My understanding of the Temple money changers (based on very old research) is that the arrangement worked like this.
-- The money changers and merchants operated with the approval of the Temple authorities (priests). They needed permits to be there.
-- The money changers were agents for the Temple. Profits from the booths went to the Temple treasury.
-- For holy days the population of Jerusalem swelled to 2-4 times its normal size. This crowd of pilgrims included Jews from all over the world.
-- Pilgrims often needed to buy doves and other sacrifical animals after they arrived. It was hard to transport these animals over long distances.
-- Torah prohibitions against 'graven images' meant that none of the world's currencies were legal tender on Temple grounds.
-- Pilgrims wishing to buy sacrificial animals at the Temple had to use special 'Temple coins' that bore no images.
-- The money changers were the people pilgrims had to meet first. They took the pilgrims' regular money and gave them the special Temple money.
-- The same Temple authorities that refused all other currencies were also the only source of Temple currency and the sole authorities for setting the exchange rate.
It was a scam and everybody knew it.
The story of the money changers is like a lot of things in the Gospels: cultural contexts come into play that tend to be lost on all the modern
goyim.
The analogies I've seen so far on this thread aren't really analogous. A modern church is not much like the Temple, functionally speaking. And the volunteers who run a gift shop in the basement of a modern cathedral aren't doing the same thing the first-century exchangers were doing.
The squeeze they put on the devout amounted to more than marketing hype. It was more like like installing pay toilets at a ballpark.
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Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity.
Archer
All species are transitional.