Problem, crisis alert, calamity, Bible controversy, sirens, alarms. We got a huge problem. And I don't see how we can move forward as friends or as a podcast or with the Bible until we have thoroughly addressed the problem that is at hand. Here's the problem: John says that Jesus went and cleansed the temple at the beginning of Jesus' ministry in John 2. But Matthew, Mark, and Luke all say that it happened at the end. What gives? Well, I can tell you what doesn't give. It doesn't give that John just had no idea about Matthew, Mark, and Luke and was like, I don't know, what did they say the timeline was? I'm old, I don't remember very well. I'm not really gonna look at their works, I'm just gonna make my thing and hope it kind of lines up or whatever. And then later he's like, oh, nuts, rats, they all put it at the end. Well, no, I made God look stupid and everything, nobody's gonna believe this religion, nobody's gonna follow Jesus. Oh, what have I done? I don't think that's what happened here. I looking at the uh you and I together have looked very carefully at a lot of these books. If you've been with me on the YouTube channel over the years, you and I have spent a lot of time with Luke and Luke and Acts. He's a very meticulous guy. He even says, I took careful notes, I interviewed people. He clearly cares about the facts. I don't think he's messing around. Mark seems to be working with Peter, I don't think Peter's messing around. And if you've been with me on this podcast for a while, you went all the way through the book of Matthew. You see the precision with which he wrote, and John isn't messing around. So all of these guys are really good at what they're doing. All of their books have stood the test of time. So the idea that just, yeah, one of them was just, you know, way wrong, you just screwed it up or whatever, well, that flies in the face of the quality of the authorship and how history has judged these books to be good. So I don't think we can reconcile the timeline problem by just saying, well, either one of them was dumb or three of them were dumb, and it's just a Bible error, and we're just gonna have to live with it. So that leaves us a few options for what we do with all of this. But first of all, let me just set it up a little bit here. John, of course, talks about Jesus cleansing the temple in John chapter 2, but then the synoptics, starting with Matthew, they put it all right at the end. Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem, famously in chapter 21 of Matthew. That's where we get the triumphal entry. Hosanna to the Son of David, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest. It's all really cool. And then right after everybody is waving palm branches and getting all excited, the very next thing, Matthew 21, 12, is uh then Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. It is written, he said to them, My house will be called a house of prayer, but you're making it a den of robbers. The blind and lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did, and the children shouting in the temple area, Hosanna to the son of David, they were indignant. And then very shortly after that, they pester him with questions about his authority and start looking for ways to have him arrested and killed. I mean, they'd really been looking at you know for opportunities to do that for a long time. All right, before we start comparing and contrasting, let's finish putting the meat on the bones of this Bible crisis calamity controversy. It's Mark 11, 15 through 19. It goes like this. Uh, okay, they go to Bethany. The next day they were leaving Bethany. Jesus was hungry, seeing the distance of fig tree. He cursed the fig tree, and the disciples heard him say it, and then on reaching Jerusalem, here we go. Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves and would not allow anyone carrying merchandise through the temple courts. That's a new detail. And as he taught them, he said, Is it not written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of robbers. The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching. When evening came, they went out of the city. All right, one more. We got one more. This is Luke 19. Keep the listening antenna out for little differences, little hints, because again, we're completely crippled and paralyzed here, and we can't move forward until we solve this. Then, Luke 19, verse 45, he, Jesus, entered the temple area and began driving out those who were selling. It is written, he said to them, My house will be a house of prayer, but you've made it a den of robbers. Every day he was teaching at the temple. But the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the leaders among the people were trying to kill him, yet they could not find any way to do it because all the people hung on his words. Okay, we had three accounts of this happening right on the front end of the escalation in Jerusalem, right at the end of Jesus' earthly life. And in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there's some reference to what Jesus got after. All four accounts, including John, seem to agree that he had a problem with those who were selling the doves, right? Did the doves get mentioned specifically in all four? Dang it, now I'm already forgetting. Let me look. Did they say? Yeah, it doesn't say doves specifically in Luke, but John, Matthew, and Mark say specifically doves. We've talked together about how that was the sacrificial option for people who didn't have much money. Jesus seems to care about that an awful lot. And all three accounts of the synoptics have the religious leaders getting real mad and wanting to kill Jesus in very close proximity to this. But John does not. The way the story reads in John looks more like we're still in an early phase here where the religious leaders are feeling Jesus out and trying to get a sense of what he's about. I don't know that that proves anything. We're just setting up the question here that, you know, we're trying to get a sense of what the difference is between the two. Okay, so how do we actually solve this or can it be solved? Option number one, I've dismissed. It's just a big glaring error on the part of John. He didn't consult the other three, or he thought the other three were wrong and wanted to fix them. So I don't think it's just a matter of John just forgot what he was doing, or the other three synoptics just did a bad job on theirs. Possibility number two is historically the most common solution to the problem. And that is that it did happen clearly at the end of Jesus' ministry. The synoptics all agree on that, but John is one to take license with the chronology of things, and he really wanted to lump the temple cleansing in with the wedding at Cana for reasons we talked about yesterday, because thematically it demonstrates the new paradigm, the new wine and old wineskins thing that Jesus was talking about, the example he was using. These two stories together, the thinking goes, demonstrate that Jesus is the replacement, the fulfillment, the completion of old institutions. And that is why John wanted to put these two things together thematically. Okay, one of the weaknesses of that argument, though, is that if anything, I think the synoptics are a little bit more likely to play with the thematic order of things than John. Maybe John is rearranging things thematically at times. I mean, certainly his gospel is structured, it looks very thematically structured. I don't know what the exact order of events are here. Maybe John gives us a very accurate order of events, and it isn't just John and the Holy Spirit who ordained that though that accurate chronology of events just happens to coincide with this beautiful ordered structure of Jesus doing certain signs that then accompany certain claims about his claims to deity and who he is. Maybe John didn't have to do any rearranging. That's just the order of operations that Jesus did stuff in. And John's gospel is the one that highlights it most closely. Maybe John had to do a lot of rearranging in order to give us the signs in, you know, water and wine, heal the official sun. It's okay if you don't know what these are yet. The miracle at Bethesda, feeding the 5,000, walking on water, the healing of the blind man, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Maybe they didn't happen in that exact order, and John had to do a lot of stuff to get it there. John also seems very interested in a cycle of festivals. So they all seem to teach theologically, especially when Jesus is mixed into it. So you got a wedding here in John chapter 2, then you have Passover. There's going to be two more Passovers that sort of punctuate the beginning, middle, and end of John's gospel. It seems like that's intentional. The middle Passover doesn't have Jesus in Jerusalem, but obviously the last one does. I mentioned the other day that Jesus makes his way back to Jerusalem for the uh the festival that we now call Hanukkah, the feast of dedication that celebrates the purification of the temple. I mean, you'll I'll point it out to you as we're going through John, but the rhythms of the feasts and festivals that all are so rich and historic with theological meaning, they all seem to, I mean, there's a reason John keeps mentioning them. And then things that Jesus does just happen to really pop when layered over the top of where in the Jewish calendar those things that Jesus said and did happen. Well, again, maybe the chronology is just airtight in John and it was ordained by God and intentionally carried out by Christ, such that all of this symbolism would just happen in the natural literal timeline of Jesus' ministry. Could be. I'm not at all threatened by the idea that it isn't that, because John does not say at the end of his gospel, you know, and all, you know, Jesus did many more things, I suppose, but all of this is written down to give you a strict chronological account of what happened so that you could make a timeline at home, and then in doing so, you would have a timeline that is accurate in his name. It's not what John's doing. He says very explicitly in John 20, starting in verse 30, Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. Whereas Luke is very explicit at the beginning of Luke and Acts that he is trying to give an ordered account. This is verse one of Luke. Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. To me, it sounds like Luke is the one who's tipping his hand and saying, I'm trying to keep it pretty chronological here. I'd be fine with just reading Luke. I mean, there are no real timeline crises in Luke. It'd be cool with just saying that's the straight telling. Whereas John is pretty explicit in saying why he wrote the book, and that certainly leaves him room to do thematic lumping. Now, all of that said, I'm not sure how many things I can think of in John where I'd be like, all right, he's definitely moving stuff around there for sure. And maybe you're thinking, well, the cleansing of the temple. I mean, what have we been talking about for the last 15 minutes or whatever? And the cleansing of the temple is the clear smoking gun example of John moving things around. But is it? Because there's a third option here. A lot of people think that Jesus cleansed the temple twice, and that John records the first one, and that the synoptics actually record the second one. That's what we're going to talk about tomorrow, as well as a couple other details to try to get to the bottom of this conundrum of this riddle. And really, y'all are smart. What am I doing here? The point is not, oh, I want a two-day arc to really drill down and figure out which it was. I need to know if there were two cleansings or one. That isn't the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is, hey, we have these four gospel accounts. Overwhelmingly, you can just lay them on top of each other and it works great. Every now and then you go to do that and you're like, okay, somebody's doing something a little different here. What's that about? Well, I happen to think that the Bible is reliable and from God, and there's a reason that it stood the test of time. I don't feel like I need to actually solve every problem, even though I was joking about it on the front end of this episode. But I also don't just want to hand wave it and be like, ah, I don't care when I can't reconcile it. Well, no, I want I mean, I might want to try. I want to think about it. And a lot of really smart people have put a lot of really good thought into how some of these places in the Gospels that uh on the front end don't seem to line up chronologically, you know, how they might actually fit together. Ultimately, you're gonna do what you're gonna do with that, but I didn't want to not speak to it because it does speak to the larger question of how do we view these four documents, the gospels together as a whole. So we'll pick it up with uh that third option next time around. And then as I have long promised, we'll be on to chapter three. All right, that's plenty for now. Um Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this.