The Gospel scenes behind the final portrait
He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell.
The portrait combines several distinct Gospel scenes. Jesus' tears at the sight of a city refer to Luke 19:41–44: approaching Jerusalem, he weeps over its failure to recognize the opportunity for peace and predicts its destruction. Jerusalem is not his hometown: Matthew 21:11, immediately before the Temple episode, identifies him with Nazareth. Chesterton's ‘native city’ thus belongs to his expansive identification of Jesus with Jerusalem, rather than to the Gospel's geographical description. Nor is Luke's occasion simply a casual daily sight: it is a prophetic lament during the entry into Jerusalem.
The overturned furniture comes from the Temple cleansing: Matthew 21:12 specifies tables and seats; John 2:13–17 adds a whip of cords and scattered money. Neither account supplies the flight down the front steps. That is Chesterton's theatrical enlargement. The warning of hell closely paraphrases Matthew 23:33 in the King James Version, where Jesus addresses the scribes and Pharisees. Finally, the mountain retreat has several possible witnesses: Matthew 14:23, Mark 6:46 and Luke 6:12 explicitly connect withdrawal to prayer. These establish solitude, but do not identify a concealed emotion as its motive. Read against these scenes, the paragraph moves from textual incidents to imaginative conjecture; its last claim is appropriately introduced as something Chesterton has ‘fancied’. Biblical wording here is checked against Project Gutenberg's King James Version text, rather than assumed to establish Chesterton's exclusive translation.
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