When I was in Christian school, I was told explicitly (by multiple MAs and Ph.Ds in theology/divinity) that the reason the New Testament and the gospels MUST be true is because of the clarity with with Jesus prophesies the destruction of the Temple: specifically, he predicts that it Jerusalem will be surrounded by armies who will destroy the outlying towns, surround it with an earthen wall, and then destroy the Temple leaving not one stone left on another. These prophecy are bolstered in strength by appearing side by side with prophetic imagery from the book of Daniel, which famously predicted the Selucid rule of Judah by Antiochus and his eventual overthrowing.
Except heres the thing they DIDN'T feel was necessary to point out.
The reason Daniel was so successful in predicting the events of Antiochus so well.... is that it was written AFTER the fact. Its not prophecy in the sense of predicting the future. It's meant to make sense of events that ALREADY HAPPENED. We know this because the type of Aramaic that those sections of Daniel are written in did not exist at the time it would have needed to be written to be truly prophetic. Scholarly consensus agrees it was written AFTER all that.
And what they ALSO didn't feel was important to mention is that similarly, the Gospels and the NT DO NOT predate the destruction of the Temple, as the books themselves assert, but are in fact. ALSO. Prophecy after the fact.
Because, if you read the Gospels as prophecy, they fortell and justify the destruction of Judea and the Temple by Rome, and legitimize it. The text itself does this explicitly, and scholarship agrees.
But, if you read the Gospels as prophetic literature written after the fact, which is what they ARE, then instead, they become an attempt to reconcile and explain WHY God would allow the Temple to be destroyed and Judah exiled.
This text is making THIS claim:
"Jesus said Judea/Jerusalem/the Temple will be destroyed because of the Jews own sin, and then it was! See! Rome has divine favor, Judaism is out, and it's their own fault! Those things weren't important anyway, it's though JESUS that we have a relationship to God."
But the text ACTUALLY only supports THIS claim:
"We wrote all this after the Temple was destroyed, in order to make sense of these events and to figure out a way to keep a connection to the divine in a way that worked for us. For some reason, the way we decided to make sense of these events was by blaming the entire rest of the Jewish people and siding literally and clearly with Roman imperialism, even though thats supposedly the force that executed Jesus. But we're going to also blame THAT on the Jews."
Are you starting to see the distinction? And this brings me back to my main point, one I make periodically and will never shut up about:
SSTOOOOPPPPPPPPPP using the "Jesus flipping tables in the Temple" story as a positive image to represent socialism and social justice.
Stop it. Stop. Doing. That.
That story is a retrospective attempt to justify the destruction of the Temple and blame it on the Jews. It is literary foreshadowing with an anti-Jewish, pro-Roman agenda. Rome was particularly angry at Judea SPECIFICALLY over a certain Temple tax that Jews refused to pay, because it was a monetary offering to the emperor as a God.
That story about the Man-God slash son of God entering the Jewish Temple, viewing it as his property, inherited from his dad, destroying things, and blaming it specifically on the Jews there who handle the money?
That's literary foreshadowing of Titus destroying the Temple because Jews wouldn't pay him money as a God. (Well. Originally his boss and then his dad, but him as well).
It's like. Shockingly clear.
It has been two THOUSAND YEARS, now will you all PLEASE stop spreading Roman propaganda against Jewish people? And calling it a GOOD thing?
Also. If you want to talk about socialism. It might interest you to know that the Temple banking system, and yes, the money changers were an essential part of that system, provided local interest free loans, buried the poor and homeless who had no one to pay for their burials, fed the poor, gave aid to widows and other underprivileged society members, and paid for public infrastructure.
Jesus is not the socialist hero you want in this story - he is the literary embodiment of fascism and imperialism. He is quite literally attacking the closer analog to socialism in that context.
If I see it one more fucking time, I swear, I will start throwing hands. The next one of you to quote this story out of context is getting a three volume set of Wars of the Jews directly to the skull.
