So we all know the event when Jesus cleansed the temple. Basically he turned tables with money, used a whip on animals, and almost attacked the merchants. What specific laws did he break and what would have been the penalty for this? Destruction of property? Disruption of public order?
During a tense time like Passover both the Jewish Temple authorities and the Roman military would have been on high alert for disturbances on the Temple grounds. Any such disturbance, no matter how big or how little, would have been interpreted as an attack on the Temple system which relied on collaboration with the Romans for its very existence. Many historians see the incident in the Temple as some sort of prophetic “acting out” by Jesus of the judgement to come on the corrupted and compromising Temple system. The Romans didn’t care about Jewish theology. They would consider such a disturbance to be insurrection plain and simple and would have responded accordingly.
I would say a disruption of public order.
There was an orderly way to deal with buying sacrificial animals.
Now, Jesus had been around the Temple since he was a boy.
If he really had a problem, there was a better way to bring it up to Temple authorities BEFORE the festival began.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert