Life of Christ

by Giovanni Papini

Jesus goes up to the Temple to destroy the Temple. He will leave to the Romans of Titus the task of literally dismantling the walls, of scattering the masses of stone, of burning down the buildings, of stealing the bronze and gold, of reducing to a smoky and accursed ruin the great stronghold of Herod; but He will destroy the values which the proud Temple upheld with its piled-up blocks of ordered stone, its paved terraces and its golden doors. Jesus goes up towards the Temple: the Man transfigured on the mountain is set against the scribes parched and withered among their scrolls; the Messiah of the New Kingdom against the usurper of the kingdom defiled by compromises, corrupt with infamy; the Gospel against the Torah; the future against the past; the fire of love against the ashes of the Letter. The day of battle is at hand. Jesus, among the songs of His fervent band, goes up to the sumptuous lair of His enemies. Well does He know the street. How many times He had gone over it as a little child led along by the hand in the crowd of pilgrims, in the midst of noise and dust, in the band of Galileans! Later as an unknown boy, confused by the dust and heat of the sun, tired and bewildered, He used to look toward the walls desperately longing to arrive at the summit, hoping to find up there in the sacred precincts a little shade for His eyes, cool water for His mouth, a word of consolation for His heart.

But to-day everything is transformed. He is not led along. He leads along. He does not come to adore, but to punish. He knows that there inside, behind the beautiful façades of the sublime sepulcher, there are only ashes and corruption: His enemies selling ashes and feeding themselves on corruption. The first adversary who comes before Him is the demon of greed.

He enters into the Court of the Gentiles, the most spacious and most densely crowded of all. The great, sunny, well-paved terrace is not the atrium of a sanctuary, but a dirty market-place. An immense, roaring din rises up from the vermin-like crowd of bankers, of buyers and sellers, of money-changers who give and take money. There are herdsmen with their oxen and their flocks of sheep; vendors of pigeons and turtle doves, standing by the long lines of their coops; bird-sellers, with cages of chirping sparrows; benches for money-changers, with bowls overflowing with copper and silver. Merchants, their feet in the fresh-dropped dung, handle the flanks of the animals destined for sacrifice; or call with monotonous iteration women who have come there after child-birth, pilgrims who have come to offer a rich sacrifice, lepers who offer living birds for their cure, obtained or hoped for. Money-changers, with a coin hung at their ears as a mark of their trade, gloatingly plunge their greedy talons into gleaming piles; the go-betweens run about in the swarm of the gossiping groups; niggardly, wary provincials hold excited conferences before loosening the purse strings to change their cash for a votive offering, and from time to time a restless ox drowns out with his deep bellow the thin bleating of the lambs, the thrill voices of the women, the clinking of drachma and shekels.

Christ was familiar with the spectacle. He knew that the house of God had been turned into the house of Mammon, and that, instead of silently invoking the Spirit, material-minded men trafficked there in the filth of the Demon, with the priests as their accomplices. But this time He did not restrain His scorn and His repugnance. To destroy the Temple, He commenced with the destruction of the market-place. The Eternal Mendicant, the poor man, accompanied by his poor friends, flung Himself against the servitors of money. He had in His hand a length of rope, which He knotted together like a whip, and with it He opened a passage-way through the astonished people. The benches of the money-changers crashed down at the first shock. The coins were scattered on the ground amid yells of astonishment and wrath; the seats of the bird-sellers were overturned beside their scattered pigeons. The herdsmen began to urge towards the doors the oxen and the sheep. The sparrow-sellers took their cages under their arms and disappeared. Cries rose to Heaven, some scandalized, some approving; from the other court-yards other people came running towards the disturbance. Jesus, surrounded by the boldest of His friends, was brandishing His whip on high, and driving the money-changers towards the door. And He repeated in a loud voice, “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves!”

And the last money-handlers disappeared from the courts like rubbish scattered by the wind.

BUSINESS THE GOD

This action of Jesus was not only the righteous purification of the sanctuary, but also the public manifestation of His detestation for Mammon and the servants of Mammon. Business, that modern god, was for Him a form of theft. A marketplace was therefore a cave of obsequious brigands, of tolerated thieves. Among all the elements of the legalized theft which is called commerce, none is more detestable and shameful than the use of money. If some one gives you a sheep in exchange for money, you can be sure that he has made you pay more money than the sheep really cost, but at least he gives you something which is not a hateful mineral symbol of wealth. He gives you a living being, which will furnish you wool in the spring time, which will bear you a lamb, and which you can eat if you like. But the exchange of money for money, of coined metal for coined metal, is something unnatural, paradoxical and demoniac. Everything that is known of banks, rates of exchange, discount and usury, is a shameful and repellent mystery which has always been the terror of simple souls, that is, of upright and deep souls. The peasant who sows his grain, the tailor who makes a garment, the weaver who weaves wool or linen, have up to a certain limit a real right that their wealth should increase, because they have added something which before was not in the world, in cloth, in wool. But that a mountain of money should bring forth other money without labor or effort, without production by man of any object to be seen, to be consumed, to be enjoyed, is a scandal which goes beyond, and confounds human imagination.

Money-changers, bankers, amassers of silver and gold, are slaves of the witchcraft of the Demon more than all others. And it is to those men, the men of banks and of finance, that the grateful Demon gives power on this earth: they are the ones even to-day who rule nations, instigate wars, who starve nations, and who, by an infernal system of their own, suck out the life of the poor, transformed into gold, dripping with sweat and blood.

Christ, who pitied the rich, but who hated and detested wealth, the great wall which cuts off from men the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven, had broken up the den of thieves and had purified the Temple where He was to teach the last truths which remained to Him to expound. But with that violent action, He had antagonized all the commercial middle-class of Jerusalem. The men He had driven away demanded that their patrons should punish the man who was ruining business on the Holy Hill. These men of money found ready hearing with the men of Law, already embittered for other reasons, so much the more because Jesus in disturbing the business of the Temple had condemned and harmed the priests themselves. The most successful bazars were the property of the sons of Annas, that is, close relations of the High-Priest Caiaphas. All the doves which were sold in the Court of the Gentiles were raised on the property of Annas, and the priests who did business in them made a good income every month out of turtle-doves alone. The money-changers, who should not have been allowed to stay in the Temple, paid the great Sadducee families of the priestly aristocracy a goodly tithe on the thousands of shekels brought in every year by the exchange of foreign money into Hebrew money. Had not the Temple itself perhaps become a great national bank with coffers and strong boxes in treasure chambers?

Jesus had wounded the twenty thousand priests of Jerusalem in their prestige and in their purses. He had overturned the values of the falsified and mutilated Letter, in the name of which they commanded and on which they fattened. More than this, He had driven out their associates, the traffickers and bankers. If He had His way, it would ruin them all. But the two threatened castes drew together still more closely, to make way with the dangerous intruder. It was perhaps that very evening that priests and merchants agreed on the purchase of a betrayer and a cross. The bourgeoisie were to give the small amount of money necessary; the clergy to find the religious pretext; the foreign government, naturally desiring to be on good terms with clergy and bourgeoisie, would lend its soldiers.