A Kosher Pharisee Disagrees about Ritual Purity

It’s Sunday Post time, and you know what that means! Gospel through a Jewish lens. Today we’ll talk about a Torah observant Pharisaic leader who disagrees with an obligation suggested by another Pharisaic group about the need for ritual cleanliness before a meal, citing that this tradition is a violation of the written law, or Torah. It won’t be the only time that this dissenting Pharisee is in legal debate with another group of Pharisees over proper interpretation of the law.

The name of this dissenting Pharisee may be familiar to you: Jesus.

Plot twist!

Now unclutch your pearls and let’s get into it.

I have to be honest, this whole Jewish gospel idea is one of my favorite approaches to the study of sacred literature. I thought my last Parsha post was pretty damn good, but where I possess a more confident grasp of the literature and exercise the style, tone, and approach to contribute something meaningful to a diverse audience, it’s within Historical Jesus scholarship and the the Jesus Movement.

In the category of the Historical Jesus and the Jesus Movement, today’s text presents a shade of one of my favorite questions: Is Jesus, or better to say, is the Jesus as characterized by the gospel accounts, overturning Jewish custom and practice in order to establish an all new thing?

In the pursuit of an answer, we need to distinguish between, or at least be mindful of, the Jesus that existed historically (through the 30s CE), the epistles and gospels that developed around that historical figure (mid-40s, with Paul, through as late as 95-110 CE, with John and Luke-Acts), and the religion, Christianity, that we date to Rome and the “Church fathers” (post-gospel, say, later second through the fourth centuries CE).

I am imposing this onto the sequence of events, and there’s no guarantee that I’m carving history at the joints, but if I were to chunk these things out, I’d say that careful readers need always to be aware of the tripartite division: (i.) the figure, (ii.) the accounts about that figure, and (iii.) the religion that develops from those accounts.

Of those divisions, my grasp of the literature ends where the church fathers begin, so I try hard not to remark on these major figures and their positions. For me, the analysis begins with what we can reconstruct about the historical figure, by appeal to what was written about him, synthesized with what we know about the history of the Late Second Temple period.

I’ve included today’s text from Mark (7.1-8; 7.14-15; and 7.21-23) at the end of this post for reference, but I won’t refer directly to it here. Instead, I’m going to consider a few things about this characterization of the historical Jesus, namely, could we understand him Pharisaically? This question, if you ask me, is logically prior to a question we may want to ask more directly related to today’s text. Here are these questions, and I’m going to remark on the latter first. The question pertaining to the text is this: Would we understand the parenthetical note about Jesus refusal to engage in ritual hand washing, “Thus, he declared all foods clean,” to signal that Jesus did away with Jewish dietary laws?

By turning to the former question next, I’d suggest that we render this latter question involving dietary laws to be moot depending on how we respond to the first question. What I mean to say is that if we were to answer in the affirmative that Jesus may be characterized Pharisaically, then the question about dietary laws is no longer a live option. It would be extremely unlikely that a Pharisee would reject the dietary code. The reason we have the laws developed as we do today is by dint of rabbinic interpretation, and the Pharisees are the proto-Rabbis!

For example, the written Torah gives us, “Do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” From there, the rabbinic guidance is to separate all meat from all dairy products. The tradition of interpreting texts in this way is called the Oral Torah, a Pharisaic, or at least proto-Rabbinic, innovation; one that Jesus speaks against! Put in Jesus’s mouth against the questioning Pharisees, the evangelist writes, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” I don’t think it’s a stretch to plug in “Written Law” here for ‘the commandment of God’ and “Oral Law” for ‘human tradition’: In effect, You abandon the Written Law of God and hold to Old Law.

We could read this one of two ways. The truth is, I’ve always liked the idea that John the Baptist was influenced by a Qumran/Dead Sea sect, the Sadducees (or Zadokites, righteous ones), and that Zadokite tradition was transmitted from John to Jesus, so the first way to read this is to mention that the Sadducees did not follow the Oral Law, so that’s one way to go.

The other way to go is to position Jesus as a Pharisee, simply debating other Pharisees. I have crept closer to that view, especially in light of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s three-part series on her blog, Life is a Sacred Text, where she places Jesus in the Pharisaic tradition within the House of Hillel. We’ll return to this soon.

In the remainder of this post I’ll give some oxygen to the idea that Jesus may, in fact, have been a Pharisee. I’ll say further that my position is firm that Jesus did not dismiss dietary laws. Just a little more than a year ago (August 20, 2023), I gave a pretty thorough treatment of the kosher Jesus, so feel free to read that on the details of my argument. In the remaining here, I’m going to discus the Pharisee idea.

On Mark

Let me begin with a few words about Mark, or the gospel according to. Composed from a number of sources, including a Passion source (JANT, Introduction to Mark), Mark presents an apocalyptic history based on biblical history (JANT Introduction to Mark). Finding similarities with a collection of popular passages that common in the first century, called Testimonia, JANT’s intro do Mark mentions that the text is not dissimilar to styles found at Qumran.  The gospel may have been composed in Rome, but JANT, and Rabbi Ruttenberg, for her part, also suggest likely composition in Antioch in Syria, for a largely non-Jewish audience.

Mark is the gospel that presents the Messianic Secret. Jesus seems to want to downplay his true identity and encourages his disciples to do the same. JANT suggests a couple of ideas for this secret. The first idea asks maybe the author sought to downplay a pre-existant high christology that was growing in popularity, maybe from Paul? It’s possible that I had read that before, but when I revisited the intro to Mark to prepare for today’s post, I hadn’t remembered this suggestion. It’s an interesting one to think on, but we won’t stop here.

Another idea is that this Messianic Secret introduced a dramatic irony for a first century, largely illiterate audience who would hear the gospel read experience the drama and mystery of just such a secret in the figure of Jesus who people were beginning to believe was the messiah. A third idea connects the idea of Messianic Secret to other Jewish apocalyptic literature. Take 2 Esdras 7.28-30:

For my son the Messiah shall be revealed with those who are with him, and those who remain shall rejoice four hundred years. After those years my son the Messiah shall die, and all who draw human breath. Then the world shall be turned back to primeval silence for seven days, as it was at the first beginnings, so that no one shall be left.

Or 1 Enoch 62.7:

For from the beginning that Son of Man was hidden, and the Most High kept him in the presence of His power, and revealed him only to the chosen.

The rabbis have a tradition of this hiddenness as well, consider a Rabbinic writing, Pesach 54b:

Apropos the list of items created during twilight, the Gemara cites that the Sages taught: Seven matters are concealed from people, and they are: The day of death; and the day of consolation from one’s concerns; the profundity of justice, ascertaining the truth in certain disputes; and a person also does not know what is in the heart of another; and a person does not know in what way he will earn a profit; and one does not know when the monarchy of the house of David will be restored to Israel; and when the wicked Roman monarchy will cease to exist.

A final idea about the Messianic Secret is pretty practical. Perhaps the secret was a way to explain why more Jews were not following Jesus during his lifetime. Whether we can confidently know just why the Messianic Secret was employed, these ideas enrich the text for me.

What we should think about next is to consider that dietary laws is one contentious topic among many for the Jesus Movement, with other practices debated among the early communities, e.g., circumcision and debate over ritual purity in daily life, which is really at the core of today’s text.

The way we ought to understand Jesus with respect to ritual purity is that he is is defeating the forces of impurity in his healing episodes. The JANT makes this point in a callout box titled, “Impurity and Healing” on page 63 of my edition, within the gospel text. Matthew Thiessen is an NT scholar who makes an extended argument in his book, Jesus and the Forces of Death. On this view, Jesus is not merely aware of the ritual purity code, his observance and practice is deeply informed by it. When it appears that Jesus may speak against purity laws, instead, he either debates their proper application and/or asserts that all people have been cleansed with the coming of the messianic age, and so, there is no longer a need for ritual purity practices (Impurity and Healing JANT).

In AJ Levine’s extended commentary on Mark, she notes that Jesus and Pharisees agree generally, but disagree on particulars (28) in this instance of cleanliness before a meal. She notes that Pharisees may be trying to make the law more appealing to everyday Jews and easier to follow; in fact, the Qumran Community criticizes the Pharisees for their more lax practice, calling them “seekers after smooth things” (Levine 45).

Levine reminds readers that Jesus is shown elsewhere as engaged in Pharisaic legal interpretation, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus appears to be strengthening some instruction, a rabbinic practice called, “placing a fence around Torah” (Levine 46).

Thiessen reminds us that we must hold the specific context in mind: Pharisees and ritual hand washing before a meal. To expand beyond that context, either about ritual purity or about dietary laws, will necessarily get it wrong (Thiessen 194).

Paula Fredricken in her essay appearing in the academic volume, The Pharisees (2021), makes two helpful observations. The first is to suggest that Jesus’s arguing with the Pharisees, especially about the proper length of tzit tzit, a four-cornered, fringed garment, either demands that we portray Jesus Pharisaically or that we extend the wearing of tzit tzit to a larger majority of Jews, making the debate over fringe length more broadly applicable. Here again, we are left with a gospel depiction uprooted from any surefooted historical analysis. It does seem to be pretty rabbinic to debate over fringe length in a garment!

I’ll close with Rabbi Ruttenberg’s assessment:

So IF Jesus was a Pharisee—a tanna—or had any of those kinds of inclinations, if he was a fellow who moved between worlds (just as some people do today, and as Josephus, a few decades after Jesus, acknowledges that he did for some time), or if he played that way sometimes—well, one might imagine that the authors of the Gospels might be motivated to distance Jesus from his Pharisaic-ness, because they themselves were already in the process of breaking up with them.

Wrapping Things Up

What do you think, readers? Does it make sense that Jesus was educated within a Pharisaic context and engaged in legal interpretation and debate with other Pharisees? The gospels composed after the fact would abandon these explicit references in order to make a more accepting home for non-Jews recruited to the movement. Share your thoughts in the comments!

The Text

Mark 7:1-8

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders, and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash, and there are also many other traditions that they observe: the washing of cups and pots and bronze kettles and beds.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
    teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Mark 7:14-15

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

Mark 7:21-23

For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”