The Gospel Of John and The Synoptics Don’t Conflict at All Concerning the Chronology of the Temple Cleansing
It is sometimes (often) frequently claimed that the Synoptics have Jesus cleanse the Temple at the end of his ministry whilst John has him do it at the beginning. This is incorrect. The Synoptics and John BOTH have Jesus cleanse the Temple at the end of his ministry.
The only difference is that John fits in much more ‘end of ministry’ material than the Synoptics between the Temple cleansing and Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Consequently, there is no conflict in chronology, only poor readings or misunderstandings. It is an error to read the story of the cleansing of the Temple at the beginning of John’s Gospel and imagine that the event had to have taken place at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. John never said it did.
Readers of the Gospels would do well to take seriously the intelligence of the text’s authors. They weren’t stupid. They were brilliant theologians who knew their subject far better than moderns do. Where we see contradiction it usually resides in our rather paltry reading skills rather than in the texts themselves. Not always, to be sure, but usually. The chronology of the cleansing of the Temple is one such example.
This is an excellent suggestion – however, I see two problems: can you really “fit” everything in John 3-12 into a single week? Samaria and Cana are both in Ch. 4. This presumes the traditional chronology, with the “triumphal entry” a week before Passover. Second, John 12:12-18 sounds like the triumphal entry from the Synoptic Gospels, the “end of his ministry” on all four gospels. The “next event” should be the temple action, which John omits.
I am not overly impressed with attempts to show he did the Temple action twice, but I am also not particularly attractive to “John re-arranged the events” either.
Phillip J. Long
February 23, 2013 at 13:45
i take the basic outline of john to be ‘historical’ (john the baptist- ministry of jesus- execution and resurrection). i don’t, though, think john is doing chronology. from the cleansing of the temple on john is just talking about stuff jesus did- either earlier or later- it made no difference to him.
Jim
February 23, 2013 at 14:01
Ah, thank you for the comment Jim, the enigma is solved. Perhaps, for John’s account does have some of the appearances of a narrative, with a series of events in a sequence… But if the sequence is not temporal… the trouble is you now need to show us how the sequence does work if it is not ordered by time or causality.
Tim Bulkeley
February 23, 2013 at 14:43
think thematic arrangement rather than temporal. think ‘vignettes’ rather than ‘timeline’
Jim
February 23, 2013 at 14:51
Jim, this post sounds like extreme special pleading to me. Jesus begins his 2 year ministry in John 2 and that is when the temple cleansing (apart from any externally imposed perspective) occurs. The cleansing in say, Mark 11 occurs at the beginning of the passion week during the in-and-out-of-Jerusalem sequence. Must we insist that these chronologies line up to take the individual messages seriously or to respect the sophisticated abilities of the evangelists as storytellers? Surely not. Can’t we argue instead, that we are dealing with a tradition that is more-or-less historical which has been used by individual evangelists for their narrative and theological purposes. The ancients did not demand the same sort of historical precision that scholars today are seeking. I guess what I am asking is, does it really matter if they disagree on the chronology, and if so, why?
Christopher Skinner
February 23, 2013 at 15:49
well i’m not pleading for anything so it’s hardly special. but what makes you think the ministry was 2 years and why do you think that they disagree other than by presuming that there’s some sort of chronological arrangement that one or the other has ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’ (which is the necessary presupposition for there to be ‘disagreement’)?
and why not see the scenes in john not as occurring along a timeline but as a series of vignettes? why, in other words, read john as though it were a modern biography?
Jim
February 23, 2013 at 15:56
So in order to harmonize the Synoptics and John on the temple action, you are willing to say that Jesus twice fed 5,000 men with five loaves and two fishes and thereafter walked across the Sea of Galilee? I don’t see how that is helpful.
James F. McGrath
February 23, 2013 at 17:40
you’re, like a couple of others, missing the point- which is that john’s post temple cleansing tales are vignettes rather than chronological. try this- think ‘flashbacks’ in a movie.
Jim
February 23, 2013 at 17:42
Can you point to another example of first century, Greco-Roman biography that uses the “vignette” model you describe? Probably not. That’s why I described this post as “special pleading” (a rhetorical fallacy). I am treating the Fourth Gospel not (as you suggest) like a modern writing, but as an example of Greco-Roman biography. To my knowledge, the vignette approach you describe, while novel and interesting, is unattested in this type of writing. To insist that John is envisioning his narrative as a series of vignettes is completely out of keeping with what we know of the genre as a whole. Again, that’s why this whole discussion seems to me like special pleading on your part. I hope my critique was a little more clear to you this time around, Jim.
Christopher Skinner
February 23, 2013 at 20:16
No need to attempt being condescending- it doesn’t prove you’re right.
Second- treat the gospels as biographies all you like. They aren’t.
Third- whether or not there are other examples of the vignette model in g-r lit is irrelevant. There are, in the world, unique things. To say there aren’t is foolish and shortsighted.
Fourth- again, no need for you to attempt, as you do once more in your closing sentence, to be condescending. It proves nothing except that you think you know more. But that hasn’t been shown yet.
Jim
February 23, 2013 at 20:24
You have misread me if you think I am attempting to be condescending. Sincere apologies if that is how my comment reads. Just wasn’t sure you understood my first post. Trying to engage in genuine dialogue here. Didn’t think that would be read as condescending (though admittedly, the tone of written word is much tougher to discern than vocal inflection). Not sure your comment about “uniqueness” can really hold here. Interesting hypothesis. I just happen to disagree for, what I think, are substantive reasons.
Christopher Skinner
February 23, 2013 at 20:41
Appreciate the clarification. So what exactly about uniqueness troubles you? Even, among g-r biographies the gospels are ‘unique’ . And then, john is unique among the gospels. Why is it difficult or inappropriate to imagine or postulate that his methodology is different than the others? And more importantly, why would he set out to alter what would have been a well known chronology (the temple cleansing) placing it in another time altogether?
In sum what i’m suggesting allows the chronology to remain whilst seeing what follows it as a ‘telescoping’ (i’m not chained to the vignette idea).
Jim
February 23, 2013 at 20:54
Jim, I didn’t have a chance to return to this over the weekend as my Sunday was pretty busy. However, I did want to say one last thing before moving on to the demands of Monday. What I would like to do is respond to your second comment in our exchange. I will omit points 1 and 4 since, as I indicated, no condescension was intended. Instead, I would like to focus on numbers 2 and 3 above.
You wrote: “Second- treat the gospels as biographies all you like. They aren’t.”
I’m not sure what part of my comment gave you the impression that I was “treating the gospels as biographies.” I was not and I do not. In fact, in every NT course I teach, I remind my students that the gospels are neither history nor biography in any real sense that we might speak of today. I ask my students to remember this phrase: “The Gospels are theologically stylized narratives with historical roots.” What I did suggest in my initial comment is that the Gospels most closely resemble Graeco-Roman biography (or bios), which is something of a consensus in modern scholarship on the Gospels. So I don’t think that claim is novel or too heavily disputed among researchers who, like myself, spend most of their time working with the canonical Gospel traditions. To my mind, if your “vignette” or even “telescopic” model is going to say anything of substance to contemporary discussions about the nature of Gospel (inter)relationships, it needs to treat the text as modern scholarship does, or at the very least provide a rationale for why you are not doing so. As it stands, your post does neither.
Next you wrote: “Third- whether or not there are other examples of the vignette model in g-r lit is irrelevant. There are, in the world, unique things. To say there aren’t is foolish and shortsighted.”
To be clear, I never indicated that there weren’t unique things in the world. So, even though this is a brilliant rhetorical flourish on your part, it really doesn’t critique anything I actually said in my comment. (Now to be fair, I may be BOTH foolish AND shortsighted, but I don’t think this thread cannot be used as supporting evidence!)
To my point though, I am surprised that you would make the statement that this is an “irrelevant” comment. To my mind, it is only “irrelevant” if you want to make your point without having to wrestle with, what is otherwise, a fair scholarly critique. Again, as a scholar who spends most of his time working in the Gospels, I would insist that my own arguments (as well as those of others) take into account other data from ancient texts. And if I was making an argument (like yours) that seems to discount a great deal of contemporary scholarship on the Gospels, I would want to be sure that it accounted for such things. That was essentially why I responded in the first place. You dismissed a common scholarly argument with, what I deemed to be, a swipe of the hand.
Thanks for the opportunity to clarify. I don’t intend to keep going back and forth on this, but I did want to return to this once more before starting my week. Have a great day.
Christopher Skinner
February 25, 2013 at 08:32