The three central Jerusalem leaders, James (the brother of Jesus), Peter, and John, were content. Their view carried weight; they were known as the “pillars.” For us, that might be a dead metaphor. For them, in Jerusalem with the Temple still standing, it was making a polemical claim. The early Jesus-followers, it seems, already understood themselves as an alternative Temple with these three as its “pillars”: a new heaven-and-earth society, living and worshipping right alongside the old Temple, making the latter redundant.
