The veil of the temple was woven from blue, purple, crimson and white thread, and embroidered with cherubim (2 Chron 3.14); the veil in the tabernacle had been similar, (Exod 26.31; 36.35). It was a valuable piece of fabric, and both Antiochus and Titus took a veil when they looted the temple (1 Mace 1.21–2; BJ 7.162). In the second temple it was some two hundred square metres of fabric; when it contracted uncleanness and had to be washed, three hundred priests were needed for the job (m. Shek 8.4–5). Josephus says it was a Babylonian tapestry (BJ 5.212), a curtain embroidered with a panorama of the heavens (BJ 5.213). The veil separated the holy place from the most holy (Exod 26.33), screening from view the ark and the cherubim or, in the temple, the ark and the chariot throne. We are told that only the high priest entered the holy of holies, once a year on the Day of Atonement.

If theological ethics speaks about man, it does not have in view man as he understands himself but man as he knows that he is understood, as he finds himself addressed by the Word of God that has come to him.

Doctrines of the atonement in Christian theology, as Marlin E. Miller has pointed out, ‘usually limit their concern to reconciliation with God and, at most, consider reconciliation with others a secondary consequence of reconciliation with God’. Too often, in other words, the vertical aspect of reconciliation is allowed to overshadow its horizontal aspect. The vertical aspect of the atonement as it pertains directly to God is often treated in isolation as if its ethical implications were of no great importance. The reverse defect, however, would also appear to be widespread. Christian ethics as we know it today often seems to proceed as if the atoning work of Christ were of little or no relevance to its deliberations on human affairs. The social or horizontal aspect of reconciliation thereby eclipses its vertical aspect. Yet if the cross of Christ is indeed the very center of the center of the Christian gospel, as the church has historically believed, then how can it fail to determine the substance of Christian ethics as well as that of Christian theology? Moreover, how can the centrality of the cross fail to orient them both in any attempt to specify their inner unity, order and differentiation?

Did Justin Martyr really have a conversation with Trypho the Jew as he states that he did in his Dialogue with Trypho? And even if he did not, does this text, indirectly at least, give evidence of genuine contact between Christians and Jews? When Tertullian in his Adversus Judaeos reviled Jews for their failure to understand the scriptures in the way he did, was he in fact reviling Jews known to him who actually disagreed with him? Or put another way, do the accusations he makes against Jews give evidence of an ongoing debate with that ancient community?