THAT FRIGGIN’ FIG TREE
After the Triumphal Entry, Mark presents us with a lame anticlimax: “And he entered Jerusalem, and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve” (Mark 11:11). We imagine Jesus glancing at his wrist sundial and saying, “Gee, I guess we should have gotten an earlier start. Peter, I told you we should have skipped that brunch buffet.” Next day, the group is retracing their steps to Jerusalem when Jesus (hungry, since they did skip the buffet this time) walks over to a fig tree, looking to munch a couple of figs. “When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs.” So he flies off the handle, blaming the tree for spiting him: “May no one ever eat fruit from you again” (Mark 11:11–14). The next morning, as they pass the place, they see the recalcitrant tree has withered down to the roots. Matthew, seeking to heighten the impact, rewrites the scene so that the tree withers as soon as Jesus reads it the riot act (Matt. 21:18–19). Zap. I'll tell you what the real miracle is here: O’Reilly and Dugard accept this tall tale as historical fact, I know not how. But surely at this point, if not before, any reader hoping for a historical account of Jesus had better drop Killing Jesus and head back to the bookstore.
Let's take a look at the rings of the poor fig tree. It belongs to that genre of extravagant tales of the super-powered and petulant Kid Jesus, just like the story of young Jesus outclassing the elders in the Temple (Luke 2:41–52) and the one about him changing water into wine to bail the host out of an embarrassing jam (John 2:1–10). Like the latter, the fig tree tale has been transferred to the adult career of Jesus, but its origins are nonetheless clear. The story is a gross embarrassment to Christians today, but it already made Mark cringe. He didn't feel at liberty to omit it, so he tried to redeem it by tacking on a superfluous stock saying about faith and forgiveness.
Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, “Be taken up and cast into the sea,” and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.1 Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you receive it, and you will. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against any one, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. (Mark 11:22–25).
It sounds like somebody is trying to change the subject. One can imagine the disciples answering, “Uh, yeah, great. But what happened to the fig tree?” The unintentional comedy is the result of Mark trying to dilute the effect of the grotesque original.
But he is not done with it. Mark has split up the story (I think Matthew decided to restore the original unity, having the curse and the withering up occur all at once) so that its two halves (Mark 11:12–14 and 20–21) now bracket the episode of the Temple cleansing (Mark 11:15–19). That way, Mark makes the fig tree story into a symbolic comment on the Temple: it has failed to produce the fruit of repentance and righteousness when God came looking for it (Mark 12:1–3, etc.), so the Temple is doomed (Mark 13:1–2). One has to marvel at conservative scholars2 who manage to convince themselves that the tree blasting actually occurred, but that Jesus did it as “an acted parable.” I'm afraid that's not much help.
Luke lacks the whole incident. He seems perhaps to have rewritten it into a couple of sayings: “If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine tree, ‘Be rooted up, and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you” (Luke 17:6) and
A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, “Lo, these three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down; why should it use up the ground?” And he answered him, “Let it alone, sir, this year also, till I dig about it and put on manure. And if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” (Luke 13:6–9)
This is what I think happened, because the parable has Lukan fingerprints on it; it features dialogue in which a man in a tight spot manages to think quickly and find a way out (as in Luke 15:16–18, etc., 16:2–5, etc., 18:4–5), as well as the key Lukan motif of a delay of the Day of Judgment (as in Luke 17:22, 19:11ff., 21:8, 23–24). So Luke very likely decided to get rid of Mark's embarrassment by splitting it up into a saying and a parable, each of which looks suspiciously reminiscent of the Markan fig tree story. On the other hand, it is quite possible that Luke had access to two earlier bits that eventually got combined to form Mark's version, and for obvious reasons Luke preferred the original versions. Impossible to say.
GOD'S MAN CAVE OR MAN'S GOD CAVE?
O’Reilly and Dugard's fixation on the Johannine God-man Christology permeates even the Temple cleansing story. “The Temple guards are tense. They know that arresting Jesus is now completely justifiable. He has interfered with the flow of commerce and called the Temple his home—as if he were God” (p. 193). As usual, this represents an outrageous twisting of the text. As our authors know quite well, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ Jesus says, quoting Isaiah, the prophet who predicted so much of the Nazarene's life” (p. 193). Who did what? Here we are again, with theology being dumped full strength into this ostensible history book. You just state flat-out as a matter of fact that Isaiah clairvoyantly outlined Jesus’ biography in advance? As we have already seen, this is an exegetical mirage. Even a cursory look at any of the supposed prophecies shows that claims like O’Reilly and Dugard are making here are complete misreadings of the Old Testament texts, without any regard for the historical contexts. O’Reilly and Dugard do not even supply any specifics. It is obvious they are simply proof-texting John 12:41, “Isaiah said this because he saw his glory and spoke of him.” That's what fundamentalists do. It's enough for them.
But besides this, how stupid do O’Reilly and Dugard think the Temple police were (or that their readers are)? Jesus is not shown claiming the Temple is his own bachelor pad. He is quoting Isaiah speaking for God.3
It is significant that O’Reilly and Dugard quote from Luke, who has Jesus say, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’” (Luke 19:46). But Luke has abridged Mark at this point, leaving out a crucial portion of the Isaiah passage. Mark has: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?” (Mark 11:17). This is important if we want to know how the earliest version, Mark's, understood Jesus’ motivation. Remember where this scene is supposed to be taking place: the Court of the Gentiles, the only portion of the huge sanctuary non-Jews were allowed to enter. Mark implies that Jesus is angry over the livestock trading and currency exchange because the chaos made it impossible for the pious Gentiles to follow the Jewish worship.4 Matthew and Luke have clipped this portion of Mark's Isaiah quote, perhaps unwittingly obscuring Mark's point. John has omitted the Isaiah quote altogether. We will soon see that even Mark's version may be an attempt to whitewash a still earlier version of the Temple incident.
What about the Jeremiah quote? Understandably, O’Reilly and Dugard take the phrase “you have made it a den of robbers” (Luke 19:46b) to imply that the Temple authorities were ripping off the pilgrims, inflating both the price of sacrificial animals and the exchange rates. But not so fast. Looking at the Jeremiah passage, we find that “robbers” does not intend literal monetary abuse but rather general hypocrisy and corruption:
Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are delivered.”—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? (Jer. 7:9–11).
Jeremiah doesn't even seem to be speaking to the priests but to the people, whose defeat at the hands of Babylon he predicts will soon fall on the nation for these sins. The Temple has become a hideout for the “pious” villains who gather there to pray. We see the same scenario in Isaiah 1:10–20. It is reasonable to assume that Jesus or Mark understood the point of the original passage and meant the same thing by quoting it.5 And in this case, O’Reilly and Dugard's nasty vilification of the Temple priesthood collapses: Jesus overthrowing the tables is “something [the crowd] wanted to do every time they stood in that long line to change their money, watching corrupt men siphon off a significant piece of their earning” (p. 193).
TURNING THE TABLES
Even if we disregard the wholly implausible move O’Reilly and Dugard have made in retaining the Johannine Temple cleansing at the beginning and the Synoptic cleansing toward the end, we still choke on the bone of the restraint shown by the Jewish Temple police and the Roman troops. It just does not compute that armed troops who were posted about the Temple to deal with emergencies just like this one would have done nothing to stop Jesus from creating havoc.6 Again, if we rationalize the story as O’Reilly and Dugard do, “explaining” that the authorities gave a Benghazi-style “stand down” order to their troops, we would have to ask why there are such troops there in the first place. Why wouldn't the general policy be to let trouble-makers get away and then apprehend them later by stealth? They even leave him at liberty to teach for the next few days? It just doesn't make any sense. If these guys had itchy trigger fingers, something like Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple would be just the kind of action they had been waiting for. They would have, they must have, nabbed him on the spot. So we have to wonder if we are reading a severely edited version of the events.
S. G. F. Brandon argued that if we are to justify key details of the narrative, even as it now stands, we must posit a much larger-scale disturbance fomented by Jesus, and a violent one.7 Consider the vast size of the Court of the Gentiles. Mark tells us that once he had made a mess of the tables, and so on, Jesus “would not allow anyone to carry anything [literally, “any vessels,” i.e., sacrificial implements] through the temple” (Mark 11:16). Now how could he have managed that? “Hey, you. I told you not to bring that stuff back in here.” “Oh, sorry, sir. What was I thinking?” No, Jesus would absolutely have to have secured all the doors in this huge expanse with his own armed men. And then we just cannot picture the Temple guards letting them get away with it. Mustn't there have been a pitched skirmish? Later we will read about Barabbas, who was “among the rebels who had committed murder in the insurrection” (Mark 15:7). Wait a second…what insurrection? Maybe the one that Jesus ignited right there in the Temple? It had to be pretty recent, in any case, right? It seems most plausible to picture Jesus being arrested in the Temple along with Barabbas and the others. Maybe the scene that we now read as set in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus’ men defend him with swords and violence, was originally located in the Temple, on the very day Jesus “turned the tables.” The two men crucified along with him at Golgotha are called lestai, “robbers,” the very term Josephus uses for the anti-Roman fighters in the Jewish-Roman War of 66–73 CE. Jesus is said to be crucified by the Romans as “the man who would be king,” King of the Jews.
Brandon reasoned that Jesus had been executed by the Romans for their own good reasons, not merely as a favor to their Jewish allies.8 If they had simply been accommodating Caiaphas and his buddies (“Sure, we can take care of it for you, old man”), why wouldn't Pilate have granted the Sanhedrin permission to stone him as a blasphemer, which was supposedly the crime for which they had condemned him? The answer always offered at this point is that the Sanhedrin feared rioting among the people if they were to have their own men execute Jesus. But this brings us back to the question: why have armed Temple troops at all, if not to control and disperse angry crowds? And why would the Romans not be similarly hesitant to execute Jesus and spark violent unrest? Because they had armed troops? Well, again, so did the Sanhedrin. In fact, the gospels place a large crowd of them at Gethsemane to arrest Jesus. They could use them. They did use them. Apologists are trying to steer us into the same neighborhood they occupy when they defend the plausibility of the scene where a crowd of roustabouts intimidate Pilate into condemning Jesus and releasing Barabbas. It's just as ridiculous.
If the story of Jesus’ arrest by Temple guards (now set at Gethsemane) was originally the direct response to the Temple incident, we would have to posit that all the intervening material we now read in the gospels has been sandwiched in. Some of it may have been fictionalized, some of it transferred from elsewhere in the original plot line, as we shall see. For instance, it would be natural for the Last Supper to have preceded the Temple incident.
Brandon suggested that the role of the Jewish authorities seems superfluous, since the Romans would have had their own reasons for killing Jesus.9 So why are the Jews part of the story? To shift the blame from the Romans, whose favor the gospel writers were hoping to curry. On Brandon's hypothesis,10 Christianity has mutated from a failed revolutionary movement (though also religious, just as the Taliban is religious) into a quietistic, Rome-accommodating faith community and sought desperately to hide their now-repudiated anti-Roman roots. As Christians were being marginalized within Judaism and well on their way to emerging as a separate religion with an increasingly non-Jewish membership, they chose to downplay Rome's role in their founder's death, making the Jewish leaders, then the Jews collectively, primarily responsible for the execution. Jewish objections to Christian doctrines were retrojected into the lifetime of Jesus, with the result that, at the Sanhedrin trial, Jesus is condemned for teaching what was really subsequent Christian doctrine (Jesus as God's Son, seated beside him in heaven, etc.).11 Even at that, though, traces of the original charges can still be seen when “false” witnesses at the trial say they recall Jesus threatening to destroy the Temple (something John 22:19 admits he said, though John reinterprets it). This reframing of the charges against Jesus allows Mark to have the Jews condemn Jesus for a religious offense, blasphemy (reflecting Jewish estimates of Christian belief as blasphemy and heresy). But since much had been made (and still is) not simply of the death by whatever means but specifically of the crucifixion of Jesus, it was impossible to erase any and all Roman involvement. The solution of Mark (or of his predecessors) was to have the Jewish Sanhedrin engineer Jesus’ death and then manipulate the Romans into doing their dirty work. The story portrays it as the result of the Jewish authorities wanting to avoid popular displeasure for doing away with a popular prophet, but the underlying reality was the Christians’ motivation to shift blame to the Jews while not being able to eliminate Roman involvement completely.
SEAMLESS GARMENT OR WHOLE CLOTH?
And yet, if, à la Brandon, there may be much more to the Temple story than appears on the surface, there may also be much less. Burton L. Mack thinks that there was no Temple incident in the first place.12
The temple act cannot be historical. If one deletes from the story those themes essential to the Markan plots, there is nothing left over for historical reminiscence. The anti-temple theme is clearly Markan and the reasons for it can be explained. The lack of any evidence for an anti-temple attitude in the Jesus and Christ traditions prior to Mark fits with the incredible lack of incidence in the story itself. Nothing happens. Even the chief priests overhear his “instruction” and do nothing. The conclusion must be that the temple act is a Markan fabrication.
Christian readers are too close to the text and take too much for granted. It is simply unthinkable for Jesus to have gotten as “O’Reilled up” as he did and to have disrupted the sacred and inviolable ritual of the Temple, upon which the continual spinning of the world depended—with no on-the-spot repercussions, nor any for days after.13 Let me give an analogous example from the other end of the Bible. There are several stories in Genesis that do not fit with the Flood story of Noah. For one, Noah's very name is punningly explained (as typical for the Bible) as deriving from the “rest” he brought to toiling humankind (Gen. 5:28–29) by inventing wine (Gen. 9:20). Such a naming pun always seeks to make the name anticipate the great thing for which the character will be remembered. Obviously whoever originated this etymology for “Noah” had never heard of him building an ark and surviving a universal cataclysm. Similarly, there are ancient culture heroes venerated as the founders of certain arts and lifestyles: Jabal, “father of those who dwell in tents and have cattle” (Gen. 4:20) and Jubal, “father of all those who play the lyre and the pipe” (Gen. 4:21). The present tense implies that the writer assumes that all nomad herders of his day can trace their way of life back to Jabal, while all musicians of his day are continuing the playing begun by Jubal. That means the writer envisioned an unbroken cultural continuity between these primordial culture heroes and his own day. And that means he knew of no world-erasing flood in the meantime. Everything would have had to be rediscovered, reinvented. After all, there's nothing about God telling Noah to go around recruiting one of every profession or talent to get aboard the ark so as to preserve the gains of culture. No, Genesis combines variegated sources, snippets, and traditions into one vast and colorful patchwork quilt, and a marvelous one it is. But it is not consistent. And the same is true for the gospels. Mack is pointing out how the whole section of Mark (and his successors) in which Jesus teaches in the Temple makes better sense without the cleansing of the Temple, which would have made the rest impossible. So Mark has either created the Temple incident or dropped a story of it into the middle of a sequence that had no place for it. Nor would this be any new thing for Mark, who elsewhere seems to group things together as long as they share the same basic topic even if they contradict one another on how they deal with it.14
One of the strengths of the Brandon “Zealot hypothesis”15 is how strikingly similar the scenario it envisions—Jesus leading a raid against the Temple—is to various events of the Jewish War as described by Josephus, who lived through those events some forty years later. For instance, with the Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday we may compare the grand entrance of Simon bar-Giora. He was an anti-Roman rebel who had also been fighting a rival Jewish faction, the Zealots (i.e., the ones who actually “copyrighted” the name), who in turn were allied with a group of Idumeans. Simon's opponents, led by one John of Gischala, had successfully occupied Jerusalem. But then their Idumean allies turned on John's Zealots, cornering them in the Temple compound. Then the tricky Idumeans, now having sided with the Temple priests, hit upon the scheme to call upon Simon, who had remained with his men outside the city walls. With these reinforcements, they could crush the Zealots.
In order to overthrow John, they voted to admit Simon, an olive branch in hand, to bring in a second tyrant to be their master. The resolution was carried out, and they sent the high priest, Matthias, to implore Simon to enter, the man they so greatly feared! The invitation was supported by those citizens who were trying to escape the Zealots and were anxious about their homes and property. He in his lordly way expressed his willingness to be their master, and entered with the air of one who intended to sweep the Zealots out of the city, acclaimed by the citizens as deliverer and protector. (Josephus, The Jewish War, 5, 9, 11)16
So let's take stock: here is a would-be Messiah entering Jerusalem to the acclaim of crowds who pin their hopes for deliverance on him. He is to cleanse (“sweep”) the Temple of Zealots, whom Josephus habitually called lestai, “robbers,” who were holed up inside. And Josephus even mentions the figurative waving of an olive branch, the sign of peace and reconciliation, recalling the palm fronds waved at Jesus by the adoring Jerusalem crowd.
At first, the parallels seem to support Brandon's version of the Temple event, that it was one more act of revolutionary religion. But on second thought, perhaps the two stories are rather too similar, too close for comfort. It begins to look as if the gospel sequence of the Triumphal Entry and the cleansing of the Temple has been borrowed and rewritten from Josephus, or at least is a reflection of the same events Josephus describes. They must have been common knowledge, after all. And we will see that other incidents in the Passion narrative are uncannily paralleled in contemporary sources, with the same implications of borrowing and fictionalizing.
Whether Brandon or Mack is right (and they both seem to have pretty strong arguments to me), either one of them is to be preferred to the way the ancient evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or their modern successors, O’Reilly and Dugard, tell the tale.
TURN DOWN THAT NOISE
Matthew 21:14 shows a party of indignant priests and scribes buttonholing Jesus in the Temple, but they are not calling him on the carpet for overturning the tables and general hell-raising, but only for accepting the acclamations of children. Again, the Temple ruckus looks like a bomb going off without making a noise. This is what they complain about: kids singing? Of course, this episode does not presuppose the Temple cleansing.
And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them [just like that]. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they were indignant; and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast brought perfect praise’?”
O’Reilly and Dugard think this happened and that Jesus’ opponents took his scripture quoting to be a declaration of his own divinity, since, in the quoted passage, Psalm 8:2, “thou” is addressed to God. But this is to read a bit too much into a text that, as usual, is quoted for its own sake, purposely indifferent to the original context. How do O’Reilly and Dugard (who merely attribute their own inference to the priests and scribes) know Mark and/or Jesus do not mean that, in this instance, God has enjoined that children bring forth “perfect praise” to Jesus, not to himself? What is the point of Psalm 8:2 in context? Look at the verse just before it.
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is thy name in all the earth.
Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted
By the mouths of babes and infants.
The point of the psalm seems to be, almost pantheistically, to say that the whole creation shows and magnifies God just by doing the things he created it to do. Thus every coo and cry of every baby is perfect hymnody. It is reminiscent of Mark 10:13–16, where Jesus complains that the disciples cannot see that they must welcome children and not think them a bother, because the little ones are the angels of God's kingdom. Maybe Matthew, who repeats the children's saying from Mark, is trying to rebuke the high-and-mighty religious elites in the same way as he and Mark rebuked the self-important disciples.
But does this charming scene reflect actual events in the life of Jesus? It looks like an alternative version of a scene we find over in Luke 19:37–40, at the climax of the ride into Jerusalem, where it makes a bit more sense.
As he was now drawing near, at the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the multitude said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
In both stories some are praising Jesus in similar terms for miracles they had seen him perform, and some of Jesus’ sour-pussed adversaries urge him to put a stop to it. Jesus’ rejoinders look different, but I think they boil down to the same thing, as both of them look to me like Matthew's and Luke's attempts to make sense of a fragmentary Aramaic/Hebrew original. The word for “sons” is beni, while that for “stones” is ebeni (as in Eben-ezer, “stone of help”). The words of John the Baptist in Matthew 3:9 and Luke 3:8, “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham,” use a pun based on this similarity between the words. I am suggesting that Luke's chorus of “children” represents the beni, while Matthew's speaking “stones” come from what he read as ebeni. If the original had read clearly one way or the other, both evangelists would probably have had it the same way, so, as it stands, I think both are independent attempts to plug the holes in a fragmentary source and to find an appropriate spot to place it in the timeline, someplace where Jesus is being praised, and somebody doesn't like it. Thus, neither one can be trusted as a historical report.