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.