Chapter 14, "The Incident in the Temple"

In my ongoing review of Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity, in which I am taking his chapters in reverse order, I now come to the "definite, though somewhat mysterious, turning point in the life of Jesus" (p. 124, italics Nolan's). Nolan's chapter 14, "The Incident in the Temple," presents the eviction of the traders and money-changers from the Jerusalem Temple courtyard as the hinge event in Jesus' career. Before it, Jesus was a not-so-widely-known teacher and prophet. After it, he was "a figure of national importance [who] could no longer be ignored."

That this incident was the turning point makes sense, Nolan says, only in the light of modern biblical scholarship — as the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke give the Temple incident as occurring during Jesus' final, fateful visit to Jerusalem. John, on the other hand, places the incident close to the very start of Jesus' ministry. None of the gospel writers, it seems, was overly interested in what we today would call historical accuracy.

Nolan writes accordingly that "at some stage Jesus became a fugitive ... Shortly after the Temple incident he withdrew and went into hiding ... [at first] in Galilee ... [though later] Jesus wandered about outside his own country as a fugitive and exile" (pp. 128-129). Then, after "he made use of the time to instruct his disciples more thoroughly in the mystery of the [coming] 'kingdom'," he voluntarily came out of hiding and went back to Jerusalem to be arrested and — as he full well knew, in advance — to be executed.

Why did Jesus "act up" in the Temple courtyard? That courtyard was where local Jews, and also Jewish pilgrims from abroad, prepared to exercise their religio-legal obligation "to spend a certain proportion of [their] income in Jerusalem" (p. 126), in order to make devotional sacrifices of "clean animals" in the holy place. The traders in the courtyard sold such animals at exorbitant prices. Meanwhile, the money-changers gouged "pilgrim Jews [who] would have arrived with foreign currency" and who needed local money to buy the animals.

Observing this activity, Jesus "noticed only the widow who gave her last penny ... and the economic exploitation of people's devotion and piety ... [and] his compassion for the poor and the oppressed overflowed once more into indignation and anger." Noting that "it was already too late in the day to do anything about it," Jesus returned on the morrow, when, "according to John, [he] used a whip" in evicting the money-grubbing leeches, provoking police intervention, and bringing himself to the attention of the Temple elders — who may have been complicit in the monetary extortion all along.


Nolan seems to relish the fact that, after, and due to, the Temple incident, Jesus became an outlaw: one who conspicuously displayed a "change of attitude toward the carrying of swords" by his disciples (p. 129). "If you have no sword, sell your cloak and buy one," Jesus told his men, as reported at Luke 22:36. Here, again, is the practical Jesus, the one who Nolan says could never be a pacifist in principle.

At the same time, the attack on the money-changers and traders was "not unpremeditated and unplanned" (p. 126), and we are not justified in believing that Jesus urged violent force as a matter of policy. Jesus was the opposite of a revolutionary hothead. Instead, as we have seen, he urged faith in the coming kingdom, in which "those who have any kind of position of power ... will have to use it to serve others" (p. 130).

As a matter of fact, this chapter contains one of Nolan's most concise summaries of Jesus' insistent teaching: "an urgent appeal for immediate change (metanoia), a warning about the catastrophic consequences of not changing, and a promise of a new Temple or community if there were to be an immediate change" (p. 128).

The chapter also contains a pithy exposition of how Jesus stood with respect to claiming any shred of official authority for his pronouncements: he didn't. Actually, it seems to me that Nolan doesn't make enough of how Jesus may have contrived the Temple brouhaha specifically to establish that "Jesus' right or authority to expel [those whom he expelled] was to be negotiated with the Temple officials" (p. 127, italics mine).

For this, as Nolan makes clear in Chapter 18, "On Trial", set up the venue in which Jesus' refusal to play the authority game with Pilate and his Jewish accusers put them on trial more than himself. Jesus, basically by remaining silent and offering no substantive reply to any of the charges put to him, ended up instead "putting everyone else to the test" (p. 160). In so doing, he made the point for all time that the truth he taught was not one which could be tested by reference to received authority.

Which fact forms the centerpiece of Nolan's eventual argument that Jesus was divine. In Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2, I recounted, "Since Jesus appealed to no outside authority to back up his claim about the change in God's intentions, Jesus himself had to be divine. Only divinity could speak such an earthshaking new truth about divinity."


New truth? The crux of that matter was that ...

... God had changed. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was doing something totally new and unprecedented. God [had in Jesus' time] been moved by compassion for the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... [Jesus attempted] to reveal ... the signs of the times, the signs that God has been moved by compassion to a change of mind ... . (p. 96)

God was no longer bent on vengeance. The Old Testament God had originally been bent on judging us for our sins ... but now, Jesus taught, mercy and compassion were the divine watchwords. Those who had known Jesus before his death, convinced that his compassion was the same as God's own compassion, just knew Jesus was divine truth become flesh.

Which ties in with the subject of the structure of coming kingdom of God. During their exile abroad, writes Nolan, Jesus instructed his twelve leading disciples thus, as told in Matthew's and Luke's gospels:

"You will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twleve tribes of Israel" ... Matthew understood this saying as a reference to the last judgment. Luke did not. To judge in the Bible means to govern, and the idea here seems to be that the twelve would be governors in the "kingdom," sharing with Jesus the basileia, or ruling power of God ... " (p. 130)


As I will mention later in my discussion of chapter 12, "The Coming of the 'Kingdom'," Nolan favors "de-apocalyptizing" the gospels. "What Jesus has to say about the last day was not apocalyptic, it was prophetic," Nolan writes (p. 109). The catastrophe Jesus prophesied was not "supra-historical" (p. 108): it was not an apocalypse at all — it was not "an imminent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil and raises the righteous to life in a messianic kingdom," as Webster's dictionary says the word apocalypse implies.

Rather, if people did not listen up, and soon, Jesus preached, a fully "historical and political catastrophe ... was just about to take place."

Nolan's interpretation here seems to imply that the gospel writers misconstrued Jesus' message, to the extent that the "judgment on the last day" — a "supra-historical" event which the evalgelists supposed to be in the offing — "is then used, in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as as threat concerning the individual rather than society."

Matthew's "great emphasis upon the coming judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment" compounds such supposed wrongheadedness, Nolan says, in spades — see pp. 108-109.


I find the tension between views which emphasize the coming judgment day and those which, like Nolan's, insist on the approaching compassionate kingdom to be hard indeed to resolve. A voice in my head keeps nagging at me, saying that there would be no Christianity today were it not for the appeal of the notion of a coming judgment day to the religious imagination. Judgment, righteousness, being subject to God's punishment for the lack thereof — these are important elements of what people have always derived from Christian teaching.

I feel, consequently, that Nolan fails the reader by not really showing how to bridge the theological gap between "Jesus before Christianity" and (shall we say) "Christ after Christianity."

In fact, the sketchy swatches of prose I have already outlined are just about it, when it comes to Nolan stating how he would square his "prophetic" view of the gospels with the dominant "apocalyptic" one that has held sway over the last 2,000 years. And that's a shame, since I believe Nolan is essentially right about how Jesus preached, above all else, universal solidarity and compassion. We need to be shown how to honor that without necessarily abandoning the moral teachings we have long associated with the Church.