Note also that in the only gospel where the whip is mentioned, the construction of the weapon is premeditated. He didn’t just grab some leather strips off a table and start swinging; the action in John 2:15 starts specifically when he has made a φραγέλλιον, phrageillon in Greek, more famous in Latin as the flagellum.
φραγέλλιον phragéllion, frag-el'-le-on … a whip, i.e. Roman lash as a public punishment:—scourge. source
A different Greek word is used for ‘whip’ elsewhere in the New Testament; this one only occurs here in John, and in Matthew and Mark to describe the particularly Roman whipping Jesus receives later on.
Anyway, a flagellum is basically a cat o’ nine tails, and has either a braided leather handle or a heavy stick attached to cords with knots. Making one takes a while, and one worth using to drive out the cattle is going to take some chunks out of a moneychanger. Fancy Roman flagella that feature later on in the scripture had hooks and chains, and were sometimes gladiatorial weapons. Castlevania shit.
This has been your regularly scheduled moment of the dad from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. There you go.
As a Christian Anarchist, this is one of my favorite facts.
My dear brother in Christ, not only did our Lord whip the money changers, He took the time to construct the whip and contemplate just how badly He was gonna fuck up those bastards.
Sort of. The part of the story that's often overlooked is the original emphasis on the sale of animals for sacrifice.
Everyone zeros in on the money changers as if Jesus was worried about FIAT rates, and overlook that it was people selling animals to be sacrificed as sin offerings that was the whole reason the money changers were there in the first place, and then why it's followed in Mark with a prohibition on carrying things (i.e. sacrifices) through the temple.
And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves, and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.
- Mark 11:15-16
The bit about not carrying things through the temple is noticeably missing from Matthew, despite copying the rest nearly verbatim from Mark.
So while yes, the commercialization of salvation didn't seem very favorably considered, it may have had more to do with the of salvation part than the commerce part in general.
This attitude is further reflected in the apocrypha too, such as saying 88 of the Gospel of Thomas:
The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, "When will they come and take what belongs to them?"
Yeah you don't find Jesus smashing up moneylenders shops in general... just that one time when they were in a temple.
Get these mother fucking money lenders out my mother fucking temple.
IKR!!!
[Matthew 19:24] "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” ~Jesus
Yeah using Roman currency to purchase animals for sacrifice wasn't allowed, it first needed to be exchanged for temple currency. The money changers charged fees on top of this, effectively using the temple as a business for themselves. So what was supposed to be a holy place was turned in to a place of bartering and commerce.
Please don't conflate markets, products and services with capitalism. That's yee old liberal con. Capitalism is a modern invention and it's all about speculation, non-existent liquidity, shell and shelf companies and bringing back usury run amok, what would have people burned at the stake during Jesus times.
Those things wouldn't be possible in Jesus' time because the mechanisms fir them could not exist without more modern forms of communication and transport.
Which means current day Christian Capitalists are even worse according to Jesus?
Capitalism wasn't a thing back then but don't let the subtleties and context of the events stop you from your conclusion that Jesus would not like capitalism because he clearly would not on any level think it is OK.
Noooo, Jesus loves America and guns. Why else would he give Joe football the ability to make a sports point?
Right?! White Jesus is the right Jesus, and my Jesus teaches 'Don't care, got mine.'
/S
Adding on to this.
Oppression of the Poor and Injustice to the Wage Earner are two of the four Sins that Cry to Heaven for Vengeance.
Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.
Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
Jimmy's 5th chapter.
He also killed a fig tree out of spite when he was hungry but there was no figs on it
Because it wasn't the season.
Hey, why are you spoiling the ending?
Spoiler he just fuckin left
He was upset that it was happening in a church you walnut, not that they were selling goods and services.
Jesus was also the one to say that rich people can't get into heaven. [Matthew 19:24]
I'm not denying that
First off, Jesus isn't against Capitalism. He never said that selling things wasn't allowed. Get your facts right.
Jesus wasn’t against capitalism because capitalism didn’t exist when he was alive. However, he was pretty clearly against people getting rich at the expense of others which is at the core of capitalism. Have you even bothered to read the other comments on here? In addition, your definition of capitalism is wrong. One more thing, Jesus wasn’t against selling things. He pretty clearly said “sell your possessions and give to the poor.”
However, he was pretty clearly against people getting rich at the expense of others which is at the core of capitalism.
How did you know? Which verse says that? Jesus's only issue with the people selling fish were that they were selling it in the temple of God. Otherwise, he wouldn't have cared. In the Bible, he has never spoken a word against tax collectors, much less Capitalists. Proof?
Figure out a way to implement communism without creating a Stalin that takes advantage of the situation to seize power, and we can talk. Until then, that is a major problem requiring a solution, and ignoring it makes people look blind.
Figure out a way to implement capitalism without creating genocides through imperialism and we can talk. Until then, that is a major problem requiring a solution, and ignoring it makes people look blind.
The problem with this argument is that the risk for someone taking advantage of the situation to accumulate power is the same under any system. I would rather take that risk for an economic system that aims to treat everyone more fairly than for one that, by design, sends wealth up to a select few who hoard it.
If the risk is so equal, why did the USSR fall to it very quickly, where the US, 300 years after our founding, just resisted Trump when he tried to do the same?
I think your risk is higher, because you are taking down the current system in order to put in a potentially improved one. But during that downtime you have extreme vulnerability.
We do not have that problem unless we also dismantle our system to a similarly vulnerable state.
"Figure out how I'm gonna be completely happy and healthy for the rest of my life and then we can discuss chemotherapy"
That's now how you fix things. Relinquishing capitalism doesn't mean Stalinism, nor communism to be honest.
Stalin is a really mixed bag. Yes he was responsible for the murder of millions of people and especially towards the end of his life was not working to better the Soviet people, but he's also one of the few leaders in Russian ir Soviet history that actually tried and succeeding in bringing up the quality of life for the average person in significant ways.
As a former boss put it "Yeah Stalin killed my uncle for no reason but he's also why my village had electricity, plumbing, and telephones"
Democratic Socialism exists
It's hilarious hearing people like you talk up Stalin as a bloodthirsty monster, and finally reading what he wrote and seeing a quiet academic.
If Stalin was so intent on seizing power, why'd he try to resign so much?
Capitalism didn't even exist at the time, wtf are you smoking
Gasp reading “capitalist” as someone seeking to exploit something in order to make capital must be hard. There’s no way anyone could have possibly done something similar to that before supply side Jesus handed capitalism to white people in London or whatever.
While the concept as capitalism didn't exist, there are certainly many facets of the ancient economy that are facets of capitalism.
Most of the economy was privately held, just certain facets of modern capitalism like corporations didn't exist.
So, while you are technically true, you know exactly what they are talking about. We can't 100% relate, but issues like laborers getting a fair wage and the rich exploiting the poor were just as relevant then as now.
EXACTLY BRO!!
