Christianity
Jerome on Christ’s Cleansing the Temple
Abstract
©Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 29 December 2010
Cleansing the Temple
And he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought, saying unto them, It is written My house is the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.Luke 19:45-46
S Jerome (340-420 AD) writes about this:
This appears to me more wonderful than any miracle that he did—that one man, and at that time so vilely esteemed as to be afterwards crucified, while the scribes and Pharisees were raging against him, and seeing their gains were destroyed, should have been able by the lashes of a single scourge to cast out so great a multitude, and overturn the tables, and break the seats, and do other things which an immense army could not have done!
The good Catholic saint is incredulous that any such deed should have been possible. This is Christ as Superman, more overwhelming than an army. Well, the truth is that Jesus must have had an army behind him, for the case is even more dramatic than even Jerome depicts. The temple had its own army, the temple Guard, and it is quite impossible that they would not have swiftly arrived on the scene when an apparent madman started kicking over the tables of legitimate business men.
They were not, of course, in the temple itself, but in one of its courts provided for public access, for teaching, discussion, and for the transaction of legitimate temple business, and one, probably this very one, was accessible even to gentiles. The buying and selling was of beasts for sacrifice, for by that time far more animals were sacrificed than the priets could consume themselves, or even sell off as joints for the local population, so the animals were sold for cash for the penitent to offer up to the temple. Animals had to be free of blemishes, so were good quality stock for selling on.
So, as Jerome surmises, this temple court was a very busy place, and one man would have been brought down by enough of the irate businessmen themselves, let alone the guards. But the guards could not have been far off. Moreover, adjacent to the temple was a Roman barracks called the Antonia Tower, built by Herod and named after Mark Antony, his chum. If the riot in the temple had been serious enough or maybe even just too noisy, the Roman soldiers would have emerged quickly into the temple court. Jesus could not have done what the gospels claim he did. He would have been arrested for assuming powers he did not have, and, er… crucified!
S Jerome must have known it, after all he was a well educated Roman before the western empire had fallen, and was a secretary to a Pope. The Pax Romana could not have allowed such sedition, if it were possible to stop it. It follows that neither the temple guards nor the Romans could have been in command. Jesus must have taken command of Jerusalem for him to have been able to cleanse the temple court.
