One of the major themes that is emerging in N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus is the idea that Jesus sought to take on the role of the temple in Jewish life. This was the reason he claimed to be able to forgive sins, spoke of his body as the temple, and overturned the tables in the temple. Some pertinent quotes from Wright:

 

Jesus’ clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works but because his kingdom-agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off her frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the vocation to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. I therefore propose that the clash between Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries, especially the Pharisees, must be seen in terms of alternative political agendas generated by alternative eschatological beliefs and expectations. (58)

His attitude to the Temple was not "this institution needs reforming," nor "the wrong people are running this place," nor yet "piety can function elsewhere too." His deepest belief regarding the temple was eschatological: the time had come for God to judge the entire institution. It had come to symbolize the injustice that characterized the society on the inside and on the outside, the rejection of the vocation to be the light of the world, the city set on a hill that would draw to itself all the peoples of the world. (64)

…Jesus acted and spoke as if he was in some sense called to do and be what the Temple was and did. His offer of forgiveness, with no prior condition of Temple-worship or sacrifice, was the equivalent of someone in our world offering as a private individual to issue someone else a passport or a driver’s license. He was undercutting the official system and claiming by implication to be establishing a new one in its place. (65)

The temple figures prominently in Jesus’ claims about himself because it set him in place to mediate and represent God’s return to Zion as the Son of Man of Daniel 7 and as the enthroned figure like a man of Ezekiel 1. Wright shows that first-century Judaism was fully poised to expect God’s return to the Temple in the form of the Messiah, even after the time of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus turned that expectation on its head - rather than reign from the temple, he claimed to be replacing the temple, both predicting and offering the solution to the problem of its pending destruction, which took place in AD 70 at the hands of Titus’ Roman army.