So I am not sure how many people are actually familiar with my timeline or not, No Christ, No Salvation: The World of a Less Miraculous Jesus, as only a few people leave comments and "like" the updates, but to give those of you who are unfamiliar with it some background on the context for which I am posing the question of this thread, we can summarize by saying that the Roman government has not pulled down the temple in Jerusalem, but instead has ruled that its centrality is indicative of a virulent form of nationalism, and that the Jews are to build new temples.
In my timeline, I wrote the justification that the Jewish clergy came up with being to scrap the Book of Deuteronomy, which is, well, kind of obviously the fraudulent work of an aristocratic priesthood that was looking to consolidate its power during the reign of a particularly young king (Josiah). The book itself alludes to its own dubious origins, stating that it comes from a scroll discovered in the temple during renovations... which is a piss poor explanation for radical alterations to doctrine if you ask me. Another member on here was kind enough to point out to me that this may not be as plausible as I had previously thought, and so I am looking to go in another direction, hoping that I might be able to get the Jewish clergy to reinterpret existent scripture to justify the Roman policy on Jewish temples.
That being said, my understanding of the matter is that a temple had been built in Elephantine in Egypt many centuries earlier, shortly after the destruction of the First Temple, and that yet another temple had been built at Leontopolis, outside of Alexandria in the 4th century BCE. The Elephantine Temple would long have been out of use by this time, though it appears to have been known to the Jewish sages and priesthood in the 1st century, while the Leontopolis Temple was still in use for certain sacrifices, although the acceptability of any sacrifices at it seems to have been a point of divergence between Egyptian and Palestinian Jews at the time. I have been mulling over the question for almost two weeks now, and all I can find is evidence that not every Jewish sect observed the same laws and circulated the same versions of the Pentateuch, as well as references to Jewish sects who did not appear to think of temples as that important at all. However, in the context of the timeline, the majority of the literature in urban Palestine has been destroyed, and so literature for the council in question is being brought in from further north in the Levant, from Anatolia, and particularly from Egypt. Alexandrian Jews seemed to have had a different view of the centrality of the Jerusalem Temple, and while the sages and priests in Jerusalem might not like it, they are being forced by the government to compromise... how is it possible to reconcile the idea of multiple temples using the more mainstream Palestian/Levantine/Anatolian literature? I know that the Leontopolis Temple was widely held to be a fulfillment of a prophecy about a temple in Egypt, but is there any precedent within Jewish literature for temples being built elsewhere?
I can't seem to find any...