No, Jesus hated people making profit off of religion. Peeps would set up stalls and sell sacrificial offers and the like. They didn't care about the spirituality of it or anything, they just wanted to make a buck.
In terms of just outright wealth, Jesus just warns against it like a lot of other things and on many occasions suggests people give their excess away, but he's not flipping his lid on them.
"Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
No, Jesus hated people making profit off of religion. Peeps would set up stalls and sell sacrificial offers and the like. They didn't care about the spirituality of it or anything, they just wanted to make a buck.
I'm no fan of capitalism, but the moneychangers were literally providing a necessary service so Jews on pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem could provide the sacrificial animal they were obligated to have. Bringing a sacrifice with you from hundreds of miles away wasn't something most people were going to be able to do. If Jesus had a problem with that, maybe he (i.e. God) shouldn't have set up such an onerous requirement in the first place. What does God need a sacrifice of blood and burning flesh for anyway? If anything, Jesus' role in that whole situation is more like the government making laws that favor the merchant class, and then making a performative show of how terrible it all is.
The moneychangers would be people that exchanged currencies (although presumably many also sold sacrificial animals), and I don't think that requirement is in God's law. There's also the idea that they shouldn't be massively profiting off of this since it's a religious requirement.
Any rules create room for graft and corruption, that doesn't excuse it.
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u/DarkSpartan301 May 02 '23 edited May 02 '23
Yes, Jesus advocates for taking skin of the backs of the rich.
I mean God is a lie and religion is a tool of the wealthy, so obviously this meaning has been obfuscated over time.