Perhaps the priestly charge against Jesus of "blasphemy" (Mk 14.64a)
was a composite charge, made up of of Jesus saying that he was (l) the
divinely-ordained messiah (Mk 14.61-62), divinely commissioned to (2)
destroy the Temple (Mk 14.58).
In other words, he was being accused of leading a militant
revolutionary movement. This charge was (implicitly) changed to 'making
himself a king,' in order to grab the attention of the the Roman
procurator
Pilate. (Mk 15.2)
The priests could have assembled circumstantial evidence to back their
charges: (1) that Jesus literally intended to destroy the Temple, as shown
by his invasive and disrupting actions (Mk 11.15-17); (2) he was the
leader
of an armed revoutionary group (Mk 14.47) (Mk 14.43 suggests that the
people
coming to arrest Jesus thought that all the disciples were armed, not just
one.); and (3) Jesus literally intended to destroy the Temple and rebuild
a
structure in it's place, probably out of wood, since Jesus was a carpenter
(Mk 6.3), and something much smaller, that could be assembled in 3 days,
perhaps personally, all by himself (Mk 14.58c Knox "with no hand of man to
help me.") This suggests that Jesus may have intended to destroy the
Temple
and to erect a duplicate of the ancient Tabernacle in its place, as the
Tabernacle was constructed basically out of wood (Ex 26.15-29). a
structure
that, unlike the Temple, had been specified and comissioned by God. (Ex
26.30). Whether he wanted to locate it on the Temple site, or for his
group
to carry it around with him is questionable, but it is certainly clear
that
the latter possibility would have been an outright threat to the
priesthood,
and would also have presumed Jesus to be like or a replacement for Moses.
And the first possibility might have caused quite an increase in priestly
unemployment.
However, an alternative to the charge that Jesus was a militant
revolutionary is that he was the leader of a religiously fundamentalist
protest movement. The gospel writers, writing after Jesus's death, may
have wanted to present him in this alternative perspective, as one who
protested the cooperation of the jewish priesthood with the Roman secular
overlords, as one who wanted to return to true bible religion, but who had
no intention himself of destroying the Temple. However, Mk 15. 29,
although
it comes last in Mark, may preserve the original statements of Jesus. Then
it was later edited, or doctored, at Mk 15.58, adding "with hands," and
"without hands," to image Isa 66. 1-2, which says that heaven and earth
were
made by God's own hands, and no human being could build a house or abode
or
Temple for God that could in any way compare or fix God in one location.
(We
recall that the Tabernacle in the wilderness was mobile.) See also Jn 4.
20-26, which says that God does not have to be worshipped in Jerusalem.
But
this still leaves the charge that Jesus was doing more than just
protesting
and really intended to destroy the Temple and to build another temple
"within three days." So as a face-saving measure to account for Jesus's
failure, if such it was, to destroy the Temple and to resurrect a
Tabernacle, Mk 10.34e was backedited to make it appear he was referring to
his personal resurrection, not to resurrecting a tabernacle or else
building
a smaller structure of some kind; and Jn 2.19 uses the passive "Destroy
this temple," as if to imply that Jesus and his fundamentalist followers
had
no militant agenda, and to account for the fact that Roman armies later
destroyed the Temple.
The above is a wild and wooly interpretation, more like a Wild West
story than credible scholarship. You can take credit for it, if you like.