The Rabbis also saw in the death penalty an expiation of the sin that had been committed. This supreme expiation was religious in character, and was brought into connection with the Temple and its sacrificial worship. Thus it is stated that only so long as the altar stood,[104] or the priest officiated,[105] could the death penalty be carried out.[106] According to the opinion of R. Akiba,[107] a capital sentence on “a defiant elder” could not be consummated outside of Jerusalem, nor even in Jabneh by the great Sanhedrin, while the Temple still stood; but he should be brought to Jerusalem and put to death on one of the middle days of the next festival when the city and the Temple were thronged with worshippers. Those condemned to death were given the opportunity to confess their sins when within ten cubits of the place of execution, the confession opening for them the gates of the future world.[108] It is related of one condemned man that when bidden confess he prayed “May my death be an atonement for all my sins”....[109] If the condemned man was unable to confess fully, he was bidden say “May my death be an atonement for all my sins.”[110] These four considerations, (a) the plain command of the written word of the Torah, (b) the recognition of the deterrent and preventive value of capital punishment, (c) the claims of just retribution and (d) the recognition of the expiatory character of the death penalty, leave it beyond doubt that the Rabbis approved of the theory of capital punishment. They accepted without question the teachings of the Torah, implying the justifiability of imposing the death penalty. At the same time, numberless passages testify to the sacredness in which they held human life,[111] and many passages prove that they had a vivid sense of the irrevocability of a consummated death sentence. To put a man to death wrongfully is as though one destroyed the whole world.[112] Rabbinical Modifications But it is no less clear that the Rabbis did not favor capital punishment in practise. It is true, as will be shown later, that after the fall of the Temple in 70 C. E., they no longer had the right of imposing the death penalty. But we possess their theory of what their practise would have been had they had the opportunity of exercising it, and this theory tends altogether in the direction of modifying capital punishment to its virtual abolition.