Categories
- Art (356)
- Other (3,632)
- Philosophy (2,814)
- Psychology (4,018)
- Society (1,010)
Recent Questions
- Why did everyone start to hate the Russians if the U.S. did the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What needs to be corrected in the management of Russia first?
- Why did Blaise Pascal become a religious man at the end of his life?
- How do I know if a guy likes you?
- When they say "one generation", how many do they mean?
I understand that my answer will be hinted at, but I will try to explain it anyway.�
Because He wasn't just breaking up a candle shop. “My house will be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers,” Christ denounces the merchants. It is not that the servants of the Temple received income (the income of priests is stipulated in the Old Testament, and Jesus never opposed this, although he opposed many things very strongly). The fact is that the Temple was turned into a stable and a bazaar. Not even the Temple itself, but its courtyard (all this was located around). Going to the house of God, a person had to pass through a cowshed, an auction house, and a currency exchange office. Stench, hubbub, and a showdown.�
If something like this happens in a temple or even a shop at the entrance to the temple in our time, they will most likely try to stop it.�
The question of the greed of the temple workers is something else entirely.
As the Jewish Passover drew near, Jesus came to Jerusalem and found oxen, sheep, and pigeons being sold in the temple, and money changers sitting there.
And he made a whip of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, even the sheep and oxen; and he scattered the money of the money changers, and overturned their tables.
And he said to those who sold pigeons, ” Take these things from here, and do not make my Father's house a trading house.”
John 2: 13-16
Those who traded in the temple described in the Bible profited from trading for themselves, selling oxen, pigeons, and other animals for the altar.
There is no such thing in an Orthodox Church. The candle shop is located in front of the entrance to the main part of the building – “church”. So all religious attributes are distributed outside the church, where the rite takes place and parishioners gather for prayer. In some churches, this chapel with candles and so on is generally located separately.
The area in front of the entrance to the temple is called the porch, sometimes the outer narthex, and the first part of the temple from the entrance is called the narthex or in Greek nertex, sometimes the inner narthex, the pre-temple.
When you come to the hospital, do the hospital also tell you that the registry is a surgical department?
The Jewish Temple has nothing to do with Christian religious buildings.
The Jewish Temple was built at the behest of G-d Himself and to worship Him alone.
Christianity, officially dating back to the 4th century, is a Greek religion of idolaters.�
Therefore, whatever Christians sell and arrange for themselves is their own business.
But Jesus could not expel anyone from the Temple, because there was never any trade in the Temple.
God usually gives His people, His church, time to change. He is long-suffering. Trading in the ancient Temple did not take place for a year, not two, not even one hundred years – since God lives in eternity, for Him 1000 years is like one day. And now came the moment of Truth, the moment of Judgment, and the cleansing of the Temple with batogs and whips began. It will be the same with the church – as long as God is long-suffering and admonishes the Church through conscience, through prophets, through circumstances, etc. By the way, the Orthodox Church has repeatedly gone through the process of taking away its property, destroying churches, destroying priests, etc. – this was also a kind of action of Christ against the trade and lies that spread in churches. But toli will still be: The Judgment of God is ahead. Both the Judgment of this age and the Judgment of the next age (pakibytia), which is sometimes called the Last Judgment.
It is necessary to support the church and clergy for something (we have a church separated from the state, right?). So they sell icons, candles, books and other things related to religion. Previously, there was a church tithe-a tax that was levied on the maintenance of the Church.
The expulsion from the temple described in the Bible is due to the fact that everything necessary for the sacrifice was sold in the temples.
The Gospel says that ” Jesus entered the temple of God and drove out all those who sold and bought in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those who sold pigeons.” The Jerusalem temple consisted of a courtyard where sacrifices were made.The vestibule separated the secular part from the sanctuary, where only priests could enter, and the high priest could enter the holy of holies only once a year on the feast of atonement. Sacrificial animals were sold in the courtyard, as well as coins were changed.Imagine the atmosphere there. A real bazaar that interfered with public and private prayer. All this took place in the courtyard, which was part of the temple, and not behind its fence. This angered Christ, and he dispersed all these merchants and money changers.
I think that all arguments about what can be traded and what should be prohibited are inappropriate, useless and even harmful. Jesus did not make any distinction between a “commodity” or a type of profitable activity. His demand was one: a categorical ban on trade in the Temple of God. Therefore, the boundaries of each Orthodox church should be clearly defined and there should be no ringing of coins on this territory. All trading operations �- �outside the temple. Then there will be no such topic and the parishioners will not be embarrassed.
This is an explanation of the thesis (blessed are the poor in spirit). The most important advantage of Christianity is the increased ability to accumulate knowledge and pagans arranged magic tricks in temples as miracles and made an artificial shortage of knowledge to increase profits . In the pagan version of the Hypocratic oath, it is forbidden to pass on knowledge about the treatment of diseases to outsiders .
The case described in the Gospels, that Jesus directly drove the merchants out of the temple with a whip, adding kicks and strong words to them, should not be compared with the current situation. And for the following reasons. There was a certain abandoned temple where services were not conducted, so all sorts of low castes, Gypsies and the like were entrenched there. There was a constant noise in the temple, people came in with dirty shoes, garbage was thrown there. In general, a clean place was turned into a pathogenic zone. But the current situation is quite different. In the days of the 90s, when Patriarch Alexy II was Patriarch, the church could well afford to exist without price lists and accessories. They were, of course, in church shops, but they didn't really take money for baptisms, weddings and funerals. I remember all that. But by the early 00s, the economy began to grow strongly, and at the same time, society changed a lot. Prices for everything have increased many times. At the same time, it took compliance with capitalist marketing models to stay afloat. The clergy work in the church, they usually have children, families, they need to be dressed and collected for school. High salaries are required, they will not be able to survive working for what God has sent. In addition, the church is quite an ordinary organization, it owns large territories and squares, and you also have to pay for all this. Where can I get money? For this purpose, it is necessary to conclude business projects with different companies and increase turnover, attach price tags. Quite a normal social process. Approximately the same process occurred in medicine. In the 89th year, I had an operation for peretonitis, without taking a penny, and saved my life, I was 1.5 years old. Right now, I'd have to pay a pretty penny to keep from dying.�
And what is written, say, in the ap. James about covetousness and avarice, and other church fathers-this is again the plague of the times. The historical context of such quotations should be taken into account. Then in the ancient world there were completely different financial realities: salaries as such were almost not required, wealth was owned by people who themselves almost did not work, managed slaves, had vineyards, all sorts of Roman aristocrats and nobles, patricians with an accentuated contempt for plebeians. I didn't have to pay for medical insurance, which I didn't have, I didn't have to pay traffic police fines, etc. Therefore, there is no point in comparing the rules of the ancient world and the rules of the modern world.
I can also add that the church's teaching itself does not condemn wealth as a phenomenon. It condemns the passion associated with wealth, which is not always associated with this wealth, but depends on the person. The Old Testament emphasizes many times that Solomon was a wise man and king of his people, and as a righteous man, untold riches flowed to him from everywhere and he controlled the economy of the Kingdom of Israel.
This is considered essentially welfare, sent by God for righteousness and supported by man himself. Sometimes the Bible even mentions something like an inventory of property, in the form of the livestock of Jacob and other figures. Sometimes there is a very impressive list of what certain righteous people owned.�
As for some of the priests who ride Maybachs, I'll leave that out of the question. I personally have not seen such a thing, I usually see them even though they have foreign cars, but they are quite used.
I have a completely different answer paradigm born. What if the anger of Christ in a well-known episode was directed against customers, just the tables of money changers turned up at hand? Customers came and went, and merchants were always there, just became extreme in the showdown. What if the problem with ecclesiastical trade is not in the shops, but in the customers, that is, in ourselves? It seems to me that the problem of church trade today is precisely this: a large number of buyers of spiritual goods come, who are not really interested in the actual church component of what is happening, rather they are buyers of the rite, I'm sorry. Did not Christ drive them out of the Temple? Therefore, I thought that critics of the church trade, as well as critics of the Russian Orthodox Church, could think about the causes of the problem. The bustle around church shops is created not by churches, but by believers, as well as the conditional luxury of the Russian Orthodox Church is built on private donations. For example, what model of command should be followed in a free society if something is not pleasant? Just don't support it. If you don't like trading in the temple, don't buy it. If there are too many such people, the temple trade will stop by itself exactly in accordance with the gospel precept.
To add to all of the above, the church does not officially recognize this as a trade. This is a donation. Donation to the church. Very much like a church Newspeak, isn't it?
There is no trading going on in the temples!
“And what is it called then?!”, you may rightly ask. �And here it is.
What you used to think of as “goods” in a church shop, from the clergy's point of view, is “freely distributed religious paraphernalia”
What you used to think of as a “payment for goods” is, from the clergy's point of view, a “donation of gratitude.”
What you usually think of as the “price of goods” is called the “recommended donation amount”in the temple.
You may have found it funny. But the state shares the position of churches. This can be understood by the following criteria::
According to our legislation, ANY commercial activity is taxable, otherwise it is illegal. Temples are NOT SUBJECT TO taxes.
Any commercial activity must be accompanied by accounting for finances and issuing checks. Temples don't issue receipts!
If we are talking about jewelry, then each of them must have a sample, and the seller has supporting documents. Otherwise, the SALE of such jewelry is illegal. In churches, you will hardly find a gold cross with an indication of the sample, and I don't say anything about documents at all.
So, no one sells anything, okoyannye! Everything as Jesus bequeathed;)
In the time of Jesus, Jews were required to sacrifice animals on a number of occasions. They could either be brought from home or bought locally. The proximity of a barnyard and a temple is no longer appropriate, and such “trading platforms” often served as a place for transactions that have nothing to do with religion. In Soviet times, the sale of tights in the toilets of factories and universities was also not encouraged, although what kind of sacredness is there… In modern temples, you will not find trade in items that are not related to rituals.�
In the Old Testament, there was a clear “price list” – for which sins, how many animals of what kind should be sacrificed and how much meat the priest should receive for food. A candle in a Christian church is a symbolic bloodless sacrifice to God, something that will not bring practical benefits to anyone, because it is not even used for lighting in the temple. In many temples, there is no seller or price list – there is a box with candles, next to it – a box for money for these candles, you can put them there as much as you think is necessary. It is not necessary to put candles, this is one of the forms of voluntary sacrifice to God: you can donate your money for a candle, you can – for the repair or construction of the temple, you can distribute it to the poor outside the temple, all this is purely voluntary. Yes, and candle shops are made (by the way, they are often located not inside the church, but in the narthex or in the courtyard) for convenience-I suspect that few of those modern parishioners who prefer candles as a form of sacrifice have their own candle factory on the balcony, and there are shops with beekeeping products not on every corner, and prices there are much higher than church prices…
Because they didn't give a damn about their own holy scriptures. The church is a political institution, a little more social, but not religious. So they don't care what Jesus or anyone else said. They want money, they get money, trading in temples is another amazing way to make a pretty penny.