28th January 2022 – John 2:12-17

Fri 28 Jan 2022

^{12 "}After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothersand his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days.

¹³The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.¹⁴In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. ¹⁵And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables.¹⁶And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade.” ¹⁷His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”"

John 2:12-17

John records this episode of the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, but the other three gospel writers record it at the end. This raises a very real question. Has there been confusion here, as some scholars think, and was there in fact only one cleansing? If so, either John or the others have got the chronology wrong. Not that this in itself would present a difficulty, because we know that on occasion the evangelists were not over concerned about presenting a chronological sequence in their narrative - Matthew, for example, deliberately groups incidents and teaching together with a particular didactic purpose, departing from the exact chronology of things. But the question still remains: Did Jesus thus act on two occasions or only one? There is surely nothing intrinsically impossible in the idea that He did so twice. Why should He not have done so twice, if occasion offered? And, if so, it is quite feasible that He should have done so at the beginning and at the end of His public ministry. Two considerations lend weight to this possibility. The first is that, while in John, Jesus speaks of His Father's house as a house of merchandise, the other gospels speak of their having made it a den of thieves (Matthew 21:13) - a stronger and perhaps more sinister and fateful phrase, as if to suggest that, while Christ's action at the beginning of His ministry may have been done in hope, the situation by the end of the time had so deteriorated that nothing was left but judgment. In the second place, John's words in 19 about destroying the temple are not recorded by the other three, yet the latter do record the twisted version of Jesus' statement brought against Him at His trial (Matthew 26:61) 'Thus they attest the accuracy of the narrative even while they seem not to have known of the incident'.

J Philip Bible Readings

28th January 2022 – John 2:12-17

27th January 2022 – John 2:1-11

26th January 2022 – John 2:1-11

25th January 2022 – John 2:1-11

24th January 2022 – John 2:1-11

23rd January 2022 – John 1:45-51

22nd January 2022 – John 1:46-51

21st January 2022 – John 1:43-45

20th January 2022 – John 1:40-42

19th January 2022 – John 1:37-19