Jesus Drives the Traders from the Temple

In Mark’s account, on the day after he rode into Jerusalem, Jesus went into the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and buying there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves, and he would not let anyone carry anything through the temple (Mark 11:12, 15–16). Matthew and Luke tell the same incident straight after the entry into the city (Matthew 21:10–12; Luke 19:45).

He taught as he did it: “Isn’t it written, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations?’ But you have made it a den of robbers!” (Mark 11:17). The first phrase comes from Isaiah’s promise that foreigners will be welcome in the temple (Isaiah 56:6–7). The second comes from the sermon in which Jeremiah warned that the temple would be destroyed as Shiloh had been (Jeremiah 7:11–14). Matthew adds that the blind and the lame came to Jesus in the temple and he healed them, and that children were shouting “Hosanna to the son of David” (Matthew 21:14–15).

The chief priests and the scribes heard of it and looked for a way to destroy him, but they feared him, because the crowd was astonished at his teaching (Mark 11:18). When he came back to the temple, the chief priests, scribes and elders asked him by what authority he did these things. He replied with a question of his own, whether the baptism of John was from heaven or from men. They would not answer, and he declined to answer them (Mark 11:27–33).

John tells the incident near the beginning of his Gospel, at an earlier Passover. Jesus found people selling oxen, sheep and doves, and money changers at their tables. He made a whip of cords, drove them all out with the animals, poured out the coins and said, “Don’t make my Father’s house a marketplace!” (John 2:13–16). Asked for a sign, he answered, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” John explains that he was speaking of the temple of his body, and that the disciples remembered it after he was raised from the dead (John 2:18–22).

A saying about the temple follows Jesus to his death. At the hearing before the high priest, Mark says, false witnesses claimed to have heard him speak of destroying the temple and building another in three days, and passers-by threw the same words at him on the cross (Mark 14:57–58; 15:29). The temple itself, which Herod the Great had begun to rebuild some fifty years earlier (Josephus, Antiquities 15.380), was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70; see the Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of the Temple.