Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

orchestrated by Jesus and his followers in fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy: “Rejoice
     greatly, daughter of Zion! Cry out, daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming
     to you; righteous and victorious is he, humble and riding upon an ass, upon a colt,
     the son of a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9).
    The message conveyed to the city’s inhabitants is unmistakable: the long-awaited messiah—the
true
King of the Jews—has come to free Israel from its bondage.
    As provocative as his entrance into Jerusalem may be, it pales in comparison to what
     Jesus does the following day. With his disciples and, one assumes, the praiseful multitude
     in tow, Jesus enters the Temple’s public courtyard—the Court of Gentiles—and sets
     about “cleansing” it. In a rage, he overturns the tables of the money changers and
     drives out the vendors hawking cheap food and souvenirs. He releases the sheep and
     cattle ready to be sold for sacrifice and breaks open the cages of the doves and pigeons,
     setting the birds to flight. “Take these things out of here!” he shouts.
    With the help of his disciples he blocks the entrance to the courtyard, forbidding
     anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple. Then, as the crowd
     of vendors, worshippers, priests, and curious onlookers scramble over the scattered
     detritus, as a stampede of frightened animals, chased by their panicked owners, rushes
     headlong out of the Temple gates and into the choked streets of Jerusalem, as a corps
     of Roman guards and heavily armed Temple police blitz through the courtyard looking
     to arrest whoever is responsible for the mayhem, there stands Jesus, according tothe gospels, aloof, seemingly unperturbed, crying out over the din: “It is written:
     My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it a
     den of thieves.”
    The authorities are irate, and with good reason. There is no law that forbids the
     presence of vendors in the Court of Gentiles. Other parts of the Temple may have been
     sacrosanct and off-limits to the lame, the sick, the impure, and, most especially,
     to the gentile masses. But the outer court was a free-for-all arena that served both
     as a bustling bazaar and as the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the
     supreme Jewish council. The merchants and money changers, those selling beasts for
     sacrifice, the impure, the heathen, and the heretic, all had a right to enter the
     Court of Gentiles as they pleased and do business there. It is not surprising, therefore,
     that the Temple priests demand to know just who this rabble-rouser thinks he is. By
     what authority does he presume to cleanse the Temple? What sign can he provide to
     justify such a blatantly criminal act?
    Jesus, as is his wont, ignores these questions altogether and instead answers with
     his own enigmatic prophecy. “Destroy this Temple,” he says, “and in three days I will
     raise it up.”
    The crowd is dumbstruck, so much so that they apparently do not notice Jesus and his
     disciples calmly exiting the Temple and walking out of the city, having just taken
     part in what the Roman authorities would have deemed a capital offense: sedition,
     punishable by crucifixion. After all, an attack on the business of the Temple is akin
     to an attack on the priestly nobility, which, considering the Temple’s tangled relationship
     with Rome, is tantamount to an attack on Rome itself.
    Put aside for a moment the centuries of exegetical acrobatics that have been thrust
     upon this bewildering episode in Jesus’s ministry; examine the event from a purely
     historical perspective, and the scene simply boggles the mind. It is not the accuracy
     of Jesus’s prediction about the Temple that concerns us. The gospels were all written
     after the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E .; Jesus’s warning toJerusalem that “the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts
     around you and surround you and crush you to the ground—you and your children—and
     they will not leave within you one stone upon another” (Luke 19:43–44) was put into
     his mouth by the evangelists after the fact. Rather, what is significant about this
     episode—what is impossible to ignore—is how blatant and inescapably
zealous
Jesus’s actions at the Temple appear.
    The disciples certainly recognize this. Watching Jesus break open the cages and kick
     over tables on a rampage, the gospel of John says