The Bible and violence fire or a sword. The cleansing of the Temple is a direct violent action by Jesus. There are also sayings of Jesus that oppose violence, such as Turning the other cheek and the passage about Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. The earliest detailed accounts of the death of Jesus are contained in the four canonical gospels. There are other, more implicit references in the New Testament epistles. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus predicts his death in three separate episodes. All four Gospels conclude with an extended narrative of Jesus' arrest, initial trial at the Sandhedrin and final trial
New Testament of the New Testament. These were all extremely important figures in the early church, writers would have mentioned their deaths if the New Testament had been written later. Furthermore, the Gospels contain numerous attacks on the Sadducees, a sect of Judaism that was wiped out with the destruction of the temple. Why, they ask, would later writers devote so much narrative space to attacking a group that no longer existed? John Robinson also notes that each book of the New Testament had to be written prior to the destruction of The Temple. Robinson notes that most scholars interpret the Olivet