Rick Sumner

I agree wholeheartedly. Amaleq13 was addressing the presence of guards next to the moneychangers.

I was addressing Amaleq13's misrepresentation of your argument (which flowed from Josephus, and the guards on the walls, down to yours, indicating a sort of continuity between them), not your argument itself.

Are you aware of any actual evidence that they had bodyguards? Would they have needed any? Are you aware of any accounts of wealthy Jews in that era being accompanied by guards in the temple? Any record of a robbery of someone carrying out commerce in the temple?

I'm genuinely curious.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Vorkosigan

As far as I can see, Amaleq has not misrepresented my argument.

This thread has really derailed and degenerated. Perhaps we should all take a break, eh?

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

Nobody made this claim so don't hold your breath.

The placement of hundreds of Roman guards around the Temple area to stop disturbances during Passover comes from Josephus. The suggestion about the moneychangers involved personal guards presumably hired by the moneychangers, themselves.

That he started the post questioning Premise 2 does not change the fact that the "impossible Temple scene" he mentions later is clearly the one in the Gospels. In fact, he is clearly referring to the earlier discussion of this same subject. Read the goddamned post, Rick. Your responses continue to bear no resemblance to reality.

You asked why it was impossible.

That question only makes sense if you think the story is possible so I described the story and asked if you really thought it was possible.

And that is when your responses first started to diverge from rationality and reality.

First, you questioned whether that was what was actually meant.

I don't see how anyone could think otherwise. Genuine confusion seems even more unlikely given the earlier discussion of the same subject where it was made explicitly clear that what was being called "impossible" was the story as it was written.

Second, you questioned whether it had anything to do with your position.

Again, that it was not being attributed to you nor addressed to your position should be quite clear if you actually read the post. He was clearly claiming that the Temple scene as depicted in the Gospels was impossible and never claimed it was your position or claimed against your position.

Finally, you changed the subject from claiming the story in the Gospels was impossible to claiming some undescribed "historical event behind it" was impossible.

He never said this and never implied this.

So we are left with your "why" question that seems to have no apparent reason to exist and a whole lot of smoke (in the form of vague references to mod conspiracies, unbelievable mischaracterizations of the original statement and accusations clearly more appropriate for your own efforts than mine) apparently intended to disguise that fact.

I think we can safely assume that you wish to retract the question now.

I look forward to your review of Brodie.

Vork, you should get a commission from the author because I ordered the book after reading your posts.

[added later]
Sorry, Vork, I was typing this while you posted and didn't see it until afterwards. I am entirely willing to wait for the "Brodie verdict".

LP675

Interesting, you might be right. It is probably a sensible course of action, considering the main consumers of NT scholarship I would imagine would be Christians.
Yes, that does make my suggestion problematic doesn’t it.

Rick Sumner

I asked whether it was what *I* actually meant.

It's the same question both times.

He was issuing in response to *my* argument.

It doesn't need to be explicitly cited, piece by piece, against my position. He was questioning the validity of *my* argument. Such questions need to be couched in terms of *my* argument.

These are all, in fact, the same question.

It's implied by the fact that he was responding to *my* argument. If a response to *my* argument is addressing an argument that *isn't* mine, it's a strawman.

This is funny. You stated that my argument was valid. Now you state that premise 2 is irrelevant--it's now a "whole lot of smoke." Earlier it was premise 1 that was irrelevant, and premise 2 that was important.

Could you make up your mind?

Not at all, I'm glad I asked it, as it was answered. Since I won't have time to review Brodie more fully for a while, it has not only been answered, it has been satisfactorily answered, for my purposes. Didn't I already state this?

Why would I want to retract the question?

I've stated, twice now, that I probably won't get to it for awhile. Grey bead, remember?

I'd do so myself, except, as noted, I just unloaded a small fortune on Mystery School books. Books are decidedly more expensive when you're not getting paid in American dollars.

I've given you my verdict, for the time being. Gray bead. Why is this confusing you?

And why is the "Brodie verdict" so important if premise 2 was just a lot of smoke? Can you please make up your mind?

I'm going to be as blunt about this as I possibly can: Do you understand what a valid argument is? A sound argument? A conditional? An affirmation? If you don't, you should probably review the links I provided earlier. You have consistently mixed those four items as though they are all different ways of saying the same thing. They aren't.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Rick Sumner

That's probably a good idea.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Ted Hoffman

Allow me to summarize the points that have been made so far as I also expand on them. This post, I hope, can serve as a resource for those confronted with claims about the historicity of the temple incident.

Reasons to believe that there is a Historical Core to the Temple Incident

None.

Reasons for believing the Temple incident never Happened/was fictionalized

• The size of the temple and the crowd size
  
  This argument states that it would have been impossible for a single, unarmed man to clear the temple of traders whose size was close to that of a football field. The swarming crowds would have swallowed up his fit and his ruckus would not have been visible more than twenty feet away due to the huge number of pilgrims who would be in the city for Passover. This would eliminate any chances of a stampede because by definition market people are disorderly.
  
• The nature of trading activities and mercantile occupation
  
  If he started by overturning the first table, the rest of the traders nearby would have paused and watched him as they stood guard over their tools of trade to stop him from scattering their money. We know traders would easily resort to violence to protect their means of livelihood. Thus, barring all else, the traders would have stopped him themselves.
  Jesus could only have managed to turn over the tables having money if: (1) they decided to watch him do it [impossible] and (2) if they fled in panic like people do when fights break out in pubs [very unlikely because the traders could not have fled and left behind their money - in pubs, people can flee because any material loss from leaving anything material is insubstantial compared to someone with a bag of money].
  
• The guards at the temple
  
  Amaleq tells us that 'Josephus describes an entire cohort (close to 600 men) being used to guard the Temple apparently only because of the crowds during Passover (Ant. 20.5.3; JW 2.12.1).'
  These guards would have stopped any troublemaker and would have stopped Jesus. The Roman government, no doubt, benefited from the trading activity through levies/taxes and so on.
  
• Argument from literary borrowing (prophecy historicized)
  
  When Troughton talks of the 'role of ‘inter-textual echo’ in the New Testament literature', whether consciously or not, he is talking about literary borrowing where Mark 11:16 is the hypertext and Neh 13:4-9 serves as the hypotext (Troughton sees it as Jesus' actions as being reflective of Jesus being engaaged actively in the Nehemiah tradition. Some here see it as midrash or even contemporization of scripture - Troughton notes that "each gospel interprets the incident through reference to the Jewish scriptures"[peshar]).
  
  Whether known or unknown to Troughton, what AMark does is what literary critics refer to as hypertextual transvaluation. Dennis R. MacDonald, in his comparison of Luke's Eutychus and Homer's Elpenor, defines hypertextual transvaluation as "a common literary strategy for replacing the values or perspectives of an earlier, targeted text (the "hypotext") with alternative values or perspectives." [sounds like 'contemporization of scripture' doesnt it]
  
  Troughton notes the differences in Nehemiah's actions (which he notes, "are insubstantial") but it is, of course, the similarities (esp. textual) that are compelling.
  
  For Nehemiah, the removal of 'foreign influence' (Tobiah the Ammonite) is his motive for expelling Tobias. Plus Tobiah is an 'enemy' of the rebuilding project and occupies the storeroom for the Temple supplies.
  
  Troughton notes the difference that "In Mark, the episode is intercalated within the episode of the withered fig tree, so that each event provides a mutual commentary on the other. Thus, the action in the Temple and the withering of the fig tree are each seen to be symbolic prophetic actions enacting destruction; the absence of fruit provokes the action against the fig tree, while the absence of ‘true fruit’ in the Temple (or ‘fruit’ of the wrong kind), is the catalyst for action.".
  
  The intercalation here is used as a literary device by the author. This further casts doubt on the historicity of the sequence and the events themselves.
  
  Argument from Borrowed Speech
  
  Troughton writes "The messianic allusion to Zechariah 14.21 when Jesus accuses the dove-sellers of ‘making my Father’s house a marketplace’ is also distinctive...Mark’s account draws on at least two crucial prophetic texts, presented together as a single statement from Jesus. In the first, Jesus recalls Isaiah 56.7, asserting that the Temple should be ‘a house of prayer for all nations’...The Isaiah text is blended with an accusation from Jeremiah 7.11, which asks: ‘Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?’..."
  
  Borrowing speech from the OT and inserting them to Jesus' mouth casts further doubt on the narrative. If the event did indeed take place, AMark would have referenced it for what happened and not borrow speech from the OT. That he does means he had nowhere/nobody else to refer to as he was creating the story.
  If he borrowed the speech, there is no reason to believe that he did not borrow the event itself, or fabricate it wholecloth.
  
  
  SOME NOTED PARALLELS:
  As we go through this, we note Vork's comments that " both the structure of the story and some of its key elements appear to be drawn from a previous story"
  
  a) Similar Motivations
  
  Troughton: "The inference in the gospel accounts is that Jesus acted against a larger number. Numbers are never specified, but the Fourth Gospel claims that Jesus drove ‘all of them out of the temple’ (2.15)...in the first case, the expulsion of Tobiah was part of a wider programme whereby Tobiah the individual is representative of the exclusion of Ammonites and Moabites from the cult, and of ‘foreigners’ in general."
  "Jesus’ motivation for ‘driving out’ displays points of similarity to Nehemiah."
  
  b) Hypertextual transvaluation between Jesus and Nehemiah (and contrawise moneychangers and Tobiah)
  
  Tobiah's presence and conduct affected the functioning of the temple and so did the moneychangers.
  
  c) Foreign influence
  
  "Both actions were in some way generated by objection to ‘foreign’ influence in national life generally, and the Temple cult in particular. In the case of Nehemiah, the expulsion of Tobiah is predicated on an ethnic and ideological designation of him as a ‘foreigner’...Jesus’ aimed to remove alien practices that impeded true piety. In this case, ‘foreign’ practices were those with no rightful place in the proceedings of Temple worship."
  
  d) Physical expulsion of tools used by foreign presence
  
  Overturning the temples of money-changers and the seats of sellers of pigeons: Troughton notes that "both actions involve a direct, physical interaction with the equipment that furnished the ‘foreign’ presence. In each case, violence is enacted against inanimate objects rather than directly against people...The Septuagint describes Nehemiah throwing the ‘household furniture’, or ‘household vessels’ ‘out of the room’".
  
  e) Similar Equipment even with some peculiarity
  
  In the gospels "Mark’s representation of Jesus has him ‘overturning’ (katestreyen ) the furniture of the sellers and the money-changers. In this case, the furniture is identified specifically as tables (trapeza ) and seats (kaqedra ), which are also potentially ‘household’ goods. However, they are not present in the Temple as such, but are technically in the Court of the Gentiles. They are present to assist the trading activities of their owners, and it is primarily this association that inspires Jesus’ action."
  
  f) Similarity in the face of editorial fatigue
  
  Prohibiting anyone from carrying anything through the temple: Troughton "According to Davies and Allison, the prohibition against carriage through the Temple is the likeliest source of allusion to Nehemiah. Specifically, they highlight the linguistic connection through common use of the term skeuoj (‘vessels’)...Nehemiah’s action in ejecting Tobiah and his ‘furniture’ (skeuh oikou Twbia ) is complemented by his enterprise in restoring the ‘vessels [skeuoj ] of the house of God’,"
  
  Jesus' prohibition of movement of vessels outside the temple is not addressed and does not make sense (thus Matthew and Luke remove it). We can deem it an editorial seam as a result of editorial fatigue as defined by Mark Goodacre in Fatigue in the Synoptics:
  
  Goodacre writes:
  "Editorial fatigue is a phenomenon that will inevitably occur when a writer is heavily dependent on another's work. In telling the same story as his predecessor, a writer makes changes in the early stages which he is unable to sustain throughout. Like continuity errors in film and television, examples of fatigue will be unconscious mistakes, small errors of detail which naturally arise in the course of constructing a narrative. They are interesting because they can betray an author's hand, most particularly in revealing to us the identity of his sources."
  
• Literary Dependence as per Thomas Brodie'a Elijah-Elisha cycle as articulated by Vorkosigan:
  
  On p93 of The Crucial Bridge: the Elijah-Elisha Narrative as an interpretive synthesis of Genesis-Kings and a literary model for the Gospels. The reason is that the foundation of the Jesus legend is the Elijah-Elisha cycle. At the climax of the two legend cycles, both E and J cleanse Temples, Elijah in the purging of the priests of Baal with fire, and Jesus of the moneychangers. Both are annointed (2 Kings 9), accession with cloaks on the ground (2 Kings 9), waiting before taking over (2 Kings 9:12-13, Mark 11:11), challenge the authorities (2 Kings 9:22-10:27), Mark 11:11 - 12:12), and money is given to the Temple (2 Kings 12:5-17, Mark 12:41-44). As Brodie puts it (p93), ..."the basic point is clear: Mark's long passion narrative, while using distinctive Christian sources, coincides significantly both in form and content with the long Temple-centered sequence at the end of the Elijah-Elisha narrative."
  
  Vork explains: "In other words, there are two OT sources, one the Elijah-Elisha narrative and the other, Nehemiah. The structure of the OT Elijah-Elisha narrative determined the structure of Mark, and shows us why Mark chose to invent this story of the Temple cleansing. Nehemiah nicely accounts for some odd details, the Elijah-Elisha narrative for both the content of the story and the larger structure. Taking Crossan's dictum that a story which can be shown to be fiction on every level, from the details like carrying the vessels out of the Temple to the intermediate structures like the plot (Elijah-Elisha narrative), to the larger overall framework (again Elijah-Elisha narrative), must be taken as a fiction, it is clear that the Temple Ruckus is fiction, pure and simple." [I however, recommend 'plain and simple' as a better punchline for effect].
  
• Other reasons
  The manner in which Jesus was allegedly crucified (grisly and lone crucifixion without his followers) further makes the event unlikely as it is normally interposed between an unlikely antecedent (entry into Jerusalem on the back of a colt*) and a more unlikely consequence (the crucifiction).
  
  As Vorkosigan so memorably put it, "no matter from what angle we squint at it from or from what level we examine it, it doesn't look historical. It looks like fiction-construction based on the OT."
  
  *The poor from the ghettoes of Jerusalem could not have come out to ceremoniously welcome an illiterate, homeless, unknown tekton from Galilee. Especially given the cosmopolitan nature of Jerusalem, with its sophisticated elite and rich men. This aside, the Jerusalem entry on the back of a donkey is itself clearly copied from Zechariah 9:9.

References

Mark Goodacre Fatigue in the Synoptics
Dennis R. MacDonald Luke's Eutychus and Homer's Elpenor
Geoffrey M. Troughton Echoes in the Temple? Jesus, Nehemiah and their Actions in the Temple

Relevant passages

I use Youngs Literal Translation throughout
John 2:13-16

And the passover of the Jews was nigh, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and he found in the temple those selling oxen, and sheep, and doves, and the money-changers sitting, and having made a whip of small cords, he put all forth out of the temple, also the sheep, and the oxen; and of the money-changers he poured out the coins, and the tables he overthrew, and to those selling the doves he said, `Take these things hence; make not the house of my Father a house of merchandise.'

Mark 11:15-21

And they come to Jerusalem, and Jesus having gone into the temple, began to cast forth those selling and buying in the temple, and the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those selling the doves, he overthrew, and he did not suffer that any might bear a vessel through the temple, and he was teaching, saying to them, `Hath it not been written -- My house a house of prayer shall be called for all the nations, and ye did make it a den of robbers?'
And the scribes and the chief priests heard, and they were seeking how they shall destroy him, for they were afraid of him, because all the multitude was astonished at his teaching; and when evening came, he was going forth without the city. And in the morning, passing by, they saw the fig-tree having been dried up from the roots, and Peter having remembered saith to him, `Rabbi, lo, the fig-tree that thou didst curse is dried up.' And Jesus answering saith to them, `Have faith of God;

Zechariah 14:21
And every pot in Jerusalem, and in Judah, Have been holy to Jehovah of Hosts, And all those sacrificing have come in, And have taken of them, and boiled in them, And there is no merchant any more in the house of Jehovah of Hosts in that day!

Nehemiah 13:4-9
NEH 13:4 And before this Eliashib the priest, appointed over chambers of the house of our God, `is' a relation of Tobiah,and he maketh for him a great chamber, and there they were formerly putting the present, the frankincense, and the vessels, and the tithe of the corn, the new wine, and the oil -- the commanded thing of the Levites, and the singers, and the gatekeepers -- and the heave-offering of the priests. And during all this I was not in Jerusalem, for in the thirty and second year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon did I come unto the king, and at the end of days I have asked of the king, and I come in to Jerusalem, and understand concerning the evil that Eliashib hath done for Tobiah, to make to him a chamber in the courts of the house of God, and it is very displeasing to me, and I cast all the vessels of the house of Tobiah without, out of the chamber, and I speak, and they cleanse the chambers, and I bring back thither the vessels of the house of God with the present and the frankincense.

Amaleq13

You asked why the story in the Gospels was impossible and you asked if my description (ie the story as written) was what was meant by Toto's comment. When the second was answered in the affirmative, you began your journey into an imaginary world where his comment was somehow being treated as though it were yours.

And your question addressed the part that was about the Gospel story which was clearly not part of your argument but a reference to an earlier discussion.

They all, in fact, make no sense since the statement was never attributed to you and clearly repeated the earlier statement that you eventually agreed with. There was no reason to ask it again and your alleged misunderstanding of his statement appears to have no basis in reality.

The subject was changed from your argument (1st paragraph) to a comment on the Gospel story (2nd paragraph). Pretending otherwise is creating a straw man that did not exist.

You aren't reading carefully enough. Toto's first paragraph questions Premise 2. I have never said it was irrelevant. The "smoke" consists of all the BS you've dragged in apparently to distract from your pointless question. You know, like the repeated pedantic and unnecessary "argument lessons" (that I'm sure you would consider to be ad hominem if they were given to you) and vague, meaningless references to mod status.

Yes, it was. On the first page.

This is just insane and boring. What actually happened is clear for anyone who can read. I'm confident in the ability of rational minds to figure out that reality.

I'll read you elsewhere. :wave:

MortalWombat

Unless they're drinking Guinness, of course.

Amaleq13

Jacob,


Has this "phenomenon" been identified in texts outside NT scholarship?