Did Jesus Cleanse the Temple... Twice?

Why John Moved the End to the Beginning

Why was Jesus put to death?

It may not strike you upon a first reading, but the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) answer this question slightly differently to John.

In the Synoptics, there is a scene in which Jesus ‘cleanses’ the Temple: he turns over the tables of its money-lenders, in a prophetic act which is thought to foretell the Temple’s demise. There or shortly thereafter, the plot on his life intensifies.

But in John, this Temple incident is not the primary cause of Jesus’ death, for it takes place at the very beginning of his ministry. In John, the key trigger for Jesus’ arrest is not an encounter in the Temple at all – it is his raising of Lazarus from the dead (11:53).

How then can we make sense of the way John makes the Synoptic end his own beginning? In this piece, I want to unpack my perspective on this chronological shift.

The Case for Two Temple Clashes

In its reception history, the idea that one (or more) of the gospels got the timing of the Temple cleansing wrong has sometimes been a difficult pill to swallow.

One common strategy to deal with it has been to posit two completely separate cleansings. Augustine, for example, comments that it is ‘evident that this act was performed by the Lord not on a single occasion, but twice over; but that only the first instance is put on record by John, and the last by the other three’ (Harm. Gos. 2.67).

This harmonisation is described by one conservative scholar as “a historiographic monstrosity that has no basis in the texts of the Gospels.”¹ Yet is there any reason to think that two events might have occurred?

Advocates of this position will note that these events are distinctive in a number of ways. John uniquely speaks of cattle, sheep, coins and Jesus building a whip of chords, he cites a different scriptural text, and a different question is put to Jesus.

Craig Blomberg further notes that some dismissals of this view would seem to rule out any kind of close additive harmonisation.² Yet there is in principle nothing wrong with there being two events of a similar nature occurring during Jesus’ ministry. In this case, it is possible that Jesus made a repeated critique of the Temple.

The Case for John Moving the Temple

While I don’t think the view that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice is necessarily a “historiographic monstrosity,” I do think it makes less sense of the evidence than a more popular view: that John deliberately shifted the chronology.

Before I unpack this view, however, we might note that it has a more ancient precedent than Augustine’s view. In his third-century Commentary on John, Origen had already argued that it was not possible to harmonise the gospels. Rather than taking John’s cleansing as a historical event, we should take it spiritually instead (10:15-16)

What is the case for this more ancient reading of the gospels?

1. They are the Same Event

First of all, it seems very likely that both John and the Synoptics are narrating the same event. While any two accounts might be expected to differ in some details, the overall thrust of the narrative is the same: it is situated near Passover, Jesus drives out the money-lenders, and Scripture is cited in reference to the event.

Blomberg notes that the Scriptures are different. Yet both Psalm 69 and Jeremiah 7 are specifically about the Lord’s Temple as his ‘house.’ Psalm 69 states, ‘It is zeal for your house that consumes me,’ while Jeremiah 7 has: ‘Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?.…’

In my view, the idea that John has re-written the earlier account fits with John’s wider re-writing of the earlier gospel(s). In the feeding of the five thousand, for example, John’s narrative contains a number of subtle differences. Yet it is nevertheless clear that the event is one and the same. So it is also is here: there are some subtle differences between the accounts, yet they are recognisably the same event.

A further consideration which may weigh against two Temple cleansings is its historical implausibility. Johannine scholar, Raymond Brown writes,

“That we cannot harmonize John and the Synoptics by positing two cleansings of the temple precincts seems obvious. Not only do the two traditions describe basically the same actions, but also it is not likely that such a serious public affront to the Temple would be permitted twice. [my emphasis]”³

While Brown’s latter consideration is somewhat subjective, I am inclined to agree with it. If Jesus had already cleansed the Temple in the manner described by John, then it would have been more difficult for him to do so a second time.⁴

2. Chronological Displacement

Another reason why I find it likely that John has moved the event is because this fits with wider literary practices in the ancient world – particularly biographical ones.

Michael Licona has demonstrated at length in his book that ancient biographers sometimes employed “synthetic chronological placement.” This means that a biographer might sometimes place an event or later in a narrative for literary effect.

To take just one example of this practice: Plutarch, Suetonius and Cassius Dio each report how Caesar once wept while at at the statue of Alexander. Yet Plutarch displaces this story, putting it about seven years later than the other writers. This allows him to link the event to Caesar’s rise to power.⁵

We find the same practice in the gospels, including John itself. The most famous example of this is the discrepancy between John and the Synoptics on the date of Jesus’ death. While the Synoptics place the event after the Passover meal was eaten, John places it on the eve of Passover, when the Passover lambs were being sacrificed.