Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out the people buying and selling animals for sacrifices. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves…. When the leading priests and teachers of religious law heard what Jesus had done, they began planning how to kill him.
MARK 11:15, 18
Jesus had a knack for making enemies in high places.
It was inevitable, given his mission: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released … that the oppressed will be set free” (Luke 4:18).
There was only one way for Jesus to defend the down and out. He had to take on the high and mighty. Uppity insiders ran the system that oppressed the powerless. They wrote the laws to their own advantage. They enforced the laws. And they punished folks who didn’t comply.
Among the Jewish community in Jesus’ day, no one was higher than the high priest. He ran the Sanhedrin, a council of about 70 men who ruled the Jewish nation. It was Congress and the Supreme Court rolled into one, or Parliament and the Supreme Court.
Josephus, a Jewish historian from that century, had this to say about the high priest: “He knew how to get money” (Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.2).
His techniques, as reported by Josephus:
Bribes. With well-placed investments, he bought friends among the social elite.
Forced tithing. He sent “wicked servants” to farms at harvesttime. There they stole tithes that the farmers were supposed to take to the Temple so priests on duty could share it as their salary. Essentially, the high priest confiscated the income from the lower priests. It’s a bit like a company president today taking a monster salary and leaving his grunts to fight for the leftovers.
Beatings. “He beat people who refused to give him the tithes.” Result: Some of the priests starved to death.
Jesus refused to condone exploitation by Jewish leaders. He also objected to their oppressive teachings that demanded more of the people than God ever intended. Jesus practiced what he preached, breaking their self-serving rules.
He had to die, Jewish leaders agreed.
Oddly, the Gospel writers don’t agree on what prompted that decision.
Four writers offer four possible motives:
• healing a man on the Sabbath;
• raising Lazarus from the dead;
• chasing merchants from the Temple courtyard; or
• showing up to teach in Jerusalem two days before Passover.
This assortment of possibilities has scholars scrambling to figure out what really prompted the Jewish leaders to target Jesus.
Early in his ministry, Jesus walked into a synagogue on the Sabbath, and there he saw a man with a deformed hand.
“Hold out your hand,” Jesus said. Then he healed it.
A group of Jewish Bible scholars called Pharisees were watching. They weren’t happy.
“The Pharisees called a meeting to plot how to kill Jesus” (Matthew 12:14).
The problem was that Jesus had broken one of their sacred rules.
In all of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, there’s not one word prohibiting Jews from treating sick people on the Sabbath. But there were such laws in the ancient equivalent of a church manual, an assortment of man-made laws to help people know how to apply Bible teachings to everyday life. Rabbis and other Jewish scholars had created these laws as commentary on the Bible.
Some Jewish groups, like the Sadducees, agreed with Jesus that these laws weren’t binding. Sadducees observed only the laws of Moses recorded in the first five books of the Bible.
But other Jewish groups, especially the Pharisees, observed the extra laws. Rather than admit that the laws were man-made, many Pharisees argued that God gave them to Moses for the Jews to pass along by word of mouth from generation to generation. Called the Oral Law, many of these rules are preserved in the Mishnah, a vast collection of laws and commentary that the Jews started putting into writing by about AD 200.
Here’s a clue about how vast these extra laws had become. Consider one written law of Moses: “The seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the LORD your God” (Exodus 20:10). It spawned more than a thousand oral laws. These add-on laws told Jews exactly what they should and shouldn’t do on the Sabbath.
Healing people, for example, was considered work—a no-no on the Sabbath. The only exception: if the sick person’s life was on the line. One rabbi expressed the exception this way:
If someone has a pain in the throat on the Sabbath, you may drop medicine in the patient’s mouth. But that’s only because it might be a matter of life and death. If someone is at risk of dying, treating the patient takes a higher priority than the Sabbath.
MISHNAH, YOMA 8:6
A man with a deformed hand wasn’t in danger of dying. So the Pharisees argued that Jesus should have waited a day to heal him.
These extra laws worked like a museum’s knee-high barrier, keeping people at arm’s length from a priceless vase. Step over the barrier and you get in trouble with museum officials who fear you might break the vase. Step over the line marked by the add-on laws and Jews got in trouble with Pharisees, who feared someone might break the super-sacred written law.
Jesus objected to add-on laws, especially when they made life tougher for people. “The Sabbath was made to serve us,” Jesus said. “We weren’t made to serve the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27 THE MESSAGE).
It’s not recorded in the New Testament, but given Jesus’ tendency to quote the Jewish Bible to make a point, he might have referred the Pharisees to the story of King Jeroboam. A prophet healed the king’s paralyzed hand on a holy day when work was forbidden: “The man of God prayed to the LORD, and the king’s hand was restored and he could move it again” (1 Kings 13:6).
Sometime near the end of Jesus’ ministry, he raised Lazarus from the dead. He did it right under the noses of the Jewish leaders—in Bethany, less than two miles (3 km) from the Jerusalem Temple where the high priest and others ran the Jewish nation.
Their reaction: “The leading priests and Pharisees called the high council together. ‘What are we going to do?’ they asked each other. ‘This man certainly performs many miraculous signs. If we allow him to go on like this, soon everyone will believe in him. Then the Roman army will come and destroy both our Temple and our nation’ ” (John 11:47–48).
The council feared that miracles this remarkable might lead people to mistake Jesus for the promised Messiah and rally behind him in a doomed revolt against Rome.
But it was the Jewish leaders who made the mistakes—two big ones:
Jesus was the promised Messiah. Why they rejected Jesus in spite of the astonishing proof—his miracles of healing the sick and raising the dead, along with his fulfilling of prophecies about the Messiah—serves as a testimony to the lure of power. Collaborators with the Roman occupiers, the Jewish leaders served at the pleasure of Rome. Even high priests were hired and fired by Rome. Caiaphas, the high priest of the moment, held his position for 18 years—longer than any other high priest in that century. Some didn’t last a year.
Jesus wasn’t the kind of messiah they expected. Conventional wisdom said the Messiah would be a warrior like David and that the Messiah’s kingdom would be a Jewish kingdom on earth. When the Jews later accused Jesus of being a rebel leader who wanted to free Israel, Jesus said they got that wrong, too: “My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders” (John 18:36).
Storming through the Temple courtyard on the Monday before his Friday crucifixion, Jesus flipped the merchants’ tables. He scattered their money and drove off Jews who were buying and selling live animals to sacrifice at the Temple.
“When the leading priests and teachers of religious law heard what Jesus had done, they began planning how to kill him” (Mark 11:18).
Priests ran the Temple ministry. They were angry that Jesus dared to intrude on their turf.
Besides, the merchants were providing convenience-store services to the worshippers. Pilgrims coming to the Temple for worship didn’t need to bring their own sacrificial animals. They could buy a priest-approved kosher sacrifice right there at the Temple. And men needing to pay their temple dues—an annual half-shekel temple tax—could get their Roman coins and other foreign currency exchanged for the only currency approved by the Temple priests: silver coins from Tyre, a city in what is now Lebanon. These coins were high quality. And they made a subtle statement: “We’re not Romans.”
What provoked Jesus to get so angry?
The biggest clue appears in what he said afterward: “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves” (Mark 11:17).
Bible experts don’t agree why Jesus scattered the people. Here are four of the most popular theories:
Protect the Gentile worship area. The Temple sanctuary building, which only priests could enter, was protected by three walled courtyards.
• Jewish men. Just outside the entrance into the Temple sanctuary was the courtyard of Jewish men. No women allowed.
• Jewish women. Beyond that was the courtyard of Jewish women. No Gentiles allowed.
• Gentiles. Beyond that was the sprawling courtyard of the Gentiles where anyone was allowed, including gawkers, mockers, and hawkers.
This outer courtyard was as close to the sacred Temple as Gentiles could get. So the courtyard was their sacred sanctuary for worshipping God. Signs etched in stone and painted blood red warned that any Gentiles entering Jewish sections of the Temple compound could expect execution. Temple guards patrolled the perimeter.
Problem with the theory. Evidence from history suggests that merchants worked only in one relatively small area of the massive courtyard: the red-roofed Royal Stoa along the south wall.
Maintain the purity of the Temple. Jesus wasn’t concerned about only the Gentiles. He was upset that business had wormed its way inside the sacred Temple complex.
One prophet spoke of a coming day when business deals would be handled somewhere else: “At that time there will not be any buyers or sellers in the Temple of the Lord All-Powerful” (Zechariah 14:21 NCV).
Problem with the theory. There’s no indication that the Jews considered the outer courtyard sacred. And even if they did, the business being conducted was for the benefit of worshippers. Also, why would Jesus purify a worship center he knew was doomed? “These great buildings … will be completely demolished,” he said, referring to the Temple. “Not one stone will be left on top of another!” (Mark 13:2). Roman soldiers fulfilled that prediction about 40 years later, in AD 70.
Get rid of people exploiting worshippers. Jesus’ criticism that the Jews had turned God’s place of prayer into a “den of thieves” could suggest price gouging. For the convenience of on-site currency exchange and a livestock market, worshippers paid a convenience premium. And it’s possible that priests charged the merchants a fee for the right to conduct business on Temple property—especially given Josephus’ report that the high priest knew how to shake the shekel tree.
Problem with the theory. Jesus didn’t chase out just the merchants. He ran off their customers, too.
Announce that God has finally rejected the temple system of worship.
The Jews had perverted the temple worship system God had given them, so God was about to shut the system down.
They had perverted it in at least two ways. Jesus hinted at both in his one-line criticism.
1. “My Temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations.”
The Jews built their worship around a caste system, with foreigners as outcasts, relegated to the outside courtyard. Gentiles couldn’t get near the altar, located inside the courtyard of Jewish men.
It’s as if the Jews insisted on ignoring one of their most famous prophets from 700 years earlier: “I [God] will also bless the foreigners who commit themselves to the LORD. … I will bring them to my holy mountain of Jerusalem…. My Temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:6–7).
2. “You have turned it into a den of thieves.”
By “den of thieves,” Jesus didn’t mean that’s where Jewish culprits were doing their thieving. He meant it was their den—their safe house.
The Temple was no longer a holy place. It had become a hole-in-the-wall hideout where the Jews felt safe, secure, and forgiven—in spite of all the nasty stuff they did outside the Temple. They figured they could sin their way through each year and then come to the Temple at Passover or some other annual festival, offer a sacrifice, and then walk away clean as a snowflake.
One prophet had warned against harboring a false sense of security in the Temple: “Do you really think you can steal, murder, commit adultery, lie … and then come here and stand before me in my Temple and chant, ‘We are safe!’—only to go right back to all those evils again? Don’t you yourselves admit that this Temple, which bears my name, has become a den of thieves?” (Jeremiah 7:9–11).
Problem with the theory. Just because Jesus quoted Isaiah and Jeremiah doesn’t mean he felt limited to their context. He could have meant something entirely different.
ANOTHER JESUS AT THE TEMPLE
Jesus Christ wasn’t the only Jesus on record in the first century to predict the collapse of the Temple, Jerusalem, and the Jewish nation.
About 30 years after Jesus Christ, and four years before the Jews revolted against Rome in AD 66, a farmer named Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem belting out a terrifying prediction. It was a prophecy he lived to see fulfilled.
Here are excerpts of his story, as reported by the first-century historian Josephus:
Jesus began yelling: “A voice cries out from the East, a voice from the West, a voice from the four winds. It’s a voice against Jerusalem, the holy temple, and the entire Jewish race!”
Day and night he continued yelling this, all over the city. Some of the city leaders had him beaten severely. But he had nothing to say for himself or to the men who beat him.
Yet afterward he continued his chanting through town until the city rulers—fearing his message came from God, as it proved to be—took him to Roman governor Albinus. The governor had Jesus beaten until his bones were showing. Yet he said nothing to defend himself and he shed no tears. Instead, with every stroke of the whip he repeated in a dreadfully mournful tone, “Woe, woe to Jerusalem….”
Jesus continued this lament for seven years and five months … until after the revolt. When the Romans returned and surrounded Jerusalem, he walked around the outside wall crying out as loud as he could: ‘Woe, woe to the city again, and to the people, and to the holy temple!’ Just as he added, “Woe, woe to myself also,” a stone from one of the Roman catapults killed him instantly.
WARS OF THE JEWS(BOOK 6, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 3)
After cleaning house at the Temple, Jesus followed up by teaching the crowds massed around him.
“When Jesus had finished … he said to his disciples, As you know, Passover begins in two days, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.’ At that same time the leading priests and elders were meeting at the residence of Caiaphas, the high priest, plotting how to capture Jesus secretly and kill him. ‘But not during the Passover celebration,’ they agreed, ‘or the people may riot’ ” (Matthew 26:1–5). Luke 22 reports the same thing.
Passover was the most popular Jewish festival of the year. It commemorated the Exodus—the release of the Jewish people from Egyptian slavery during the time of Moses. The name comes from the last of the 10 plagues, when the angel of death “passed over” the Jews and killed the oldest child in each Egyptian family. That tragedy prompted Egypt’s pharaoh to release the Jews—something the earlier nine plagues of frogs, locusts, and other miseries had failed to do.
In Jesus’ day, Jewish pilgrims came to Jerusalem by the hundreds of thousands to worship at the Temple and to pray for a messiah to free them from Roman oppression. Greater Jerusalem was home to an estimated 100,000 souls, give or take a few tens of thousands; estimates vary. During Passover week, the number of souls in Jerusalem exploded to anywhere from double to ten times the population—up to a million. Estimates vary that wildly.
With so many Jews in town, most of them fed up with a century of Roman occupation, there was always potential for an uprising. Governor Pilate brought extra Roman soldiers to town to help maintain peace. Caiaphas, appointed by the Romans, had a vested interest in peace as well. He didn’t want any trouble. He wanted a strategy for quietly arresting Jesus and shutting him up forever.
Bible experts debate which day Caiaphas called this final strategy session. Matthew says it was two days before Passover. But there’s confusion about which day Passover began that year, sunset Thursday or sunset Friday. Many scholars say that Matthew was talking about Jesus’ celebration of the Passover meal with his disciples, better known as the Last Supper. They ate that meal on Thursday evening, hours before Jesus’ arrest. If so, Caiaphas plotted the arrest of Jesus on Tuesday.
He need not have bothered. Thursday night, one of Jesus’ disciples, Judas, would agree to lead the Temple police to a place where they could arrest Jesus privately, away from adoring crowds.
The four accounts of the Jewish leaders plotting to kill Jesus don’t necessarily clash. It’s not as if one Gospel writer got it right while the others should have checked their sources. Instead, the reports suggest that the Jewish leaders had been plotting exit strategies for Jesus throughout his ministry.
They had no idea that the most degrading exit they could arrange would only make his comeback seem all the more wonderful.