Jesus, on the other hand, is depicted as touching and dining with the ritually unclean, and he may therefore have objected both to the implied slight toward non-Jews and to the disrespect for their space of worship that was involved in holding commercial activities in the Court of the Gentiles. But some may have thought that the presence of Gentiles, viewed as inherently unclean, was no more and no less defiling than the presence of animal dung.
Animals leave behind messy droppings, and dung was considered to defile sacred space.
If calling it a temple tantrum gives the wrong impression, does “the cleansing of the temple” get closer to the meaning of the incident? If the selling of animals occurred anywhere within the temple precincts, it would have been in the outer court called the Court of the Gentiles. In John’s version, Jesus actually takes the time to make a whip from cords ( John 2:15). In Mark 11:11-19, Jesus visits the temple but waits until the next day to do anything. Did Jesus lose his cool, as the phrase temple tantrum might suggest? Both the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Mark depict not a sudden rash outburst but something carefully planned.
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