In her first lecture, Dr. Harris discussed the ritual and historical significance of the Jerusalem Temple, before and after its destruction in 70 CE. It remained a powerful center of religious identity, she explained, not only for Jews but also eventually in Christian ecclesiology, or theology about the nature of the Church. “By the beginning of the twelfth century, the Church had fully appropriated the meaning of the Jewish Temple into its self-understanding: seeing itself as God's earthly dwelling place, as Body of Christ, as a pure place set apart from the mundane world, protected by a pure and chaste clergy.”

The second lecture explored manifestations of the Temple in Christian architecture. To set up the discussion, Dr. Harris reflected on New Testament interpretations of Jesus' identity, and the ways his followers re-centered the meaning of Temple ritual and Jewish eschatological hopes in the person of Jesus. “While acknowledging its centralizing force and great holiness, early Christian texts also suggest that the ministry of Jesus was, in part, a critique of the Temple cult and somehow transferred the meaning of the Temple onto himself. With the death and resurrection of Jesus, the apostle Paul initiated a symbolic re-invention of the Temple: from then on, the presence of God was thought to dwell within the followers of Jesus.” This would pose a problem for later builders and designers of places for worship, because the question of sacredness in physical spaces would need to be addressed in relation to the Temple – the sacredness of which was seen to have passed into Jesus and the followers who comprised his Church. Through visual aids, Dr. Harris portrayed the medieval architectural innovations that reflected Temple-based ecclesiology. She noted, “Despite the danger of re-spatializing the sacred within places of worship, this is precisely what we see over the course of the Middle Ages: architecture, liturgy, commentaries and sermons all point to the introduction of the element of Temple spaces and meaning into Christian churches.”

In her third lecture, on “Body, Self and Temple in Christian Anthropology,” Dr. Harris traced the development of ideas about the human body becoming a Temple, a dwelling place for God and the center of worship. In this area of Christian thought, Temple imagery is appropriated by Christianity as a transformed but living aspect of its Jewish heritage. On the final day, Dr. Harris posed the question, “What effects did the Christian appropriation of the Jerusalem Temple, as an ecclesiological model, an architectural watershed, and an anthropological metaphor have on actual relations between Jews and Christians in medieval Europe?” She concluded that ambiguity remains, and explained, “The use of the Temple communicated the supersession of Judaism by Christianity, but it also contributed to the doctrine concerning the necessity for protecting the Jewish population within Christendom. Perhaps the ubiquitous presence of symbols from the Temple kept the meaning of the Jewish population present before the minds of medieval Christians.”

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