Cleansing of the Temple
("Christ driving the money-changers from the Temple") (Matt. 21:12–13; Mark 11: 15–18; Luke 19:45–46; John 2:14–17)

The sight of the Temple in Jerusalem turned into a market place by money-changers and by traders in cattle, sheep and pigeons provoked the famous outburst, "Jesus made a whip of cords and drove them out of the Temple." In the center stands Christ brandishing a makeshift whip of bunched cords. Those around him are fending off the blows, others make for the doors, driving the animals before them and overturning tables and benches in the general confusion. The money-changers attempt to gather up their money or are clutching their purses. A woman picks tip a basket of pigeons. According to Matthew the episode took place in the Temple precincts but it is customary to represent the interior. Only John mentions the whip. The beasts were sold as sacrificial animals, the sheep and oxen for the rich, the pigeons for the poor. (Cf. Presentation in the Temple where Joseph's offering of pigeons is a sign of his poverty; also Lev. 12:8.) Christ's outburst was the kind of dramatic act that invites a symbolic interpretation, the more so since it was untypical of him. The Middle Ages saw it prefigured in the mysterious horseman who had driven Heliodorus from the same Temple a few centuries earlier. Renaissance humanists found a pagan prefiguration of it in the fifth labor of Hercules, the cleansing of the Augean stables. To the Reformation the theme symbolized Luther's condemnation of the sale of papal indulgences.