In all four canonical gospels of the Christian New Testament, the cleansing of the Temple narrative tells of Jesus expelling the merchants and the money changers from the Temple in Jerusalem.
In this account Jesus and his disciples travel to Jerusalem for Passover, where Jesus expels the merchants and consumers from the temple, accusing them of turning it into "a den of thieves" (in the synoptic Gospels) and "a market" (in the Gospel of John) through their commercial activities.
Most historians agree that an actual event took place, although some scholars believe that the accounts refer to two separate incidents. In The scene is a common motif in Christian art.
Description
In the narrative Jesus is stated to have visited the Second Temple in Jerusalem, where the courtyard was described as being filled with livestock, merchants and the tables of money changers, who changed the standard Greek and Roman money for Jewish and Tyrian shekels. Jerusalem was packed with Jews who had come for Passover. According to the AD 66 census by Cestius, as cited by Josephus, the attendees at the Passover Festival were counted as more than 2.5 million pilgrims.
In Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47 Jesus accuses the Temple authorities of thieving and, in this instance, names poor widows as their victims, going on to provide evidence of this in Mark 12:42 and Luke 21:2. Doves were sold to be sacrificed by the poor who could not afford lambs as a sacrifice. According to Mark 11:16, Jesus then put an embargo on people carrying any merchandise through the Temple, a sanction which would have disrupted all commerce.The Fourth Gospel And the Quest for Jesus by Paul N. Anderson 2006 page 158 This occurred in the outermost court, the Court of the Gentiles, which was where the buying and selling of animals took place.
Matthew 21:14–16 says the Temple leaders questioned Jesus, asking whether he was aware that children in the temple were shouting "Hosanna to the Son of David" in Jesus's praise. 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.
Old Testament background Jesus's pronouncement and action in the temple draw on several texts from the Hebrew Bible. In the Synoptic accounts his words combine two prophetic passages: ("my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations") and ("a den of robbers"). John Nolland observes that in Jeremiah's original oracle the "robbers" are not the temple vendors but the worshippers themselves, whose conduct away from the temple makes a mockery of their worship within it: their part is "to collude in the state of affairs by facilitating the public worship of those whose lives assert something quite different from fidelity to God." On this reading the charge extends beyond commercial exploitation to a broader indictment of religious hypocrisy.
Ben Witherington III identifies further background for the Markan account in ("there shall no longer be a trader in the house of the "), which he reads as the eschatological backdrop to Jesus's action, and in ("The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple"), which supplies the motif of the Lord coming in purging judgment.
In John's account the disciples connect Jesus's action to ("Zeal for your house will consume me"; ), which the narrative presents as foreshadowing that Jesus's consuming dedication to God's house would lead to his death.
Chronology
There are debates about when the cleansing of the Temple occurred and whether there were two separate events.
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 of the Gospel of John (at John 2:13–16). Ancient compositional practices involved such chronological displacement and compression, with even reliable biographers like Plutarch displaying them. While most historians agree that an actual event took place, some scholars believe that the accounts refer to two separate incidents, given that the Gospel of John also includes more than one Passover. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo agree that Jesus performed a similar act twice, with the less severe denunciations of the Johannine account (merchants, sellers) occurring early in Jesus's public ministry and the more severe denunciations of the synoptic accounts (thieves, robbers) occurring just before, and indeed expediting, the events of the crucifixion of Jesus. Craig S. Keener makes the case explicitly: "Unless Jesus cleansed the temple twice, which is unlikely, it is impossible to harmonize John's chronology for cleansing the temple with that of the Synoptics"; he argues that John deliberately placed a single cleansing at the opening of Jesus' ministry so that "Jesus' entire ministry is the Passion Week, overshadowed by his impending 'hour.'"
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?"Paul L. Maier "The Date of the Nativity and Chronology of Jesus" in Chronos, Kairos, Christos: Nativity and Chronological Studies by Jerry Vardaman, Edwin M. Yamauchi 1989 pages 113–129Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible 2000 Amsterdam University Press page 249
In the Antiquities of the Jews the first-century Roman-Jewish historian 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).As stated by , there is some uncertainty about how Josephus referred to and computed dates, hence various scholars arrive at slightly different dates for the exact date of the start of the Temple construction, varying by a few years in their final estimation of the date of the Temple visit. Temple expansion and reconstruction was ongoing, and it was in constant reconstruction until it was destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans.Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, page 246 states that Temple construction never completed, and that the Temple was in constant reconstruction until it was destroyed in 70 AD/CE by the Romans, and states that the 46 years should refers to the actual number of years from the start of the construction. 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 AD 24 and 29. However, there is reason to think that the practice of selling in the Court of the Gentiles was only instituted in 30 AD by Caiaphas. This would mean that Jesus was reacting to a newly-instituted practice: the merchants would not have been there in previous years.
The tables would only have been there between Adar 25 and Nisan 1, in preparation for the passover. The temple tax had to be paid by every Jewish male before Nisan 1 (Ex. 30:11). This would mean that the timeline was compressed by the gospel writers.
Historicity
Most scholars agree that it is "overwhelmingly probable that Jesus did something in the temple and said something about its destruction".
Given that desecration of a temple was seen as a capital offense by the Romans, Ben Witherington III says that "It is very unlikely that the early church, while involved in evangelism and seeking acceptance at all levels of society, would make up a tradition about Jesus performing some sort of violent action in the temple."
Analysis
Challenge to authority
Professor David Landry of the University of St. Thomas says that "the importance of the episode is signalled 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."
According to D. A. Carson, the fact that Jesus was not arrested by the Temple guards was due to the fact that the crowd supported Jesus's actions. Maurice Casey agrees with this view, stating that the Temple's authorities were probably afraid that sending guards against Jesus and his disciples would cause a revolt and a carnage, while Roman soldiers in the Antonia Fortress did not feel the need to act for a minor disturbance such as this; he also says that Jesus's actions probably prompted the authorities' decision to have Jesus arrested some days later and later had him crucified by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate.
Significance of money
Animal sales were related to selling animals for use in the animal sacrifices in the Temple. Money changers in the temple existed to convert the many currencies in use into the Jewish and Tyrian money accepted for paying the Temple taxes. Ben Witherington III further notes that the Tyrian shekels required for the temple tax bore the image of Herakles (Hercules) on one side and the inscription "Tyre the holy and invincible," and suggests that the presence of these overtly pagan coins and images within the temple precincts may have contributed to Jesus' objection to the money-changing operation.
A common interpretation is that Jesus was reacting to the practice of money changers routinely cheating the people, but Marvin L. Krier Mich says that a good deal of money was stored at the temple, where it could be loaned by the wealthy to the poor who were in danger of losing their land to debt. The Temple establishment therefore co-operated with the aristocracy in the exploitation of the poor. One of the first acts of the First Jewish-Roman War was the burning of the debt records in the archives.Mich, Marvin L. Krier. The Challenge and Spirituality of Catholic Social Teaching, Chapter 6, Orbis Books, 2011,
Symbolic prophetic action
The scale of commerce in the temple precinct—the outer court covered roughly 35 acres and was packed with Passover pilgrims—made a complete physical expulsion of all merchants impossible within a brief episode.
Pope Francis saw the cleansing of the Temple not as a violent act but more of a prophetic demonstration.Pope Francis. "Angelus Address: Jesus Cleanses the Temple of Jerusalem". Zenit, March 4, 2018. Translated from the Italian by Virginia M. Forrester. In addition to writing and speaking messages from God, Israelite or Jewish ('spokespersons', 'prophets') often acted out prophetic actions in their life.Lockyer, Herbert. All the Parables of the Bible, Zondervan, 1988. p. 53. . Ben Witherington III and Craig S. Keener therefore agree that the action is a symbolic prophetic sign, a brief dramatic interruption sufficient to enact a prophetic declaration rather than a sustained physical takeover.
Sceptical scholars such as those in the Jesus Seminar as expressed in the book The Acts of Jesus (1998) cite the vastness of the temple complex to question the historicity of the episode, but feel Jesus "performed some anti-temple act and spoke some word against the temple".
John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar says that Jesus was not attempting to cleanse the Temple of any corruption. Instead, it was a radical protest against the institution of animal sacrifice, which gave people a false sense of transactional forgiveness compared to repentance. He believes these views aligned with John the Baptist and Jeremiah.
Interpretation of John 2:15 In 2012 Andy Alexis-Baker, clinical associate professor of theology at Loyola University Chicago, gave the history of the interpretation of the Johannine passage since Antiquity: