Within at most a day after Jesus overturned tables and created a disturbance in the Temple, it is likely that the previous activities had resumed. Indeed, without a significant enough band of followers to overpower the Temple guard and Roman garrison and to permanently hold the Fortress Antonia, Jesus would not have expected it to turn out otherwise. (Our few extant examples of sign-prophets acted outside the city proper, not in the midst of the authorities’ power.) It is therefore probable that Jesus intended his act in the Temple symbolically in some sense, as many scholars recognize.102 Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world people recognized the value of symbolic actions,103 Jeremiah’s smashing of a pot in the temple precincts being a particularly relevant case in point (Jer 19:10-14).104 The meaning of the symbol here, however, has engendered considerable debate. Some proposals have generated little support among current scholarship, for instance the proposal that the Gospels use the Temple cleansing to symbolize the replacement of the cultic system of the Temple with Jesus’ new sacrifice for sins.105 Others, however, merit further discussion.
Economic Exploitation?
Some have proposed that Jesus challenged economic exploitation in the Temple, but the extant evidence for this thesis is not very strong. Jerusalem was the center of a prosperous trade and tourist industry;106 while the local aristocracy may not have profited directly from mercantile activity in the Temple (see below), they were at the top of a steep economic pyramid (artisans may have been at its bottom) that profited from Jerusalem’s economic strength, especially from a tourist industry encouraged and accommodated by the Temple establishment. Profiting from a system that profited everyone need not, however, be construed as economic exploitation, and sacrifices were not at the heart of it.107
One Jewish scholar notes the rabbinic tradition that moneychangers worked in the outer court for about one week and received no profit.108 He admits that in practice some may have abused this system, and that Jesus may have justly reacted against the abuses; but he doubts that the abuses pervaded the system.109 This tradition that the moneychangers did not profit (at least not exploitively) may well be late, but we lack a specific early one that offers a contrary view.110 If one tradition is dependable, the commercial use of the court of the Gentiles, turning it into something of a hellenistic agora, began only shortly before the time of Jesus; this practice may have invited criticism from a number of pietists at that time.111 Again, we cannot be certain how reliable the tradition is.
Some propose that the issue was simply paying money in the Temple.112 Yet it is difficult to see how the sacrificial system could have been conducted without selling, money and moneychangers.113 Pilgrims could hardly bring their own sacrifices from the Diaspora, and it would be inconvenient even from Galilee. Despite other professions in lists of unscrupulous means of profit, moneychangers provoked little complaint, and were often persons of high moral reputation and prominence.114 Given varying city currencies, moneychangers were also necessary, even in the towns of Galilee.115 Certainly in the Temple, where pilgrims arrived with a wide variety of currency but needed to purchase sacrifices to obey the law, moneychangers were necessary.116
Perhaps most importantly, there is little evidence that Jerusalem’s aristocracy profited directly from the commercial activity in the Temple, whether from selling or moneychanging. Although polemical texts often complain about the priestly aristocracy, they remain completely silent about them profiting from sales in the Temple.117 Granted, our texts cannot reveal the motives of those involved in such trade, and some exploitation may have occurred.118 But this possibility does not constitute evidence that economic exploitation was at the center of the activity in the Temple or of Jesus’ protest there.
Defending the Worship of Gentiles?
Gentiles were welcome alongside Israelites in Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs 8:41-43). But due to increased sensitivity to purity considerations, by Jesus’ day Gentiles were excluded from courts nearer the holiest place.119 Thus the commercial activity in the outer court, by treating it as less sacred than the courts of women and Israel that were also part of Solomon’s outer court, risked marginalizing Gentile visitors’ worship of Israel’s God.
Merchants did not prevent gentiles from praying, but the Temple’s structure expressed an ideology of separation that, as Borg puts it, “excluded gentiles generally,” and that Jesus rejected.120 Thus it is possible that the separation of Gentiles constituted at least one source of Jesus’ protest.121 It is likely that at least Mark understood Jesus’ action in this manner; in Mk 11:17 Jesus quotes Is 56:7: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” Yet while the saying in Mark fits this agenda, it is otherwise unlikely that defense of Gentiles was Jesus’ sole reason for challenging the Temple. The other Gospel writers probably surmised this, for it is not the reason emphasized in Matthew and Luke, who both omit Mark’s line about God’s house being “for all nations.”
Judgment on the Temple
Most likely, Jesus’ act in the Temple challenged the Jerusalem aristocracy that controlled the Temple system, hence related in some way to Jesus’ prophecy of the Temple’s impending destruction. Thus when Jesus overturns the tables in Mark he also cites Jer 7:11 concerning the Temple’s destruction (Mk 11:17).122 A symbolic prediction of judgment fits the likelihood that Jesus did predict the Temple’s destruction (a likelihood noted earlier in this chapter).
Some who denounced or prophesied against the Temple did so because they opposed the aristocratic priesthood who ran it.123 Some thus see Jesus’ act as a prophetic symbol of ritual cleansing, reacting against the moral defilement there.124 In its most extreme form, this view portrays Jesus as following Pharisaic purity rules to their logical conclusion;125 in its more reasonable forms, it portrays Jesus as zealous for the Temple’s cleansing, an agenda that he could easily have borrowed from biblical renewal movements or even Scripture (e.g., Mal 3:1-4).
Others concede contemporary denunciations of the Temple hierarchy’s uncleanness but note that the Gospels do not emphasize this point;126 they argue that a concern for purity in the traditional Jewish sense would focus on ritual concerns.127 They believe that Jesus’ action symbolized something more dramatic than the Temple’s purification — namely, its destruction.128
Sanders argues that Jesus believed that God would directly intervene to establish his kingdom, and that Jesus was preparing for a kingdom “in which a temple, whether new or cleansed, would be useful.”129 Sanders’ proposal may well be correct; such an image fits many contemporary ideas about the eschatological Temple (whether supernaturally reconstructed or humanly restored). This hope naturally stirred more prominently after 70 CE130 but is abundantly attested before Jerusalem’s destruction,131 especially in the Qumran Scrolls.132 The expected restoration of the vessels, the ark133 and perhaps its manna134 also implies a renewed, eschatological temple of some sort.135
The proposals of purification and prophecy of judgment are not, however, mutually exclusive; if Jesus believed that the temple institution warranted judgment, he could well have believed that immoral leadership in some sense had defiled it. Many of Jesus’ contemporaries emphasized a new or renewed Temple precisely because of the impurity of the priesthood.136 Purification and replacement are thus not mutually exclusive options.
While Jesus undoubtedly spoke of the destruction of the Temple and apparently envisioned a new, eschatological one, the gospel tradition does not provide clear indication that Jesus’ eschatological Temple was purely a physical one. Jesus’ contemporaries, including those that expected an eschatological Temple, could also depict the Temple in spiritual terms.137 One would expect such spiritualized imagery in the Jewish philosopher Philo,138 but more noteworthy is its appearance in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where the true Temple sometimes symbolizes the community.139 The use of Psalm 118 in the festal Hallel suggests the authenticity of its citation in the Synoptic tradition (Mk 12:10-11; cf. 11:9-10; 14:26),140 which in turn might suggest that Jesus himself did intend a new Temple but with himself as the cornerstone.141 If so, his followers rightly understood that Temple spiritually (1 Cor 3:16; Eph 2:20-22; 1 Pet 2:5; cf. Lk 19:40, 44; Rom 9:32-33).142
Before Jesus could become the chief cornerstone, however, he had to be rejected by the builders — the establishment who controlled Herod’s temple (Mk 12:10-12). Opposition to the Temple would generate hostility from most of mainstream Judaism,143 and perhaps even martyrdom at the hands of the authorities. 144 For Jesus to offer this provocation, then refuse to flee Jerusalem or arm his followers, suggests that he intended to face the authorities’ hostility.
