Since the Temple is the parent and original, it is only to be expected that one should find ruins and fragments of it surviving everywhere, along with more or less ambitious attempts to recapture its lost glory and authority. And since Evil cannot create or beget but can only pervert, corrupt, wrest, and destroy what Good has accomplished, it is not surprising that the most depraved of practices take their rise in the Temple. Let us recall that the mysterious “Watchers” in Enoch’s day carefully kept the ordinances that had come down from Adam, and claimed sanctity by reason of possessing a knowledge which they had completely subverted. How roundly Isaiah rebukes and denounces the ordinances of the temple—the new moons, the fasts, the prayers, the offerings, and so on, when performed by the Jews in the wrong spirit! While the temple still stood in Jerusalem, the brethren of Qumran looked forward for the coming of “a true Temple” after God’s own heart. When Satan assayed to try the Lord, it was to the pinnacle of the temple that he took him; did the Evil One, then, have access to the holy place? For answer we need only recall that Jesus declared that the House of his Father had been turned into a den of thieves as he drove the money changers from its courts—a reminder that large financial institutions today, as well as government buildings, occupy structures faithfully copied from the classical fanes of ancient temples and add to the bronze and marble the sanctimonious hush of holy places. Thus the temple economy has been perverted along with the rest.
When the symbolic killing and eating of beasts were supplanted by lustful and vengeful rites of human sacrifice; when the feasts of joy and abundance became orgies, and the sacred rites of marriage were perverted to the arts of the temple hierodules; when the keepers of the records and teachers of wisdom became haughty and selfrighteous scribes and Pharisees—then was demonstrated the principle that any good thing can be corrupted in this world, and as Aristotle notes, as a rule, the better the original, the more vicious the corrupted version. When “two men went up into the temple to pray” (Luke 18:10 [Luke 10:7]), both were ostensibly going about their devotions; yet the one was bringing hypocrisy and vanity into the holy place. So we might seriously consider the proposition that whatever we see about us in the way of the institutions of civilization, good or bad, may in the end be traced to the temple.
The First Cleansing of the Temple
At Passover Jesus drives the traders and money-changers from the temple (“make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise”), and to those who demand a sign he answers, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” speaking of the temple of his body.
Note. This first cleansing (distinct from the later one in Passion week) is preserved in John alone.
? How to read this edition
The reading is the Joseph Smith Translation, in the text of the Covenant Christian Edition, carried beside each Gospel and set against the King James baseline. Headers give both numbering systems: the CCE chapter and verse, and the traditional KJV reference.
12After this he went down to Capernaum — he and his mother, and his brethren, and his disciples. And they continued there not many days. 13And the Jews’ Passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem 14and found in the temple those who sold oxen, and sheep, and doves, and changers of money, sitting. 15And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables. 16And he said unto them who sold doves, Take these things from here. Make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise. 17And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of your house has eaten me up.
18Then spoke the Jews and said unto him, What sign do you show unto us, seeing you do these things? 19Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. 20Then said the Jews, Forty-six years was this temple in building, and will you rear it up in three days? 21But he spoke of the temple of his body; 22when therefore he had risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them, and they believed remembered the scripture and the word which Jesus had said unto them. 23Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover on the feast day, many believed on his name when they saw the miracles which he did. 24But Jesus did not commit himself unto them because he knew all men things 25and needed not that any should testify of man, for he knew what was in man.
A Den of Thieves
Nibley, the temple’s great modern scholar, read the cleansing as the verdict on a sacred economy gone wrong, and saw the same perversion in the marble-and-bronze “temples” of finance today.
The Messiah Who Would Rebuild the Temple
Behind “destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” lies a contested expectation Barker recovers: that the Messiah, the Son of God, would tear down the second temple and build the true one.
It was believed - how widely we do not know - that the Messiah would destroy the temple built by the group from Babylon and build a new, true temple. Using the convention of describing the people of Israel as sheep, 1 Enoch predicted that the old house would be folded up and carried away, and the LORD of the sheep would erect a new house (1 Enoch 90.28-29). In Matthew’s (and Mark’s), account of Jesus’ trial, witnesses claimed that Jesus said: ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days’; to which Caiaphas replied: ‘Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God’ (Matt.26.61 [Matt. 12:14],63). The high priest, then, expected the Messiah, the Son of God, to destroy and rebuild the temple. In the opening scene of his gospel, John used these same titles to introduce Jesus, but added two more: the King of Israel and the Lamb of God, ‘Lamb’ being the other meaning of the Aramaic word ‘Servant’. John chose titles that present Jesus as one of the sacral kings of the first temple : he had John the Baptist identify Jesus as the Lamb of God, the one on whom the Spirit came to mark him as the Son of God; then he had Andrew tell Simon Peter ‘We have found the Messiah’; and then Nathanael saying ‘You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel’ (John 1.33-34 [John 1:5], 41, 49).
Throughout his gospel, John presents the Jews as a group who have not only rejected the ways of the original temple; they have forgotten them. They no longer understand them. As he presents his case, John uses bitter irony against those he calls the Jews, culminating with his account of Good Friday. He has Pilate say to the Jews: ‘Behold your King’; and he has the chief priests answer: ‘We have no king but Caesar’ (John 19.14-15 [John 10:11]). John described the crucifixion as the moment when Jesus was ‘raised up’ (John 3.14 [John 2:2]; 8.28; 12.32, 34), and here the allusion is to the LORD whom Isaiah saw in the temple, high and lifted up, and also to the Servant who was exalted and lifted up before he suffered so that his knowledge could make many righteous (Isa.52.13 [Isa. 19:1]; 53.11).
In this paper I shall set out some of the ways in which John used this first temple royal symbolism and show that he used irony to emphasise how much the Jews had lost touch with their original temple teaching and beliefs.
Ellipses mark omissions within Barker’s own sentences.