115.  It is a mistake to think of the cleansing of the temple as a distinct Messianic manifesto.  The market in the temple was a licensed affront to spiritual religion.  It found its excuse for being in the requirement that worshippers offer to the priests for sacrifice animals levitically clean and acceptable, and that gifts for the temple treasury be made in no coin other than the sacred “shekel of the sanctuary.”  The chief priests appreciated the convenience which worshippers coming from a distance would find if they could obtain all the means of worship within the temple enclosure itself.  The hierarchy or its representatives seem also to have appreciated the opportunity to charge good prices for the accommodation so afforded.  The result was the intrusion of the spirit of the market-place, with all its disputes and haggling, into the place set apart for worship.  In fact, the only part of the temple open to Gentiles who might wish to worship Israel’s God was filled with distraction, unseemly strife, and extortion (compare Mark xi. 17).  Such despite done the sanctity of God’s house must have outraged the pious sense of many a devout Israelite.  There is no doubt of what an Isaiah or a Micah would have said and done in such a situation.  This is exactly what Jesus did.  His act was the assumption of a full prophetic authority.  In itself considered it was nothing more.  In his expulsion of the traders he had the conscience of the people for his ally.  There is no need to think of any use of miraculous power.  His moral earnestness, coupled with the underlying consciousness on the part of the traders themselves that they had no business in God’s house, readily explains the confusion and departure of the intruders.  Even those who challenged Jesus’ conduct did not venture to defend the presence of the market in the temple.  They only demanded that Jesus show his warrant for disturbing a condition of things authorized by the priests.

116.  The temple cleansing is recorded in the other gospels at the end of Jesus’ ministry, just before the hostility of the Jews culminated in his condemnation and death.  Inasmuch as these gospels give no account of a ministry by Jesus in Jerusalem before the last week of his life, it is easy to see how this event came to be associated by them with the only Jerusalem sojourn which they record.  The definite place given to the event in John, together with the seeming necessity that Jesus should condemn such authorized affront to the very idea of worship, mark this cleansing as the inaugural act of Jesus’ ministry of spiritual religion, rather than as a final stern rebuke closing his effort to win his people.  Against the conclusion commonly held that Jesus cleansed the temple both at the opening and at the close of his course is the extreme improbability that the traders would have been caught twice in the same way.  The event fits in closely with the story of the last week, because it actually led to the beginning of opposition in Jerusalem to the prophet from Galilee.  At the first the opposition was doubtless of a scornful sort.  Later it grew in bitterness when it saw how Jesus was able to arouse a popular enthusiasm that seemed to threaten the stability of existing conditions.