by Giovanni Francesco Rustici
23 And when he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” 24 Jesus answered them, “I also will ask you a question; and if you tell me the answer, then I also will tell you by what authority I do these things. 25 The baptism of John, whence was it? From heaven or from men?” And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ 26 But if we say, ‘From men,’ we are afraid of the multitude; for all hold that John was a prophet.” 27 So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things. Matt. 21:23-27
There is no surviving evidence that our Messiah went through any kind of “ordination” to become a “teacher.” The chief priests and elders of the people were the ones who controlled who was ordained. They don’t recognize this guy as one of their pupils. He was itinerant. He needed to explain what they had gotten wrong and what the Torah required. He needed to teach as many people as he had time to do. With the recognized authorities being highly suspicious of Him, the people wanted to know if Jesus’ “papers” were in order, so to speak. Jesus had been teaching and healing within the temple compound, a job the elders considered theirs alone, so naturally they wanted to know who he was. It was, they thought, a clever way to question this man’s authority. They thought they could expose Him as either a nutter or, even better, a Roman conspirator.
Messiah’s answer was to proffer a far more astute question about authority, by questioning their respect for the popular “teacher,” John the Baptizer. His question exposed the elders’ cunning and cowardice. So, when they pleaded ignorance, they stood self-condemned for being unable to judge such matters. If they could not judge John’s authority, by what standard could they judge Jesus’? He was, after all, the man John called—
. . . the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. John 1:9b
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