FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

Lent III - 2012    

John 2: 13-22 

Harry T. Cook

Some might question the placement of John's version of the cleansing of the Temple this early in the Lenten liturgical cycle in as much as the synoptic gospels depict the event coming in the last week of Jesus' life with the not so subtle suggestion that it was that very event that precipitated his arrest, trial and conviction. Not so fast, says Paula Fredriksen, Boston University New Testament scholar. In the second edition (2000) of her 1988 book From Jesus to Christ (Yale Nota Bene), she offers a correction to her own work, and in so doing makes a convincing case that Jesus had probably made numerous visits to Jerusalem in his adult life, and not only the momentous one upon which Mark, Matthew and Luke made such an emphasis.

Fredriksen admits that she followed the crowd in assuming Mark's original proposal was the correct one. She writes: "These two anomalous facts -- Jesus was crucified; those closest to him were left alone -- compelled me to reevaluate both the traditions preserved in the New Testament and the various portraits of Jesus offered by current scholarship. The sort of chronology implied in the Gospel of John -- currently out of favor in most academic reconstructions -- emerged (to my surprise) as the key to resolving the dilemma posed by the facts of Jesus' execution and his disciples' survival. Only multiple trips to Jerusalem, such as John portrays, could explain how Pilate knew with such certainty that Jesus was politically harmless: so the disciples survived. And only what the pilgrim crowd thought about Jesus -- not what Jesus thought about himself -- can explain Pilate's use of crucifixion. The necessary dependence on the gesture at the Temple to explain Jesus' death, which is hardwired into any reconstruction that keeps to the outlines of Mark's presentation of Jesus' mission, diminished accordingly."/1

Fredriksen goes on to say that when she visited the site of the Temple under the tutelage of E.P. Sanders she saw its vastness and began to wonder if somebody having a tantrum and kicking over a currency exchanger's table would have attracted attention sufficient to cause the kind of major governmental intervention that the synoptic gospels suggest with the arrest and trial of Jesus. In any event, she says, only Jesus -- none of his followers -- is depicted as being crucified -- which in turns suggests that it was Jesus' long-term exposure as a countercultural figure that did him in, not the Temple "gesture," as Fredriksen puts it.

John the evangelist, as noted, placed the Temple episode early in his narrative -- on the first Passover of Jesus' public career. V. 13 indicates that Jesus went up to Jerusalem -- "up" in altitude, not "up north." This suggests that Jesus saw himself as a good Jew who would naturally have made that almost obligatory pilgrimage. The less convincing note comes next. What did Jesus expect to find in the Temple courtyard if not those who were vending the fauna necessary for the required sacrificial ritual? And since it was considered sacrilege to use Roman coinage with the likeness of Caesar stamped on it, the currency exchangers were an absolute necessity. Quite probably, they charged a fairly steep fee for their services, which could well have excited what may have been Jesus' egalitarian sentiments -- though those are more evident in the synoptic gospels than in John.

John's depiction of Jesus as saying "Take these things away" and the quotation from Psalm 69 ("Zeal for your house will consume me") are unrealistic. John goes on to depict surprised Jews asking Jesus by what authority he has upset the whole business.

That inquiry may not have been made so much in anger, as is the usual expositor's judgment, but in wonderment. "What sign can you show us for doing this?" Jesus' answer ("Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up"). The late Raymond Brown considered this an eschatological prophecy delivered by Jesus some time before his execution ca. 30-33 C.E. Fredriksen thinks that cannot be possible. She doubts that anybody much before the late 60s of that era could have conceived of the Temple being destroyed. She asks why Paul, whose work precedes that of the gospels (and John's by as many as 60 years) would not have noted such a prediction, had it been made?

The temple to which John has Jesus refer is, John says, Jesus' own body, which has the fourth gospel already in position to lead the textual procession by a somewhat circuitous path to Calvary and the Easter garden, and from there to the upper room and the lakeshore at dawn.

Two other notes: 1) We should not skim too lightly over John's reference to "the Jews" as opposed to how the synoptic gospels refer to the same people, viz. as scribes or elders or Pharisees or Sadducees. J.D. Crossan interprets the reference to "the Jews" to mean that by the time the fourth gospel was taking shape the break between synagogue Jews and Jesus Jews (my terms) was deep and final enough that "the Jews" were perceived by proto-Christians as the enemy; 2) The reference to "46 years" in v. 20 has the possibility of uncanny near-accuracy. Josephus says in one place/2 that Herod's major improvements on the Second Temple began in Herod's 18th year as ruler, or about 19 BCE. Forty-six years later would be plus/minus 27 C.E., just about the time that John, in his three-year narrative, places the cleansing of the Temple

* * * * * 

If either homilist or bible class teacher is looking for a single point at which to engage a congregation or group of inquirers in the Johannine reading of the day, he or she might explore what the church thinks it is doing in light of what Jesus is said to have done upon what John intimates is Jesus' third -- and obviously the last -- visit to the central cultic site of Judaism.

A case can be made that John scooped up the "cleansing of the Temple" narrative from the earlier synoptic gospels and used it in his own way to make it clear at the beginning of his version of things that the Temple and all for which it stood was gone, and, in some sense, good riddance. In the Temple tradition of ritual sacrifice, mostly mandated by Leviticus, the currency exchanges were there to save observant Jews from using the verboten Roman coin with a "graven image," that of Caesar, on its face. The exchangers exchanged the denarii or drachma for shekels so that the sacrifice would not be impure. Exchangers had to do business, so they probably shaved off a little profit. Neither of those things was severe enough as an offense to cause the kind of tantrum Jesus was said to have had.

I think John was saying that everything about the Temple was pass� and with it the whole package of its desert religion. John had made clear in the prologue (1:1-18) to the gospel named for him that all the business about tracing Jesus back to Abraham or even Adam was beside the point. Jesus for John was or represented the "logos," i.e. the creative energy and wisdom of the universe in a human being - and perhaps by extension in humanity as a whole. Thus connecting him in any significant way with the house that Herod built or with the lineage of an adulterous king was a mistake.

John appeared to want his late first century communities to get beyond bygone temples and their rituals to a more or less philosophical appreciation of him without whom nothing was made that was made -- he being the light, the truth, the door, the way. The cleansing of the Temple story, obviously extant in the lore long before John appropriated it for his own purposes, was made by him into a line of demarcation between a past and a future. It would help lift the Christ figure above the scrum of history and into an eternal, almost Platonic dimension of being.

Questions to ask, then: To what extent has the church catholic over a couple of millennia followed that lead? Or is it still obsessed with its temples and rituals, some of the particulars of which can actually be traced back to Leviticus?

1/ Fredricksen, xxiii.

2/ Antiquities, XV. 11,1)