Quote: RC:... That he went to Jerusalem for a Passover, got into a fight in the Temple over something trivial, thereby both insulting the Temple cult and damaging the lawful and proper businesses of a couple of the scores of moneychangers and a birdseller or so of the dozens of them. That upon a proper complaint by the merchants and the Temple he was arrested and, it being the Holy Day and the Jewish courts thus were not in business, he was processed in a magistrate's proceeding wherein the eyewitnesses identified him as the perp. He was promptly handed over to the Romans, who did whatever passed for a judicial proceeding, and he was promptly executed. ...
Quote:MIN: The whole "money-changer" thing though reeks of xtian influence which seems to derive from Hellenistic ideals much of the time. ... would a Jew going to the temple who knew that the temple tax had to be paid in the half-shekel coin have been so upset?
RC: The half-shekel tax was not the only reason for the moneychangers, since they had been collecting that tax all over the place for some weeks before -- their tables were set up in the provinces from the 15th of the previous month, and in the Temple from the 25th. There are good records of Jews from all over the world willingly paying their half-shekel tax.
I understood that moneychangers were needed to facilitate the sale of sacrificial items -- birds, etc. -- in coins without forbidden images. However, since the half-shekel-collectors working far away were entitled to change their shekels into darics, which bore an image of an archer, to lighten the load for transport to J'lem, perhaps the avoidance of images on coins is not quite accurate as a rationale. Perhaps moneychangers were necessary for the same reason cambios operate everywhere: foreign Jews on pilgrimage would have had foreign currency, and the offerings-vendors can't be expected to do foreign exchange. Since offerings transactions likely had to be in the local currency, moneychangers were needed at least in some cases before buying offerings.
Quote:MIN: Moreover, if he had only committed property crimes why the sudden rush to violate every rule in the book by holding a trial on Passover?
RC: 1. It was not only property crimes: the Temple was insulted. Consider Jesus Van Winkle waking up in Rome and going to St. Peter's and seeing all the idols there, and smashing one or two since they so obviously violate the Commandments. The insult to the cult would be the bigger crime than the value of the damaged idols.
2. There was no Jewish trial held at all, there was not more than a magistrate's proceeding; it was the Holy {Good} Day, the Yom Tov, magistrate unhappy at having to do anything. Validating the charges by having witnesses identify the perp should have sufficed for a magistrate to hand over the perp, with a bill of particulars, to the Romans. Perhaps the perp just pissed off whomever did the Roman proceeding -- Pilate if you wish. Certainly he, a penniless Galilean, could not have paid the damages, and it is plausible that the Temple complainants insisted on a severe penalty for the insult. So, away with him, a nudnik.
Quote:MIN: So I'll grant you that your version is "possible." Will you grant mine that this story was written later to make the Jews look like the bad guys to a Greco-Roman audience which already has a piss-poor opinion of them?
Yes, it is possible that it was made up later, but only if everything else was also made up -- that is, only if your position of 2nd C CE whole-cloth novelty for the entire NT is true. You are not the first person to have suggested to me that the Temple fracas was invented, but that first person still wants to have the rest of her cake to eat and publish about.
The Temple fracas would have been appalling, highly unfavorable to Jesus, to a Jewish audience of the 1st C CE, like idol-smashing in St., Pete's today to a devout RC. So, having the fracas included in all four gospels and then any natural consequence thereof utterly and completely ignored is what led me to ponder this in the first place. From that ponder I have evolved this far more plausible story of the entire "passion week". That is, one only needs to accept that there was a historical Jesus and that he was actually crucified. Then asking why he was hung up and examining the Mishnah (mostly Shekalim) and some internet-found writings on the practices of the Temple era, and assuming human nature is invariant, the rest follows.
The NT version of why he was hung up is definitely an invention made to have the Jews look bad, to make Jesus the victim of the unbelieving, venal, entrenched, corrupt Authorities, rather than the perp that he was, of various crimes, acts that would be criminal today. As for the death penalty, recall that in 18th C England even children were hanged for stealing http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/child.html, and the British colonies were no less severe.
http://www.history.org/Foundation/journa...branks.cfm
