Elaine Pagels gives this summary of the events leading up to
Easter Sunday: “Jesus’ passionate and powerful presence aroused
enormous response, especially when he preached among the crowds
of pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. As the
Jewish and Roman authorities well knew, tensions were high
during the religious holidays when Jewish worshipers found
themselves face to face with the Roman soldiers. Jesus’ near
contemporary the Jewish historian Josephus, himself a governor
of Galilee, tells of a Roman soldier on guard near the Temple
who contemptuously exposed himself before just such a crowd, an
outrage that incited a riot in which twenty thousand died. When
Jesus dared enter the Temple courtyard before a certain
Passover, brandishing a whip, throwing down the tables of those
changing foreign money, and quoting the words of the prophet
Jeremiah to attach the Temple leaders for turning God’s house
into a ‘den of robbers,’ the Gospel of Mark says, ‘he would not
allow any one to carry anything