Political Correction
And He began to teach and say to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a robbers’ den.” Mark 11:17 NASB
Robbers’ – Rome did not crucify men for theft. That means that the two men on either side of Yeshua on the cross were not there because they robbed someone. No, crucifixion was reserved for the crime of sedition. Men who were crucified were those who fought against the power of the Roman Empire. The man who was released by Pilate was not a thief. He was a revolutionary, an insurrectionist, a political criminal. When Yeshua was crucified, he was executed as someone who stood against Rome, who was viewed as a rebel.
This clears up some things, as we will see, and creates other problems, as we will also see. First, let’s deal with the clarification.
“Finally, again with Mark, we have a problem with the standard English translation of his passage. Mark’s condemnation of the temple as ‘a house of robbers’ has caused no end of confusion. The word for ‘robbers’—lēstai in Greek—reappears at Mark 14.46 [14:48], when Jesus protests that the arresting party has come for him as if he were a ‘robber’ (singular, lēstēs). And the word appears again at Mark’s crucifixion scene, where Jesus is hanging between two otherwise unidentified ‘robbers’ (so the Revised Standard Version [RSV], at Mark 15.27). The uninformed reader can walk away with the impression that Rome crucified people for larceny. A lēstēs, however, was not a ‘thief.’ Lēstai were political brigands—militants, rebels, insurrectionists. That is how Josephus used the term. The Greek of Mark’s sentence actually means something like, ‘You have turned the temple into a hiding place for revolutionaries.’”[1]
So overturning the tables in the courtyard of the Temple was not about disrupting financial malfeasance. It was an apocalyptic sign that the current government was coming to an end. The “rebels” who hid under the banner of the Temple (now who might that be?) were about to be overturned and God was going to establish His kingdom in their place. No wonder the Temple authorities were upset. Clarification means now this makes sense.
But this clarification creates another problem. Did Yeshua (and subsequently, his followers) believe that “the end” was really at hand, that the world as they knew it was soon to be overturned with an apocalyptic, divine intervention? In other words, what does “the Kingdom is at hand” really mean? For if these men really thought that the world was about to end (a not-so-uncommon idea in first century Jewish thinking), then, as we know, they were wrong. It didn’t happen, which is why, of course, many Jews today reject Yeshua as the Messiah. But what about us? Are we just going to pretend that the failure of the apocalyptic expectation doesn’t matter? And if it does matter, at least exegetically, then doesn’t that change the way we read Paul and Peter and John and all the others?
It appears we have traded one small question for a much bigger one.
Topical Index: lēstēs, brigand, rebel, thief, Mark 15:17, apocalyptic, Mark 11:17
