John 2 - The Money Changers

The Money Changers

The story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers in the Temple is related. Jesus goes to Jerusalem for the Passover, the first of three in John, the others being John 7, where he goes to the Feast of Tabernacles, and the final Passover during which he is crucified. He enters the Temple courts and sees people selling livestock and exchanging money. He explodes:

So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market! (15-16)

John says his disciples remembered Psalm 69:9, "zeal for your house will consumes me", perhaps a bit of wordplay interposing the ideas of "'demanding all my attention' and 'leading to my destruction'" (Miller 204) Whether the disciples remembered this during the incident or afterward is not clear.

He is asked to perform a "miraculous sign" to prove he has authority to expel the money changers. He replies "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days". The people believe he is talking about the official Temple building, but John states that Jesus meant his body, and that this is what his disciples came to believe after his resurrection. John then says that during the Passover Feast Jesus performed miraculous signs, but does not list them, that caused people to believe in him, but that he would "not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men". Perhaps John included this statement to show Jesus possesses a knowledge of people's hearts and minds, an attribute of God (Brown et al. 955).

This introduces the antagonism between Jesus and "the Jews", as John calls them, a sign perhaps of a non-Jewish audience. This is over the nature of the Temple. The Temple is already destroyed by the time of the writing of John, and John is trying to show right from the start that the old Temple has been replaced by the new Temple, Jesus' resurrected body and the new Christian and Johannine community. This shows to most scholars the split between John's community and Judaism in general. Some of the Dead Sea scrolls also speak of the community as the temple (Brown et al. 954).

John mentions the incident with the money changers as occurring at the start of Jesus's ministry, while the synoptic gospels have it occurring shortly before his crucifixion. Some scholars insist that this instead shows that Jesus fought with the money changers twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of his ministry. The incident in the synoptics occurs in Mark 11:12-19, Matthew 21:12-17, and Luke 19:45-48. Perhaps John has relocated the story to the beginning to show that Jesus' arrest was for the raising of Lazarus in John 11, not the incident in the Temple (Brown et al. 954).