this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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so... Jesus wasn't actually against the rich nearly as much as people make him seem these days.
The flipping of the tables wasn't that they were doing business or even taking advantage of people. it was that they were doing business inside the temple.
as for all the "go sell your shit and follow me" stuff... well. yeah. Imagine, if you will Jesus with a cheesy sleazey-car-salesman grin and his hand out. Also notice that he really had a thing for hanging out with rich people.
none of the disciples were particularly poor. Mathew was a tax collector. James and John were both heirs to a successful fishing business, two of the others were senior employees in that business. he dined with and partied with the rich all the time, too. Joseph himself would have been well off (as a tekton, he wasn't exactly poor. He was the guy that built everyone's homes and such.) (though Mary probably fled from Joseph when he found out she was preggers. details)
basically, he acted and sounded like every half-baked cult leader you can imagine.
Jesus was mad at those using the temple for commerce but also said they were robbing people. “Den of robbers” It wasn’t just the location.
he was angry they were charging a bit extra for a bit of extra service. the money changers were presumably vetted by the Temple so they weren't outright cheating their customers. the whole reason the temple required the tributes to be in silver shekels (or half shekels) from Tyre was that Tyre was known to not debase their currency; and the money changers would easily vetted to avoid the ones clipping or outright forging coins.
As for the livestock merchants, keep in mind there were (are?) stringent requirements for sacrifices that made bringing animals from outside the city difficult to do. These were not the goats being raised to be put into a stewpot. Even just raising them for sacrifice was expensive. Bringing them into the city was another expense. Keeping them in the city, too.
It's very easy to imagine that Jesus was just being like "I can buy goats back home for (whatever a generic goat was worth)! These are ripoffs" and then going full-karen, while being too stupid to understand all that.
It sounds like you think Jesus was wrong.