Over the past few decades scholars have become loathe to label Jesus’s actions in the Temple (Mark 11:14-17; also in the other three Gospels) with the traditional phrase “The Cleansing of the Temple.” One reason is the hateful afterlife of this phrasing, because it makes it sound as if Judaism at its very heart was foul, dirty, unclean, and vile, and Jesus is the one who purified it. In other words, this phrase can be/has been taken to mean that God hates Jews and their religion and sent Jesus in order to show the true path of holiness.
The social and political implications of that view are stunning. They
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Great posting about important issue. There are multiple good descriptions about historical Jesus’s life which i have read but could you briefly give a quick summary of how Jesus and his followers who were generally accepted to be “illiterate” by many would have known about these and other texts? I always love to see how well you summarize things that are debated among scholars.
They would have heard them read in synagogue, every sabbath, since they were children.
Was there no synagogue in Nazareth?
There wsa no building apparently. But “synagogue” simply means something like “gathering” and consituted a gathering of Jews for worship (later required 10 males to be present to be considered a synagogue.)
This makes total sense. Jeremiah 7:6-7 makes clear that Yahweh will only dwell in the temple if Israelis act justly. And since they failed to do that, the Essenes, John the Baptist and followers, the Samaritans, Jesus and his caravan, and many other groups would believe the temple and its system is totally corrupt and, therefore, Yahweh doesn’t dwell there in the temple. He is not there in the Holy of holies. This fits with Malachi 3 where Yahweh will come to his temple at some point in the future.
When the Romans sacked the temple in 70CE, there was enough temple money to largely pay for the great coliseum in the city of Rome. So, the temple would have been viewed as a kind of fort Knox of monied corruption, a den of thieves among the Romans, the Herodians, the Sadducees, the high priests, and the Sanhedrin. A gigantic money-making machine in league with the occupiers. So, Mark’s gospel is saying that Jesus cleaned up the place to make it suitable for Yahweh’s holy spirit to arrive there. Just like Mark has Jesus being silent during his trials in order to fulfill Isaiah 53:7.
https://ntstudies.org/f/why-marks-gospel-has-its-content
You have covered the problems with the Gospel of Judas in the past, but it seems to put forward something important and missing from the traditional gospels. Jesus is posed as the lamb of God, a sacrifice given; as such, it seems odd for him to sacrifice himself. Would God be without God afterwards? The gospel establishes Judas as the person in the world who cherished Jesus the most and who would be sacrificing the most by giving him up. Does the scholarship seem to think this was the thread of thought which the author would be trying to portray in creating such a text: an uneasiness with the idea that God could or would sacrifice himself? If yes, are there any indications as to how widespread that train of thought would be in the early days?
Ah, good questoin. I think the idea is that a divine being (not the One God) is inhabiting the body of the man Jesus during his ministry. (In Gnosticism the divine realm was made up of numerous divinities, one of whom came into Jesus prior to his ministry). To return back to the heavenly realm the divine being needs a means of escape from the entrapment of the body, just as humans do if they want salvation. Judas makes it possible for that to happen by arranging to have the man crucified, so the divine element can escape.
It has recently been suggested that Jesus was decrying the sacrificial economy itself and was against the practice of animal sacrifice. His “temple tantrum” was thus a rebuke against the practice. The temple was purportedly constructed with built in sluices to direct the inevitable flow of blood resulting from mass sacrifices on the holy days. Did the majority of practicing Jews residing in outlying areas, too far for practical travel to the temple, practice propitiating sacrifices in their home territories on the holy days? Is there any convincing evidence, as some are purporting (christpiracy.com) that Jesus was vegetarian?
It was against Jewish law for Jews to perform blood sacrifices outside the temple. That’s one reason Jerusalem got so crazy-crowded during the annual festivals. There’s no real evidence that Jesus was a vegetarian per se, at least on principle. The fact that he ate a passover meal with his disciples would suggest otherwise. But as a poor laborer from rural Galilee, he almost certainly would not have had much, if any, access to meat in his diet. But he would have probalby eaten fish.
“It was against Jewish law for Jews to perform blood sacrifices outside the temple.”
Were sacrifices allowed outside of the temple before Deuteronomy?
Probably.
Bart, searching for “Jesus literacy” in blog posts yields good answers to my question above. Jesus’ Literacy 12 July 2013 and Could Jesus Read? 20 April 2021 both have detailed summaries which basically answer my question above.
Dr. Ehrman,
I understand from you:
Jewish Apocalypticsm came from Jews questioning the godly response to disobedience. We were obedient: why are you punishing us with 5386 BCE (Nebuchadnezzar II sacking the Temple) and taking us into exile? But chapter 11 and 12 of Daniel come from a second insult (Hellenistic enforcement).
Part of Hebrew Apocalypticism was set with Zoroastrianism’s ideas of final judgment, cosmic good and evil, and end of the age.
Why? Because the Babylonian Exile influenced Jewish Apocalypticism but the Persian Period also influenced Judaism and through that Christianity.
Would you altar that summary?
Thank you.
Steve Campbell, author of Historical Accuracy [of the Bible]
I’m not confident (and actually rather doubt) that Jewish apocalyptic thought was inspired or motivated by Zoroastrian thinking. We first find Jewish apocalypticism around 200 CE, well over a century after the Persian period, and the Zoroastrian texts that we have that look similar to early apocalyptic thought are very difficult to date as coming from that earlier period.
Dr. Ehrman,
The key to resolving the “puzzlement” of Jesus violently attacking an economic apparatus explicitly demanded by Leviticus lies in the text-critical divergence of the very passage he quotes: Jeremiah 7.
In Jeremiah 7:22, Yahweh explicitly states He commanded nothing regarding burnt offerings or sacrifices when Israel left Egypt. This creates a massive structural contradiction with the Priestly Pentateuch.
When we track manuscript lineages, the older Hebrew stream preserved by the Septuagint and echoed in early Qumran text-types maintains a much harsher, uncompromised version of this prophetic, anti-sacrificial stance. Later proto-Masoretic transmission and standardization systematically smoothed over these severe text-critical bumps to retroactively legitimize and harmonize the prophets with the institutional temple cult.
If Jesus was acting “in the line of Hebrew prophets who opposed the activities of the temple,” his violence was a direct endorsement of this older, anti-sacrificial textual tradition over the heavily managed priestly compromises.
Was his disruption a rejection of mere administrative corruption, or was he exposing a fundamentally compromised textual and institutional narrative?
My sense is that he was definitely opposed to how the temple was being run AND that he did not think sacrificial offerings were what God wanted (standing in the line of Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, etc.)
Being committed to a faith does not mean being committed to every expression of it. The Evangelists wrote at a time when the fall of the Temple needed to be explained. They argue that Jesus, the Son of God and the exponent of the true message of the Scriptures, prophesied the fall because he, like so many prophets (in their view) before him had been rejected. So they rejected the Temple in the certainty that they were expounding the message of Jesus and no less of the prophets of old. Commitment no less genuine for being radically critical. But things were to drift apart as time wore on
Dear Dr Ehrman-If I may ask for a little further clarification on an adjacent textual issue,may I ask if the late Dr Bruce Metzger regarded the ‘Holy’ in 14:26 as genuinely original to the text of the Gospel? I only ask due to your having been his colleague, and thus know his thought far better than i do.
Are you referring to John 14:26, and asking if Metzger thought the textr originally read “Holy Spirit”? I don’t re all ever talking to him about it but I believe he did. I don’t know of any major manuscripts that lack “Holy”
Dear Dr Ehrman-Thank you for your reply. Yes precisely, did the late Dr Metzger hold that the word ‘Holy Spirit’ was likely original to John 14:26? I only ask because I recently read the claim that night all our early manuscripts of John, with the possible exception of the Syriac Sinaiticus, contain ‘Holy’ in John 14:26, and I wished to inquire whether this is indeed true (it should be noted that some say that the absence of ‘Holy’ in the Syriac Sinaiticus may be due to damage to the manuscript).
Yes, I think I said that was true.
It seems to me that several stories in the gospels confirm that Jesus felt the same way as the prophets in that he preferred devotion to God and loving your fellow man to aspects of Mosaic law that center around things like ritual purity or strict adherence to the Sabbath. I’m thinking of the following verses – Luke 10:25-37, Mark 7:1-23, Matthew 12:9-14 and Matthew 9:10-13. Do you think that this preference goes back to Jesus? It seems consistent throughout the synoptic gospels.
Yup!
The *fourth-century BCE* Greek historian Theopompus reported that Iranian religious belief envisioned a cosmic struggle between Ohrmazd/Ahura Mazda/Good and Ahriman/Evil ending in the defeat of evil and the restoration of happiness.
“Good defeats Evil” is a different theological problem from the “justification of obedience” problem of Jewish apocalypticism but it is underneath Good vs. Evil. “Why are the righteous suffering if they have obeyed God?” fall under the heading Good defeats Evil.
Zoroastrianism provides a better hierarchical framework: the ultimate conflict is between Good and Evil, and history culminates in the defeat of Evil and the restoration of the Good–so obedience would not be met by suffering.
The similarity does not by itself prove borrowing, but it demonstrates that a developed cosmic Good-versus-Evil eschatology existed in Iranian religion by the fourth century BCE before your approximate date of 200 BCE for the emergence of Jewish apocalypticism. This is relevant when evaluating possible Zoroastrian influence on later Jewish apocalypticism.
So you agree with why I disagree with your response? If not, why?
One big issue is how we know when certain views developed. Our evidence is entirely textual, and the Zoroastrian texts are notoriously difficult to date.
Hey Bart,
Great article outlining the Jewish roots of Jesus and the events in the gospels.
On a related note, I was wondering what your thoughts were on whether some parts of the gospels involve the authors expecting readers to recall stories and passages of the Hebrew bible in order to understand the authors’ intended meaning.
Specifically, passages like Matthew 5:3: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, seem quite vague on first reading. Looking online some people connect the verse to similar sounding verses found in the Hebrew bible, like Isaiah 57:15 and Psalm 51:17 just to give a few examples. When trying to make sense of what Matthew 5:3 means does the author expect the readers to interpret it in light of the similar verses mentioned above? How do scholars generally try to understand the more difficult to grasp parts of the bible such as Mt 5:3?
Finally, just want to say thank you for all the awesome work you do, you’ve made learning about Christianity both more enjoyable and accessible for people like me. Cheers!
Yes, I think probably Jesus and certainly the Gospels writers were alluding to passages in Scripture to provide a kind of unexpressed/silent authentication of what they were saying.