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All four Gospels record the fact that Jesus cleared the temple in Jerusalem of buyers and sellers. Why did he do this? What’s more, when did he do this? Matthew, Mark, and Luke record him doing it at the end of his ministry, but John records him doing it at the beginning. In this episode, Jimmy Akin takes you through the biblical clues needed to understand this mysterious event!
Transcript:
Coming Up
All four Gospels record that Jesus cleansed the temple in Jerusalem.
He drove out those who were buying and selling, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers.
But there are two mysteries about this action: Why did Jesus do it . . . and when did he do it?
That’s what we’ll talk about today.
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One of the events that is recorded in all four Gospels is Jesus’ cleansing of the temple.
Mark tells us,
[Jesus] entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple” (Mark 11:15-16).
A question that occurs to almost everyone who reads this passage is: Why did Jesus do this?
But a second question occurs to those who study the Gospels closely: When did Jesus do this?
Matthew, Mark, and Luke present it as occurring at the end of Jesus’ ministry—just before he goes to the Cross—but John presents it as occurring at the beginning of the ministry—when he’s just starting out.
Today, we’ll look at both questions.
Why Were They There?
Before we get to those questions, though, let’s ask a preliminary one: Why were there sellers and money changers in the temple to begin with?
The answer is fairly straightforward.
A big part of worship at the Jerusalem temple was the offering of animals in sacrifice, and so it was as a convenience to the worshippers that some people brought sacrificial animals there for people to buy.
I mean, the animals had to come from somewhere, and if you weren’t a farmer, you’d have to buy the animal you wanted to offer from someone. Even if you were a farmer, you might in a place that was distant from Jerusalem, and it could be a problem bringing your animal all the way to the temple. So this was a perfectly reasonable service to provide for people.
What about the money changers? What were they doing there?
Well, a lot of people also made monetary offerings at the temple—like in Mark 12:41-44, where Jesus sees a poor widow putting two small copper coins in the treasury.
The problem was that there were a lot of different kinds of money in circulation, and some of them were problematic from a Jewish perspective.
For example, in Mark 12:16. After Jesus is asked whether it’s legitimate to pay taxes to Caesar, he has them produce the kind of coin you could pay the tax with, and he asks whose image is on it. They reply that it has Caesar’s image.
Since this conversation was happening in A.D. 33, the Caesar at the time would have been Tiberius, so the coin had a picture of Tiberius on it, and this was a problem because Jews often regarded pictures of rulers—especially ones that people actually worshipped, like the Roman emperor—as idolatry.
Worse yet, many coins had other pagan symbols and writing on them. Many Roman coins depicted the goddess Roma, for example.
And it would scarcely be appropriate to offer a monetary offering to the true God—in his temple—that was depicting false pagan gods and pagan worship. So it was a perfectly reasonable service—as a convenience to the worshippers—to let them change their money, for a reasonable fee, into money that was acceptable for use at the Jerusalem temple.
There thus isn’t a problem with the actions that the people were performing. It’s totally fine to sell animals and to change money for people. If they had been doing these things outside the temple, Jesus wouldn’t have objected.
So why did he cleanse the temple?
Why Jesus Did It
The Gospels provide clues. The fullest version is found in Mark, who records Jesus saying,
Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of robbers (Mark 11:17).
Here Jesus refers to two quotations from the Old Testament. The first is from Isaiah 56:7, where the prophet describes a day when God will bring Gentiles to Jerusalem, where they will worship him, and he will accept their offerings. Thus, the temple is called “A house of prayer for all the nations” (Isaiah 56:7).
It comes as a surprise to many people today, but non-Jews did worship at the Jewish temple. You didn’t have to be a Jew to go there, and many Gentiles had no problem worshipping the God of the Jews, who they acknowledged as the local God—regardless of whatever other gods they may have believed in.
In fact, the Romans regarded themselves as the most pious people on Earth, so they wanted to make sure they worshipped everyone’s gods. Even Roman emperors sent offerings to the Jerusalem temple. For example, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria reports that the Roman emperor Augustus did. He writes:
So religiously did [Augustus] respect our interests that, supported by well-nigh his whole household, he adorned our temple through the costliness of his dedications, and ordered that for all time continuous sacrifices of whole burnt offerings should be carried out every day at his own expense as a tribute to the most high God.
And these sacrifices are maintained to the present day and will be maintained for ever to tell the story of a character truly imperial (On the Embassy to Gaius 23[157]).
So in return, the priests at the Jerusalem temple would offer a daily sacrifice to God for the safety of the Roman emperor.
But Gentiles were regarded as ceremonially unclean by Jews, so if a Gentile wanted to worship at the Jerusalem temple, where was he supposed to go?
The temple was structured as a series of four progressively more holy courtyards. From the outermost to the innermost, they were:
- The court of the Gentiles, where Gentiles could come to worship God; in fact, this was by far the largest space in the temple, so they really wanted it to be accessible to Gentiles
- The court of women, where Jewish women could worship
- The court of Israel, where Jewish men could worship
- And the court of priests, where Jewish priests ministered
Jesus’ cleansing of the temple on the grounds that it was to be a house of prayer for all the nations indicates that the money changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals had set up shop in the court of the Gentiles and were misappropriating worship space for ordinary commerce.
That leads us to the second quotation, which is from Jeremiah 7:11, where the prophet excoriates the people of his day for performing immoral and pagan practices and—in God’s eyes—turned his temple into “a den of robbers” (Jeremiah 7:11) (that is, a place where robbers feel safe in their immoral lifestyle).
The fact the money changers and sellers felt safe in the temple—and the fact they were engaged in commerce—thus make the reference to the den of robbers appropriate.
The other Gospels do not pick up on the detail about the Gentiles that Mark does, however. Matthew and Luke omit “for all the nations” from the Isaiah quotation, and John has Jesus telling the sellers of pigeons,
Take these things away; you shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade (John 2:16).
These accounts focus more on the use of the temple to earn a living rather than for worship as what is objectionable, though this is consistent with Mark’s account.
In short, Jesus cleansed the temple because people were misappropriate worship space and using it to make a living. What made it worse was they were doing it in space that was supposed to be set aside for the Gentiles to worship God.
When Did Jesus Do It?
Since the Synoptic Gospels and John portray it differently, there have been several proposals on when Jesus cleansed the temple:
- At the end of the ministry. Jesus chronologically did it at the end of his ministry (as the Synoptic Gospels indicate) and John present it at the beginning for theological purposes
- At the beginning of the ministry. Jesus chronologically did it at the beginning of his ministry (as John indicates) and the Synoptics present it at the end for theological purposes
- Both at the beginning and the end. Jesus did it twice—at both the beginning and the end of his ministry
None of these options should be dismissed out of hand. We can demonstrate that the Evangelists do not always record events in strict chronological order. They sometimes put material in topical order—like when Matthew gathers together teachings of Jesus into major discourses (for example, the Sermon on the Mount is a collection of Jesus’ ethical teachings that are scattered in different places in Luke).
There’s more to say about these three possibilities than we can explore here, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.
At the Beginning Only
You might argue for proposal 1 by noting that the Synoptic Gospels link the cleansing of the temple to Jesus’ death. Immediately after his remark concerning the den of robbers, Mark continues:
And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and sought a way to destroy him (Mark 11:18).
Matthew and Luke put a little more space between the clearing of the temple and the plot to kill Jesus, but all three have the cleansing as an initiating event in the conflict between Jesus and the Jerusalem authorities, Mark links them explicitly, and it’s understandable why—after a public outburst in the temple—the authorities would act against Jesus. One might thus regard this as the correct chronological placement of the event.
The question would then by why John relocated this event to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and here I don’t see any plausible reasons that would be strong enough to move it out of what seems like a natural place in Jesus’ final conflict with the Jerusalem authorities.
You can always come up with a reason—like saying that it was to bracket Jesus’ whole ministry as one of conflict with the authorities—but this seems weak to me when it has a natural place later in the sequence.
At the End Only
On the other hand, you might argue for proposal 2 by pointing out that John is demonstrably concerned with chronology. He regularly provides chronological information that is absent from the other Gospels, so one could view his account as an attempt to clarify exactly when the incident happened.
Like the Synoptics, John notes that the incident happened when “the Passover of the Jews was at hand” (John 2:13). The question would be which Passover, and here John provides a clue. Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” after which “the Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple [Greek, naos], and will you raise it up in three days?” (John 2:19-20).
Unfortunately, this common translation appears to be mistaken. John distinguishes between the temple in general, including its courtyards—for which he uses the Greek word hieron—and the inner part of the temple that only the priests could enter—for which he uses the term naos. Here John uses naos, and the naos was completed in 18/17 B.C.
This reveals that the verse should be translated according to another grammatically possible reading, which would be “This temple [naos] has been built for forty-six years.”
The forty-sixth anniversary of the naos’s completion would be A.D. 30, so John is locating the clearing of the temple at the Passover of A.D. 30.
While some think Jesus was crucified in A.D. 30, this is mistaken. The evidence indicates Jesus was born in 3/2 B.C., and Luke states that he “was about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23) when he began his ministry. That means Jesus began his ministry about A.D. 29, so John situates the clearing of the temple toward the beginning of Jesus’ ministry—in A.D. 30—with Jesus not being crucified until A.D. 33.
The question would then by why the Synoptics present the cleansing of the temple at the end of the ministry, and here there is a reasonable suggestion. Clearing the temple is exactly the kind of public demonstration that could provoke a response from the authorities, and so it would be natural to put it just before the Crucifixion.
I thus see proposal 2 as better supported than proposal 1.
But there’s still another proposal to consider.
At Both the Beginning and the End
The Synoptics give us an indication that Jesus cleared the temple just before his death, and John gives us an indication that he cleared the temple at the beginning of his ministry.
This leads us to proposal 3—that Jesus cleared the temple twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of his ministry, like bookends.
This proposal is rejected by many scholars. They can argue that we shouldn’t say two events in the Gospels are different just because they are described differently, and the difference in timing is just too small to indicate a different event—especially when coupled with the Evangelists’ known ability to place things in their narratives for topical or theological rather than chronological reasons.
I’m sympathetic to the claim that we shouldn’t look at every little difference as indicating a different event, but in this case, I think the two clearings interpretation is the most straightforward reading of the evidence.
The reason is that John is clearly writing with supplemental intent—that is, he is intending to supplement the material found in the Synoptic Gospels by principally relating stories not found in them.
In fact, the outline of John’s Gospel is designed to interlock with the Gospel of Mark, so John expects you to already know the Synoptic tradition, including the clearing of the temple at Jesus’ final Passover in A.D. 33.
Why wouldn’t he mention both clearings, then? Because of economics. All four Evangelists keep their Gospels to the length of a single scroll because books were fantastically expensive. A single copy of Matthew cost the equivalent of more than $2,200.
On this view, because of his supplemental intent, John chose to include a clearing of the temple at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry—to make it clear that one happened then—and then because of economics, he chose to omit the one at the end so that he could keep his Gospel to a single scroll since you already know about the one at the end of the ministry.
We also have other indications that John’s clearing of the temple is designed to flesh out the Synoptics record. In Mark, Jesus’ accusers say,
We heard him say, “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands” (Mark 14:58; cf. 15:29).
Jesus doesn’t say anything like that in Mark, but John records that during the first clearing of the temple, he had said,
Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up (John 2:19).
John thus appears to be supplementing Mark to indicate when the witnesses heard Jesus say something along these lines—it was during the first cleansing of the temple, at the beginning of the ministry.
On that occasion, the temple authorities didn’t act against Jesus. However, after he grew a reputation as the Messiah over the course of his ministry (cf. John 6:15), when he proved to be a repeat offender by clearing the temple again, they did.
Final Thoughts
More can be said about all this. In his book The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, Craig Blomberg offers additional considerations favoring the two-clearings hypothesis (see pp. 216-219).
And that’s the view that I favor. I don’t dismiss the other two possibilities. I do think that the idea Jesus cleared the temple only at the end of his ministry and John placed it at the beginning for no obvious reason is weak. I think that the idea he did it only at the beginning and the Synoptists presented it at the end is stronger. But I think that the balance of evidence points toward him doing it twice—once at the beginning and once at the end.
* * *
If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video
You can also support the podcast—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!