Cleansing of Temple. The cleansing of the Temple narrative tells of Jesus expelling the merchants and the money changers from the Temple, and occurs in all four canonical gospels of the New Testament. The scene is a common motif in Christian art. In this account, Jesus and his disciples travel to Jerusalem for Passover, where Jesus expels the merchants and money changers from the Temple, accusing them of turning the Temple into a den of thieves through their commercial activities. The narrative occurs near the end of the Synoptic Gospels and near the start in the Gospel of John. Some scholars believe that these refer to two separate incidents, given that the Gospel of John also includes more than one Passover. Jesus is stated to have visited the Temple in Jerusalem, where the courtyard is described as being filled with livestock, merchants, and the tables of the money changers, who changed the standard Greek and Roman money for Jewish and Tyrian shekels. Jerusalem was packed with Jews who had come for Passover, perhaps numbering 300,000 to 400,000 pilgrims. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade. And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. In and Jesus accused the Temple authorities of thieving and this time he names poor widows as their victims, going on to provide evidence of this in and. Dove sellers were selling doves that were sacrificed by the poor who could not afford grander sacrifices and specifically by women. According to, Jesus then put an embargo on people carrying any merchandise through the Temple, a sanction that would have disrupted all commerce. This occurred in the outermost court of the gentiles. says the Temple leaders questioned Jesus if he was aware the children were shouting Hosanna to the Son of David. Jesus responded by sayingfrom the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise. This phrase incorporates a phrase from the, from the lips of children and infants, believed by followers to be an admission of divinity by Jesus. There are debates about when the cleansing of the Temple occurred and whether there were two separate events. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine agree that Jesus performed a similar act twice, with the less severe denunciations of the Johannine account occurring early in Jesus's public ministry and the more severe denunciations of the synoptic accounts occurring just before, and indeed expediting, the events of the crucifixion. Claims about the Temple cleaning episode in the Gospel of John can be combined with non-biblical historical sources to obtain an estimate of when it occurred. John 2:13 states that Jesus went to the Temple in Jerusalem around the start of his ministry and John 2:20 states that Jesus was told: Forty and six years was this temple in building, and you want to raise it up in three days? In the Antiquities of the Jews, first-century historian Flavius Josephus wrote that the temple reconstruction was started by Herod the Great in the 18th year of his reign 22 BC, two years before Augustus arrived in Syria in 20 BC to return the son of Phraates IV and receive in return the spoils and standards of three Roman legions. Temple expansion and reconstruction was ongoing, and it was in constant reconstruction until it was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. Given that it had taken 46 years of construction to that point, the Temple visit in the Gospel of John has been estimated at any time between 24-29 AD. It is possible that the complex was only a few years completed when the future Emperor Titus destroyed the Temple in 70 AD. Professor David Landry of the University of St. Thomas suggests that the importance of the episode is signaled by the fact that within a week of this incident, Jesus is dead. Matthew, Mark, and Luke agree that this is the event that functioned as the trigger for Jesus' death.