The cleansing
of the Temple narrative tells of Jesus expelling
the merchants and the money changers from the Temple, and occurs in all four canonical gospels of the New Testament.
In this account, Jesus and his disciples travel to Jerusalem for Passover, where Jesus expels the merchants and money changers
from the Temple, accusing them of turning the Temple into "a den of
thieves" through their commercial activities.In the Gospel of John Jesus refers to the Temple as "my Father's
house", thus, making a claim to being the Son of God.
The narrative occurs near the end of the Synoptic Gospels (at Matthew
21:12–17, Mark
11:15–19, and Luke
19:45–48) and near the start in the Gospel of
John (at John
2:13–16). Some scholars believe that these
refer to two separate incidents, given that the Gospel of John also includes
more than one Passover.
Jesus is stated to have visited the Temple in Jerusalem, where the courtyard is described as being filled
with livestock, merchants, and the tables of the money changers, who changed the standard Greek and Roman money for Jewish and Tyrian money. (Gentile money could not be used at the Temple
because of the graven images on it.) Jerusalem was packed with Jews who had
come for Passover, perhaps numbering 300,000 to 400,000 pilgrims.
And
making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and
oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their
tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, "Take these things away;
do not make my Father's house a house of trade."
"And
Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought
in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of
them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be
called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves."
In Mark
12:40 and Luke
20:47 Jesus accused the Temple authorities
of thieving and this time he names poor widows as their victims, going on to
provide evidence of this in Mark
12:42 and Luke
21:2. Dove sellers were selling doves that were
sacrificed by the poor who could not afford grander sacrifices and specifically
by women. According to Mark
11:16, Jesus then put an embargo on people
carrying any merchandise through the Temple—a sanction that would have
disrupted all commerce. This occurred in the outermost court of the gentiles.
Matthew
21:14–16 says the Temple leaders
questioned Jesus if he was aware the children were shouting "Hosanna to the Son of David." Jesus responded by saying "from
the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise." This phrase
incorporates a phrase from the Psalm
8:2, "from the lips of children and
infants," believed by followers to be an admission of divinity by Jesus,
thus confirming his divinity via prooftexting the Old Testament.
Chronology
Claims about the Temple cleansing episode in the Gospel
of John can be combined with non-biblical historical sources to obtain an
estimate of when it occurred. John
2:13 states that Jesus went to the Temple
in Jerusalem around the start of his ministry and John
2:20 states that Jesus was told:
"Forty and six years was this temple in building, and you
want to raise it up in three days?".
In the Antiquities of the
Jews, first-century historian Flavius Josephus wrote that (Ant 15.380) the temple reconstruction was started
by Herod
the Great in the 18th year of his reign 22
BC, two years before Augustus arrived in Syria in 20 BC to return the son
of Phraates IV and receive in return the spoils and standards of
three Roman legions (Ant 15.354). Temple expansion and reconstruction was
ongoing, and it was in constant reconstruction until it was destroyed in 70 AD
by the Romans. Given that it had taken 46 years of construction to that
point, the Temple visit in the Gospel of John has been estimated at any time
between 24–29 AD. It is possible that the complex was only a few years
completed when the future Emperor Titus destroyed the Temple in 70 AD.
David
Landry suggests that "the importance of the episode is signaled by the
fact that within a week of this incident, Jesus is dead. Matthew, Mark, and
Luke agree that this is the event that functioned as the "trigger"
for Jesus' death." While most artistic renderings have a more
dramatic depiction of Jesus thrashing the merchants, Nathan W. O'Halloran's
reading of the Greek word pantas indicates
that Jesus took some ropes he found lying around "to drive out the sheep
and oxen, like any shepherd or cattle herder would do", followed, no
doubt, by their owners. He also notes that the Synoptics do not make
mention of a whip; and that Mark uses the word "drove", as it was
used elsewhere for the spirit "driving" Jesus into the desert, or
Jesus himself "driving" out demons.
O'Halloran identifies the actions of Jesus with "a
calculated prophetic action evocative of the temple condemnation in Jeremiah
7:1-15". The Gospel of Mark uses the phrase, "Then he taught
them..." as Jesus references the prophet Jeremiah. The full quotation from Jeremiah reads:
Are
you to steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal, go
after strange gods that you know not, and yet come to stand before me in this
house which bears my name, and say: "We are safe; we can commit all these
abominations again"? Has this house which bears my name become in your
eyes a den of thieves? I too see what is being done, says the Lord. (Jeremiah
7:9-11)
Toledot Yeshu
As with other parts of Jesus's story, there are a number
of later embellishments to the narrative of the incident that are generally
regarded as legendary or polemical by scholars. The Toledot Yeshu, a parody gospel probably first written down about 1,000
years later but possibly dependent on second-century Jewish-Christian
gospel if not oral traditions that might go back all the way to the
formation of the canonical narratives themselves, claims that Yeshu had
entered the Temple with 310 of his followers. That Christ's followers had
indeed entered the Temple, and in fact the Holy of Holies, is also claimed by Epiphanius, who claims that James wore the breastplate
of the high priest and the high priestly
diadem on his head and actually entered the Holy of Holies, and that John
the Beloved had become a sacrificing priest who wore the mitre, which was
the headdress of the high priest.
Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea
According to the apocryphal Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea, Demas, one of the two robbers who were crucified with
Christ, stole the 'secret deposit' of Solomon from the Holy of Holies, an
act which Judas blamed on Christ:
He
[Demas] made attacks upon the rich, but was good to the poor…And he set his
hand to robbing the multitude of the Jews, and stole the law itself in
Jerusalem, … And to Caiaphas and the multitude of the Jews it was not a
Passover, but it was a great mourning to them, on account of the plundering of the sanctuary by the
robber … Judas says to the Jews: Come, let us hold a council; for perhaps it
was not the robber that stole the law, but
Jesus himself, and I accuse him.
Yeshu was likewise accused of robbing the shem hamphoras, the 'secret name
of god' from the Holy of Holies, in the Toledot Yeshu.