# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S40
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

40 Proceedings of the nineteenth convention

[a second time] without being prevented from it by force, as a wholly vain imagination.

Incidentally it may be remarked how important it is, besides the second cleansing of the temple, to hold also to the historicity of the first. It gives us a remarkable historical point of reference and a proof that the Bible has nothing to fear from the chronology of world history. In the conversation, namely, that Jesus had with the Jews after the first cleansing of the temple, they, like his disciples at that time too, had not understood Jesus' words: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up," but had referred them to the temple at Jerusalem, and therefore said to him: "Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?" As we know from Josephus, Herod had begun the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem eighteen years before his death, that is sixteen years before Christ's birth, and this work had been continued steadily by him and his successor. If we now add to these sixteen years the 30 years that Jesus was old at that time, when he went to Jerusalem to this first Passover after his baptism, we have exactly the forty-six years of which the Jews speak there. This important passage is therefore one of the pegs on which biblical chronology can hang more than one dating.

Against the reproach, however, that this whole cleansing of the temple does not fit Christ's character otherwise, Lilienthal remarks in his somewhat trivial way (VII, 122): "What in this action is supposed to be derogatory to the honor of Jesus? It is true, he makes a scourge of cords. But where does it say that he struck out at people with it, as the painters sometimes represent this story? Just as he did not drive out the dove-sellers from the temple with blows but only ordered them with words to carry away their wares, so he also did the cattle-dealers no harm. The circumstances of the story can be pictured in a very comprehensible way thus: Jesus finds in the temple these buyers and sellers, among whom the cattle-dealers took the first place. He rebuked them for the desecration of the temple and commanded them to be off with their cattle. Since they now perhaps had little inclination for it, Jesus makes of the cords frequently found in this market a scourge, to drive out the oxen and sheep, which, as is well known, is done by such implements without its being necessary to beat the animals with much force, since they go merely at the cracking of the whip where one intends to drive them. When the cattle now went out of the temple, their owners no doubt followed of themselves, so as not to lose what was theirs, which was also not Jesus' intention. For that he did not wish to give their wares up to plunder is evident from his conduct toward the dove-sellers. The oxen