From the Frick Collection, via Wikimedia Commons
(Click to enlarge.)
Some, particularly among Protestant commentators, say that the advent of Jesus and Christianity eliminated the need for a temple. But Jesus’ righteous zeal for the House of God, which is depicted in all four of the canonical gospels, seems to suggest (along with such passages as his reference to the temple as “my Father’s house,” in Luke 2:49) that Jesus venerated the temple.
Notice, too, that the Jesus who calmly braided a whip and then proceeded to drive the money-changers out of the sacred precincts and to overturn their tables and chairs and to dump their coins out on the ground wasn’t the weak and shrinking “consumptive schoolgirl” whom the young C. S. Lewis saw depicted in church art and rejected in disgust.
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