Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

name, become
     a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, utters the LORD!” That
     translation uses the phrase
spaylayon laystoun
to mean “den of thieves,” which makes sense in that the Septuagint was written long
     before
lestai
became a byword for “bandits”—indeed, long before there was any such thing as a bandit
     in Judea or Galilee. Here,
lestai
is the preferred Greek translation of the Hebrew word
paritsim
, which is poorly attested in the Hebrew Bible and isused, at most, twice in the entire text. The word
paritsim
can mean something like “violent ones,” though in Ezekiel 7:22, which also uses the
     Hebrew word
paritsim
, the Septuagint translates the word into the Greek by using
afulaktos
, which means something like “unguarded.” The point is that the Hebrew word
paritsim
was obviously problematic for the Septuagint translators, and any attempt to limit
     the meaning of the Hebrew or Greek words to a specific meaning or an overly circumscribed
     semantic range is difficult, to say the least. Thus, it is likely that when Jesus
     uses the word
lestai
in this passage, he means nothing more complicated than “thieves,” which, after all,
     is how he viewed the merchants and money changers at the Temple.
    The tangled web that bound the Temple authorities to Rome, and the notion that an
     attack on one would have been considered an attack on the other, is an argument made
     brilliantly by S.G.F. Brandon,
Jesus and the Zealots
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 9. Brandon also notes correctly
     that the Romans would not have been ignorant of the cleansing incident, since the
     Roman garrison in the Antonia Fortress overlooked the Temple courts. For the opposing
     view to Brandon’s analysis, see Cecil Roth, “The Cleansing of the Temple and Zechariah
     XIV.21,”
Novum Testamentum
4 (1960): 174–81. Roth seems to deny any nationalist or zealot significance whatsoever
     either in Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem or in his cleansing of the Temple, which he
     reinterprets in a “spiritual and basically non-political sense,” claiming that Jesus’s
     main concern was stripping the Temple of any “mercantile operations.” Other scholars
     take this argument one step further and claim that the “cleansing” incident never
     even happened, at least not as it has been recorded by all four gospel writers, because
     it so contrasts with Jesus’s message of peace. See Burton Mack,
A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). Once again this seems like a classic case of
     scholars refusing to accept an obvious reality that does not fit into their preconceived
     Christological conceptions of who Jesus was and what Jesus meant. Mack’s thesis is
     expertly refuted by Craig Evans, who demonstrates not only that the Temple cleansing
     incident can be traced to the historical Jesus, but also that it could not have been
     understood in any other way than as an act of profound political significance. See
     Evans,
Jesus and His Contemporaries
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1995), 301–18. However, elsewhere Evans disagrees with
     me regarding Jesus’s prediction of the Temple’s destruction. He not only believes
     that the prediction can be traced to Jesus, whereas I view it as being put in Jesus’s
     mouth by the gospel writers, he also thinks it may have been the principal factor
     that motivated the high priest to take action against him. See Craig Evans, “Jesus
     and Predictions of the Destruction of the Herodian Temple in the Pseudepigrapha, Qumran
     Scrolls, and Related Texts,”
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha
10 (1992): 89–147.
    Both Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud indicate that the sacrificial animalsused to be housed on the Mount of Olives, but that sometime around 30 C.E. , Caiaphas transferred them into the Court of Gentiles. Bruce Chilton believes that
     Caiaphas’s innovation was the impetus for Jesus’s actions at the Temple as well as
     the principal reason for the high priest’s desire to have Jesus arrested and executed;
     see Bruce Chilton, “The Trial of Jesus Reconsidered,” in
Jesus in Context
, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 281–500.
    The question posed to Jesus about the legality of paying tribute to Caesar can be
     found in Mark 12:13–17, Matthew 22:15–22, and Luke 20:20–26. The episode does not
     appear in John’s gospel because