEAUTIFUL
Saint Paul writes to the Christians of Rome:
“So we being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.”
—Romans 12:5
There is the true transformation.
Rome itself is not literally the whole Mystical Body of Christ.
The Church is the Body of Christ.
—Romans 12:4–5; 1 Corinthians 12:12–27; Colossians 1:18; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 787–795
But the Church of Rome became, through the ministry of Peter and his successors, a visible center of ecclesial communion.
Christ had said to Peter:
“Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
—Matthew 16:18
And the Church teaches that the Bishop of Rome, successor of Saint Peter, possesses a unique ministry of unity within the universal Church.
—CCC 880–882
Think about the divine irony.
The empire crucified Peter.
Yet Peter’s chair outlived the emperors.
The Caesars are gone.
Peter’s confession remains:
“Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God.”
—Matthew 16:16
The Roman Empire once tried to extinguish Christianity.
Instead, Rome became inseparably associated with the visible unity of the Catholic Church.
ROME AND THE CITY OF GOD
But there is an even deeper mystery.
Catholic theology does not simply identify earthly Rome with the City of God.
Saint Augustine makes the distinction profoundly clear in The City of God.
There is an earthly city built upon disordered love of self.
And there is the City of God, formed by the love of God and ordered toward eternal communion with Him.
—St. Augustine, The City of God, XIV.28
The City of God cannot finally be identified with Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, New York, or any earthly political order.
Its final manifestation is the heavenly Jerusalem:
“And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”
—Apocalypse 21:2
So perhaps the mystery is better expressed this way:
The City of God did not become Rome.
Rome was conquered by the Cross and made to serve the pilgrim City of God.
The city of Caesar became the city where the successor of the fisherman Peter would serve the communion of the Church.
The capital of an empire became a witness to a Kingdom not of this world.
—John 18:36
And the instrument by which Rome once terrorized its enemies—
the Cross—
became the sign Rome herself would eventually raise toward heaven.
FROM THE TEMPLE TO THE BODY
This brings us back to Jerusalem.
Jesus had spoken words that sounded impossible:
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
—John 2:19
Saint John immediately explains:
“But he spoke of the temple of his body.”
—John 2:21
There is the deepest transition of all.
From the Temple made with stones—
to the Temple of Christ’s Body.
From repeated animal sacrifices—
to the one sacrifice of Calvary.
From blood placed upon an earthly altar—
to the Precious Blood of the Son of God.
From one geographical sanctuary—
to a Church sent into every nation.
And from the physical Body of the risen Christ comes His Mystical Body:
the Church.
The Temple veil is torn.
Christ rises.
The Holy Ghost descends.
The Gospel leaves Jerusalem.
And eventually it enters Rome.
Not because Jerusalem was meaningless.
But because what began in Jerusalem was destined for the whole world.
The irony of salvation history is breathtaking.
Jerusalem rejected Christ, yet Jerusalem gave the world Christ.
Rome crucified Christians, yet Rome became a center of Christian unity.
The Cross, once Rome’s instrument of shame, became Christianity’s sign of victory.
And the Crucified Jew whom Roman soldiers mocked as “King of the Jews” became worshiped throughout the lands once ruled by Caesar.
This is not the triumph of Rome over Jerusalem.
It is the triumph of Jesus Christ over both.
Jew and Gentile reconciled in Him.
Not two saviors.
Not two bodies.
One Lord. One faith. One baptism. One Body.
—Ephesians 4:4–5
And therefore Saint Paul begins his letter to Rome with words that must govern every Christian reflection on this mystery:
“The gospel… is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, to the Jew first, and to the Greek.”
—Romans 1:16
To the Jew first.
Then to the nations.
Then even to Rome.
And from Rome, the confession of the fisherman continues to echo:
Jesus Christ is Lord.
Perhaps Yoma 39b cannot compel a skeptic to believe.
But placed beside Calvary, Hebrews, the destruction of the Temple, the spread of the Gospel, and the transformation of Rome, it becomes something worth pondering deeply.
Around the time the old signs were remembered as ceasing,
the Sign toward which they pointed had been lifted upon a Cross.
The sacrifice was offered.
The Lamb was slain.
The veil was torn.
The Temple of His Body was raised on the third day.
And history began moving from the earthly Jerusalem toward that final City which neither Roman armies nor any earthly power can destroy:
the New Jerusalem, the City of the living God.
“For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come.”
—Hebrews 13:14
The final victory belongs neither to Jerusalem as an earthly city nor to Rome as an earthly empire.
It belongs to the Lamb.
And all history—Jerusalem, Calvary, Rome, the Church, and the nations—is being drawn toward His eternal Kingdom.
Christus vincit. Christus regnat. Christus imperat.
Christ conquers.
Christ reigns.
Christ commands.