Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And yesterday I jokingly introduced the idea of a gigantic Bible crisis. It's not a gigantic Bible crisis, but it is a point of apparent conflict, tension, maybe even contradiction between the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the Gospel of John that we've been working on. Over the last couple of weeks or so, we've been looking at the second half of John chapter two, which tells the story of Jesus cleansing the temple of the money changers and the people selling livestock for sacrifices and stuff. And the interesting point of apparent contradiction is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all put that cleansing at the temple of the temple, not at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, as John seems to do, but at the end. So yesterday we explored a couple of explanations for this apparent tension. One being that John was just wrong or the synoptics were just wrong. I don't think these books hold up historically, or people, I just think that would have got straightened out, or somebody would have got ignored if errors that big were there, and everyone took it as, you know, all four of these are telling us a literal timeline, and one of them's just wrong. I think that would have stuck in everybody's craw and it would have damaged the proliferation, the popularity, and the reliability, the reputation of whichever of these two parties the early audience members thought was wrong. Possibility number two that we explored is that John was just moving stuff around and grouping it thematically. Some of the weaknesses of that argument are that the other gospel authors, Matthew and Mark, maybe even to an extent Luke, seem just as likely, if not more likely, to do a little bit of thematic lumping here and there in their chronologies than John does. There's not a ton of places that with absolute certainty we can point to the Gospel of John and say, okay, he definitely moved things here or here. But a lot of people assume that John does because of how neat and tidy the timeline is in terms of the way it corresponds to Jesus doing miraculous signs, seven of them that tell a theological story, and how neatly the timeline in John uh corresponds to certain I am statements, Jesus claiming God and claiming God in fullness and in various ways, in support of the thesis of John set up in the prologue in John chapter one. And still further, people say, well, you know, John clearly lumps and moves things about in groups thematically instead of theologically, because it so tightly follows festivals, feasts, and the rhythms of the season. John is very into that. Uh, that absolutely could be the case. It is it wouldn't bother me at all. It is not a threat to our understanding of scripture or the reliability of scripture to just say, well, John said he wasn't, he didn't say anything, but I'm trying to give you a neat chronological tidy story. I'm trying to show you all of this stuff in a way that's going to make it make sense so you can see what I see and saw with my own eyes, and that you would believe and by believing have life in the name of Jesus. So I certainly would not be uncomfortable with the idea that John did do some lumping to highlight this stuff. At times, John gives us very specific chronologies. On the third day, a wedding took place at Cana. The next day, Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. The next day, John was there again with two of his disciples. We get stuff like that. But at the end of chapter two, we get done with everything, and we start chapter three, and it just says, Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. See the way that just sounds like a freestanding story. To me, that reads like John saying, it doesn't matter when exactly this happened. Maybe it happened right after Jesus' the first Passover here in Jerusalem. Maybe it was the next thing that happened. Maybe it wasn't. It isn't important. And uh a cue like that tells me that John isn't trying to demonstrate anything theologically by connecting it necessarily to the previous story. All four gospel authors have little tells, little phrases they like when they're trying to say, like, immediately this happened. You know, Luke, for example, says he's telling a very ordered story here, but also Luke probably uses more one day this happened, one day that happened, sometime after this, this happened, kind of storytelling than even Matthew does. So sometimes Luke is very precise. Like here at the end of Luke 11 and into Luke 12. When Jesus left there, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law began to oppose him fiercely and besiege him with questions, waiting to catch him in something he might say. Next verse. Meanwhile, when a crowd of many thousands had gathered so that they were trampling on one another, Jesus began to speak first to his disciples, saying, Okay, you see, there's necessary chronology there from Luke. He's spelling out this was happening, and at the same time, this thing was brewing over here. But so often what we get from Luke is stuff that sounds more like this. Then he went down to Capernaum. Okay, well, that means sometime after the previous thing, he went down to Capernaum. Uh, Luke 5, 1. One day, as Jesus was standing by the lake of, okay, so that's one day. Um, Luke 6. On another Sabbath, he went into the synagogue. And you see what I'm saying here? They all the gospel authors have different ways that they communicate timeline and the necessary relation or lack thereof of the next thing to the previous thing. John gives us quite a few hints and we can kind of tell when one thing is following after the next. So, what do we get here between the first anecdote in John 2 and the second? All right. Uh, they uh they left the wedding at Cana, and after this, he went down to Capernaum. Okay, that could be any time after this, but we know from the other gospels that that any time after this was before his final trip to Jerusalem. When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Okay, well, that really could be the next Passover, or it could be the final Passover. Either way, the timeline cue here is just well, he went to Jerusalem for the Passover because it was time to go to Jerusalem for the Passover. Okay, possibility one, somebody's wrong. I don't think that's true. Possibility number two, there's just one temple cleansing, and John lumped it a little differently. The evidence for lumping and the proclivity to do that between the different gospel authors, I've spoken to it. I don't know who does it the most or if that's the best case, but certainly John may be doing that here. Option number three, Jesus just cleansed the temple twice. And I guess I could spend a bunch of time unpacking this, but it's really a pretty simple proposition. If true, that would mean that when he cleansed the temple the first time in John chapter two, people were like, Yeah, we're ready for temple cleansings. This is great, and we don't want to arrest you at all. But by the time he cleansed the temple again, almost exactly two years later, people were like, Yeah, now you're not an unknown. Now we do know what you're into, and you're a threat to our institution and establishment, and we want you gone, and you just gave us enough of an excuse to have you arrested, or even to want to kill you. Another reason to view this as maybe a second temple cleansing, maybe there are two, would be you get the detail about the whip and the cords and all of that stuff. You get more details about the sheep and the cattle as opposed to just the doves. You get more detail about him scattering the coins specifically, even though, like, you know, driving out the money changers and the like I would assume some coins would scatter. But John seems to lock on to different details. And also John doesn't of Jesus quoting any scripture here, whereas the synoptics, you know, give us a pretty serious connection with Old Testament stuff linguistically. Coming out of the temple cleansing in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it seems like the religious leaders are very angry and accusatory coming out of that. Coming out of it in John, it seems like they're very curious. Kind of seems like the accusation Jesus makes in John is stop making my father's house a marketplace. So he's mad about the bastardization factor, the commercialization. It kind of seems like in the other three, it's more about just corruption and shady business dealings and the grossness of the temple leaders being intertwined with these questionable merchants and all of that. And also, I suppose if there were two temple cleansing, I mean on the first one, it was just shock and awe. I mean, like, I uh we got to think about this a little bit. Give it a couple years to think about it, and everybody's like, if he ever does that again, we are completely arresting him. I'm sure it was the talk of the town the next year as people were getting ready for their Passover, you know, they're setting up their little booths and stuff. Like, you think that guy with the whip is gonna be back? Well, I brought my anti-whip arm guards this time, just in case he is. Surely everybody remembered maybe two years was enough for that to be the kind of thing where it's like, oh, great, well, he did it once, he's doing it again. And, you know, I I suppose if Jesus did it once, maybe he would do it again. If he was mad about it the first time, it would make sense that the next time he goes to Passover, which is when he went and died, that he would still be mad about it. I mean, they clearly didn't stop doing the thing that he was angry about, and it's not that weird in the Gospels to have Jesus do things more than once. He does a large-scale miraculous feeding more than once. It seems like a lot of his teachings he issued more than once. There's more than one account of somebody celebrating him at a meal and people being grumpy about it. I mean, if Jesus is trying to reach everybody and communicate all of this stuff, it would make sense that they wouldn't all always be around to see him do it every single time. And you might want to double up and hit a lot of these points again and again. Final verdict. Guys, I have no idea. I don't know. I don't feel a lot of pressure on this one. Some people I really look up to think there were just clearly two. They make a great case. I think the details of both of them, they don't look that different to me. It looks like John is maybe just shining a light on a different aspect for themes that he's trying to really emphasize here in John chapter two. If he did cleanse it twice, it looks like it was just a very, very similar cleansing. I'm totally at peace with this having happened once. And uh I don't think anything in John's language here, in the transitional language, the timeline language, would make him into a liar. And also, if there were two, I don't think that the other gospel authors would be liars because they left out the first one. Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to want to divide their story up between Jesus in the north in the safe territory, and Jesus in the hive of scum and villainy in Jerusalem. They all break down up north and then bravely move south and face everything down there. John is content to give us more of the details of Jesus moving all over the place. I don't know. I'm at peace with either one. What I'm very confident of is that I know what the story is doing in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and I feel I clearly know what the story is doing in John. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the story narratively, beyond the theology we've discussed, seems to be at helping the reader understand the events that led to Jesus getting arrested and executed. In John, the arrangement of events here, like the cleansing of the temple, seems to be telling the new reader who's just getting to know Jesus, stuff about Jesus and how he is that paradigm shift that we talked about a couple of days ago. Cool. That was fun. I like it when we get Bible crises and get to pick at it and explore it a little bit. I like that these Bible crises always serve as an opportunity to go look at more Bible and keep more of it in our hip pocket at any given time. And I don't feel a ton of pressure to just mash the gas pedal and see how fast we can get through books of the Bible, but I have been champing it the bit to get to this conversation with Nicodemus. This is some very tonally different material than what we've looked at so far in John, and I'm excited to get to that next time around. Okay, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again too.