Quote:Even if there were none in the Temple, the soldier at Antonia Fortress were on constant alert for any disturbance in the Temple.
For reasons best known only to them, Rome kept trying to unload the rule of Judaea on to the Herodian family. From 37 BC to 70 AD the periods of direct Roman rule were limited to the years between 6-41 and 44-54 after which Claudius and Nero began assigning different territories to Herod Agrippa II and gave him the right to govern the temple.
This odd behavior of the Romans can only be explained as a tacit admission that the jews were a pain in the ass to them and they were keenly aware of the religious sensibilities of what they considered primitive barbarians who clipped the ends of their dicks off because some silly god...who presumably put the foreskin there to begin with...thought it was a good idea.
So I'm not so sure that a Roman officer would be all that quick to invade the temple. As noted, there would have been guards and it is not unreasonable to assume, as the other writers you mention, that the money-changers themselves would have had their own protection.
This whole idea seems to stem as an outgrowth of the more Greco-Roman concept of a temple where offerings to the gods were collected but the commercial activity was in the agora/forum.
In short, this whole story seems to be a gigantic turd introduced by the Greco-Roman proponents of the religion who had, at best, a fuzzy idea of what was going on in the jewish temple and contrasted it to their own. Never forget that Jer. 7:11 - OT shit generally regarded as post-exilic but who knows when it was last edited....states "
Quote:11 Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching! declares the Lord.
This whole story seems to be an invocation of the Jeremiah shit. The gospels writers were big on that sort of thing.
