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The Defeat of the Jerusalem Garrison 3

The Cleansing of the Temple
Authority
The Wicked Husbandmen

Abstract

The miracle of the fig tree preceded the entry into the city but it was not a miracle. It was not the season for figs so why should Jesus expect to find sustenance on it? For those with ears to hear it shouts out that the story is a parable. The fig tree was the Roman Empire. Jesus says the fig-tree would be barren forever, Rome would be impotent. Jesus goes on to say that they could throw “this mountain” into the sea if they had faith. What was “this mountain” other than the might of Rome. A mountain is a common metaphor for an empire and is so used in Revelation. Jesus was about to attack Jerusalem. He reassured his followers with a morale boosting speech using a fig tree as a metaphor for Rome that they would succeed in defeating the gentile if they had faith in God. Later, he Roman fig-tree had withered! How Jesus and his band of Nazarenes defeated the Roman garrison of Jerusalem.

The Cleansing of the Temple

In Mark 11:15 to 19, the author of the first gospel at last chooses to give us a taste of violence. The travellers’ tales will have included violence so the gospel has to have some somewhere, but it is ludicrously toned down. Jesus—according to John, armed only with a home made whip of knotted cords—overturns the tables in the temple and takes control of it, refusing to let anyone through. Why did the tradesmen themselves not stop him if a piece of string were his only weapon? Why did the temple guard, the civil police of Jerusalem, or Roman legionaries not stop him? Roman soldiers were housed in the Antonia fortress adjacent to the temple and had easy access to the temple and the city. The answer can only be that the Jerusalem garrison had been overpowered, or had withdrawn,

The cleansing of the temple was the minimum any apocalyptic leader was expected to do. Ezekiel 40-48 prescribes the renovation of the temple in detail. An Essene like Jesus had a special hatred of the corrupt temple priesthood and would have been intent on purifying the temple at the first opportunity. Essenes could see only corruption in the way the Sadducees conducted temple business and scriptural passages dear to the Essenes prescribed the cleansing of Jerusalem of strangers and visitors. Zechariah 14:21 concludes with:

In that day there shall be no more a Canaanite in the house of the Lord of Hosts.

In the scriptures, a Canaanite is a non-Jew—a gentile!

The cleansing was not merely to stop the temple being used as a market place. The market which Jesus wrecked was in the court of the gentiles, separated by an inviolable wall from the sacred parts of the temple, the two inner courts. But pollution is not contained by walls! Jesus at the transfiguration had undertaken to cleanse the courts as the ritual in Zechariah 3:7, which Jesus followed at the transfiguration, tells us:

Thou shalt keep my courts.

Jesus makes a speech to explain his action to those remaining but it has been partly suppressed. A hint of its content is preserved in Mark 11:17 which has been introduced by Mark’s formula indicating a new source. Here he quotes Isaiah 56:7 which seems to oppose his action, and Jeremiah 7:11 which supports it. Plainly Jesus has been confronted by the temple authorities who ask him why he has cleared out the court of the gentiles contrary to the teaching of Isaiah. From Mark’s clues, his answer would have been:

Holdeth these strangers to the covenant of the Lord? It is indeed written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves. Saith the Lord, I will cast you out of my sight.

God’s condition in Isaiah for gentiles (strangers) to enter the temple was that they should join themselves to the Lord—become Jewish proselytes. These gentiles had not done so and were unclean. Since God’s holy house was unclean it was unfit for God to step into, and yet his kingdom was nigh. It answered Jeremiah’s description—it was a den of thieves which God would cast out of his sight. And so Jesus had done, following God’s will.

Naturally the Sadducees were annoyed. The evangelist has emphasized this to deflect attention from the rebellion. In Matthew 21:15-16 we get a detail missing in Mark. it reads:

And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to the Son of David; they were sore displeased, And said unto him, Hearest thou what these say? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?

Of course the children crying Hosannas in the temple were not young children as theologians infer from the subsequent quotation from Psalms 8:2. Who could believe anything other than that they were the Children of Israel weeping in gratitude and praising their king who had just purified the defiled temple? That is what they were and the meaning of the psalm proves it. The quotation in Matthew, intended for gentiles, is a misrepresentation. The psalm properly reads:

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

Jesus is saying that God ordained these Children weeping in gratitude like babies to provide the strength to subdue Israel’s enemies. And that they had done. There is confirmation in the apocryphal Book of Thomas the Contender where in one passage Jesus says:

You are babes until you become perfect,

obviously using “babes” as a metaphor, suggesting that Essene terminology for the Simple of Ephraim, besides “Children”, was “babes”. Jesus also refers to the Elect and the doctrine of the perfect suggesting this work is linked to the Essenes.

These passages end with the barren fig tree withering away, the metaphorical withering of the Romans.

Did Jesus do it alone? That was the idea Mark wanted to give but it is manifestly nonsense unless Jesus wore blue leotards. He did it with his disciples. And not just those noted as the twelve or even the pious invention, the seventy, but the whole of his army—four or five thousand, if the gospels are to be believed, a hundred to nine hundred if profane sources are accepted. The gospels imply there was little resistance to the cleansing of the temple but the misplaced story of the legion of devils disguised as swine is really the previous defeat of the Jerusalem garrison in the valley of the brook Kidron. The surviving soldiers judiciously withdrew to await reinforcements.

Could Roman legionaries really have been defeated by Jesus’s gang? There is no denying even from the gospels that the Nazarenes assumed civil power even though only temporarily, and Jesus was tried for the crime of Laesae Majestatis. If Jesus had been a lone demonstrator, as the gospels suggest, he would have been instantly arrested by the temple guards. The reason they could not is that the Nazarenes were in control. Though we have few clues about the Nazarenes’ arms or their skills in warfare, they were evidently determined and strengthened by the power of religious conviction—they were fanatics. And the Romans will have found that there was more to worry about than the Nazarene militia—they and their cause were popular.

Jerusalem at Passover time, according to Josephus, was packed with almost three million pilgrims. These are the babes and sucklings whom Jesus acknowledges as having given the strength for the Nazarenes to still their enemies. The Roman commander of the Antonia Fortress, with only two thousand infantrymen, could not contain such numbers and, having suffered a defeat beneath the Mount of Olives, must have chosen to withdraw until additional soldiers came up to Jerusalem from Caesarea on the coast. That would have taken a few days. And according to Mark, it is a few days that Jesus had in control of the city.

D E Nineham naïvely or dishonestly asks:

If Jesus was assisted by his followers why did the temple police or the Roman garrison do nothing? and Why was the matter not raised at Jesus’s trial?

Answers respectively, they bowed to a superior force, and it was. Luke 23:2 gives “perverting our nation” as one of Jesus’s crimes. It means sedition—the crime of Laesae Majestatis, inciting the people to assume the power of government illegally. A single demonstrator armed with string could not have done it.

Authority

Mark implies the events he recounts next occurred on a later visit to Jerusalem but obviously they did not. The chief priests, scribes and elders ask him:

By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority to do these things?

showing it was on the occasion of the cleansing. They are inviting him to admit he is acting as a king. Authority, sometimes translated as power, is code for a king. They are saying:

You have to be the king to do this. Who made you a king?

Jesus is unperturbed. His answer really means:

What’s it to you? You can do nothing about it.

Mark explains why. If the temple officials agreed that John the Baptist had God’s authority, that was sufficient because Jesus was his successor. If they denied it, he had the de facto authority of the crowd and the Nazarenes. Jesus was in charge, either way, and when they declined to answer there was nothing more to be said.

People recognized Jesus as having the authority or power of a king according to the scriptures. Those that had ears to hear would understand!

From this point on, in Mark, we have several debates between Jesus and the Sadducees and perhaps some Pharisees. So far as it is possible to tell previous disputes in Mark have not been with Jesus’s opponents but with his converts—the simple of Ephraim. In the Community Rule we learn that the Master shall not rebuke the men of the pit, or dispute with them, and will not grapple with the men of perdition until the day of God’s vengeance. The Damascus Rule explains that the men of the pit are the rich— primarily the Sadducees. It seems that the capture of Jerusalem and the temple for Jesus freed him to grapple with and rebuke the men of the pit. It must have signified the day of God’s vengeance—Jesus felt free to argue with the priesthood but also he must now have expected God or the archangel Michael to act.

The Wicked Husbandmen

According to Mark, Jesus now relates the parable of the wicked husbandmen, a parable which was spoken against the temple authorities (Mk 12:12). The gate of the temple sanctuary was decorated with a magnificent solid gold vine representing Israel and meant to remind the priesthood that God had given them charge of Israel as its husbandmen. There can be no argument but that the description of the vineyard is an allegorical description of Israel. The metaphor is used in Isaiah 5:1-7 and the beginning of this parable uses the same imagery. Yet commentaries on the gospels swear black and blue that this is not an allegory because parables are not allegories. Well parables are, and this plainly is.

If the vineyard is Israel and the man is God, then the wicked husbandmen are the temple priesthood who want to keep the fruits of the vineyard for themselves. They kill or maim the messengers, meaning the prophets, sent by God. Essenes regarded themselves as prophets. Only the Sadducees rejected the prophets as a point of principle—Sadducees were concerned only with the Torah not the later books of the scriptures—further proof that the story was directed at the priesthood. Finally God sends his wellbeloved son, “wellbeloved” signifying that he is a king. The parable would have continued from 12:7:

and the son evicted the wicked husbandmen and returned the vineyard to the hands of his father.

The parable justified Jesus’s eviction of the corrupt temple priesthood, and the return of Israel to its proper owner, God.

Unfortunately this happy ending was later spoiled by the son himself being crucified. Mark therefore had to alter it. From 12:7 onwards, the son was also killed, the tenants killed by the father and the vineyard handed to others—the gentile church. If Mark’s ending were genuine it would have been another prediction by Jesus of his death, a prediction of the destruction of the temple and a prediction of the gentile church. To a rational person this cries out that it was added after 70 AD.

The assertion that the vineyard owner “went into another country” signifies the feeling that God no longer dwelt with his people as he had at the time of Moses in the desert. Conventional commentators, immune to the idea of allegory, create for themselves even more problems. They say the story, to be the sort of parable they want, must be realistic and it is unrealistic to have a landlord with such patience that he sent many servants. Does it make them begin to think it is an allegory in which the landlord is God? No! The story has been altered! There should have been only three servants.

The quotation which follows is from Psalms 118:22-23, a song which cries for “the day which the Lord hath made”, meaning the day of the restoration of the kingdom. It is the psalm which the crowd sang at the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. The humble stone rejected by the builders became the head of the corner, a corner stone, the basis of the temple. The Christian interpretation is that the humble stone was Jesus, a humble man, but that is only partly true. In the psalm it is Israel that is the humble stone—compassed about by all nations, its gentile enemies. The prayer in the song is that Israel will cut off these enemies. Many of the psalms have much in them to suggest an Essene origin and the Essenes would read as Israel in this context, not the whole nation which was all Israel but the remnant of Israel that was righteous, namely, themselves. The humble stone elevated to the greatest was meant to be the replacement of the official priesthood by the humblest of men, the poor men, the Essenes. In the sense that Jesus was their leader, the Christian reading is correct.

In Matthew 21:28-32 the parable of the wicked husbandmen is preceded by another parable about a vineyard—the parable of the two sons. The parable will have followed the one about the husbandmen rather than preceded it. The second son portrays the rulers of Israel who undertook to do God’s work but did not. The first son portrays the repentant sinners—the publicans and harlots—who believed John the Baptist and were baptized. Interesting here is that Matthew indirectly acknowledges that most of the Nazarene converts came from the efforts of John the Baptist not Jesus or his disciples. Matthew also says:

John came unto you in the way of righteousness,

using the Essene expression, “the way of righteousness”. John and Jesus were Essenes.

After Jesus had finished the parable of the wicked husbandmen, the chief priests were surely outraged. They believed they were doing God’s work, and they took the fact that they were so rich to be God’s approval. They were impotent to do anything but would have expressed their outrage to Jesus. Jesus replied with his second parable.

Page Tags: Temple, Cleansing, Entry into Jerusalem, Jerusalem Garrison, Fig Tree, Gadarene Demoniac, Authority, Wicked Husbandmen, Jesus, Fig, God, Israel, Jerusalem, Jesus, King, Legion, Mark, Nazarenes, Parable, Roman

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.