Jesus in the Temple

(Gospel of John 2:13 - 2:25)
As the time for the celebration of the Passover was approaching, Jesus traveled to Jerusalem.  There, in the very courtyard of the Temple, he found merchants selling cattle, sheep, and doves for sacrifices.  He also saw tables set up by brokers engaged in the business of currency exchange.  Out of some lengths of rope, Jesus made himself a whip and, with it, he drove out all the cattle and the sheep and cleared the area around the Temple.  He scattered the brokers' coins and upset their tables.  Next, he accosted those who were selling the doves and ordered them, "Get these things out of here!  Quit turning the house of my Father into a marketplace!" (This made his disciples remember a passage in scripture: “A passion to protect God's house consumes me.”)

In reaction, the religious authorities demanded, “What miracle are you going to present to us to justify doing this?”

Jesus declared, "Tear this Temple down, and in 3 days time I will raise it up."

The religious authorities responded, "This Temple took 46 years to build, and you tell us you can rebuild it in only 3 days?"

But the temple that Jesus was speaking of was the temple of his own body.  After he had risen from the dead, his disciples recalled this exchange and consequently concluded that the passage in scripture referred to this pronouncement made by Jesus.

While he was in Jerusalem during the time of the Passover celebrations, many people became devotees of Jesus when they witnessed the miracles he was performing.  Jesus, though, being well acquainted with human nature, was wary of them.  (Indeed, he needed no one to tell him about men, for he knew what was in every man's heart.)

Notes
1.  As a reformist, Jesus objects to and is strongly offended by the commercialization of religion and regards business conducted on the premises of the Temple as sacrilege, a violation of its sanctity.  Here, for the first time in this Gospel, he calls himself the Son of God (earlier he assumed the title Son of Man).  And he takes it upon himself to act in the interests of his father and forcibly to expel those who have set up shop in the Temple confines.  His actions are those of a vigilante.  He does not complain to the authorities or demand that they take action.  He does not arouse popular support for his position.  Or petition the government.  No, he, a decisive, perhaps impulsive man of action, makes himself a whip and takes action on his own.  (There is no reference to his disciples helping him, though they were apparently witnesses.)  The justification he gives to the religious authorities could scarcely have been satisfying to them.  It is a wonder his actions, comprising destruction of personal property and probably assault, did not land him in the clink.  They did, of course, give him a certain reputation.

2.  There is no implication that selling animals for sacrifice or making currency exchanges are illegitimate enterprises, only that they should not conducted in or around a house of worship.  Business and religion should be separate.

3.  In the Gospels, Jewish religious authorities are continually referred to as "the Jews."   (One can't help thinking that this is an early manifestation of anti-Semitism, a curse upon the people responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.)  It is inaccurate and misleading to refer to them as "the Jews" since every person in the Gospels, bar Pontius Pilate, is a Jew, including, of course, Jesus.  There was, though, an effort to divorce Christianity from Judaism, beginning at an  early date.  The authors of the Gospels, writing decades after the crucifixion, wanted to distance Jesus from Judaic orthodoxy, if not from the Jewish nation.  Early, as well as later Christianity assayed to de-Jew Jesus and, as Christianity spread to many peoples who shared few traditions with the Jews or even Middle Eastern cultures, it had an interest in doing so.  Later, the Jews, as an entire people, would be demonized as the facilitators of Jesus' execution (ignoring the fact that without his crucifixion there would be no Christianity).

4.  The prophecy sited comes from the 69th Psalm.

5.  Construction of the Temple of Herod was known to have begun in 20 B.C.  Therefore, the actions recorded here occurred in 27 A.D.