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TempleStudy.com Fireside Discussion – Introduction
http://www.templestudy.com/2012/08/05/templestudycom-fireside-discussion-introduction/

I am so thankful what the Lord has given us in these Latter Days so there is no confusion.

Temple Theology - An Introduction Margaret Barker (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Temple-Theology-Introduction-Margaret-Barker/dp/028105634X

One of the reviews

Stunning Overview of Barker’s Prodigious Lifework
By Bay Gibbons VINE VOICE on February 11, 2009
Format: Paperback
This reviewer comes to Margaret Barker’s “Temple Theology” after nearly a decade of reading her great corpus of Biblical studies, including The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem, The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity, The Lost Prophet: The Book of Enoch and Its influence on Christianity, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy and The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy. This vast and prodigious output is unparalleled in the field of Biblical criticism of the past century. However, it will be admitted that much of her work is so dense in its scholarship and explication, that it becomes exceedingly difficult to the specialist, let alone the lay person.

Now we come to the present work, “Temple Theology,” which is no more nor less than the reprint of a series of lectures given by Barker at the University of London in 2003, and reprinted in book form by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 2004. This plainly written text with a minimum of footnotes provides an excellent introduction to and a summary of the Barker corpus of scholarship.

As is shown by the attacks made in companion reviews on this site, Barker’s honest and courageous reexamination and reworking of centuries of Biblical scholarship—mostly German and chiefly Protestant—is not an easy task. Barker’s chief thesis is as deeply disconcerting to the traditional Biblical scholar as it is to the devoted Evangelical worshipper. Her central thesis—that Jesus Christ was essentially a restorer of a lost hierocentric religion rather than an inventor of something new—has successfully shaken the very foundations of Old Testament and early Christian scholarship.

Barker is much like the lone voice crying in the wilderness, facing an army of dead and living German Protestant scholars whose researches laid the foundation for a century and more of intertestamental scholarship, and whose life labors are now called into serious question by Barker’s stunning and groundbreaking labors. She also faces a vast multitude of Christians of every possible denomination who have been taught to believe in a strict trinitarian monothesism—a tenet which Barker devastatingly shows is inconsistent with both ancient Jewish religion centered on the First Temple and the Temple-centered religion which Jesus restored and revitalized. Nevertheless, Barker is not entirely alone in the wilderness. Her work is now admiringly and diligently studied by courageous Catholics, German scholars of the Protestant tradition, Russian Orthodox, Mormons and others. More than sixty careful reviews of Barker’s work have been published, including a lead review in the Times Literary Supplement in 2003.

That being said, Western academia is not yet sold on Barker, with complaints that while her work is remarkably convincing, it leaves too many unanswered questions. To this reviewer, that is to be expected in the groundbreaking work of any pioneer scholar—as the circle of knowledge grows, so does its outside edge of ignorance.