Jesus Christ and Trajectories of Purity: A Response to Thiessen’s Jesus and the Forces of Death

Eastern Great Lakes Biblical Society Annual Meeting

Virtual, 17 March 2022

Starting Points

• Thiessen identifies 2 problems
• Cultural gap where moderns view ancient purity concerns as naïve and fail to understand them
• Scholarly portrayals of Jesus rejecting all purity concerns in an anti-Semitic directions
• He aims to correct this by demonstrating how much Jesus kept purity norms

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To Be Explored: Problems with Thiessen’s Argument

• Theorizing Purity
• Historical contexts and trajectories
• Exegetical Issues

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• Close with a reframing of Jesus in the midst of purity trajectories

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Theoretical Problem #1: Holy vs. Pure?

• Holy:Profane and Pure:Impure are separate domains
• Lev 10:10 (!) and Ezek 22:26
• But Lev 20:25 and 2 Chron 30:17
• Klawans’s Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism
• Separation of ritual and moral impurity is only true of Mishnaic Judaism
• Qumran tended to conflate the two
• Even the distinction is problematized

Theoretical Problem #1: Holy vs. Pure?

• An “abomination” can be ritual (Exod 8:26, Deut 14:3) OR moral (Lev 18:26, Deut 13:14
• Certain foods were “unclean” (Lev 11) but intentionally eating such food was sinful (4 Macc 5:19-21)
• Toll collectors were unclean due to contact through their work (m. Ṭehar. 7:6; y. Ḥag. 21a) but they were also morally corrupt (b. Sanh. 25b, b. Šebu. 39a, t. B. Meṣ 8:26)

Theoretical Problem #2: Impurity as Death?

• Based on the work of Jacob Milgrom
• If almost anything can be associated with death (e.g. childbirth, benign skin disorder), then how helpful is the association?
• If death is so critical, then why no addressing of corpse impurity in Leviticus and why little attention to actual fatal disease?
• Best viewed as a distant symbol with more particular concerns present in the 1^st century

Historical Problem #1: Caricaturing Pharisees

• If Jesus fits in well with other Jewish perspectives then how can the Gospel writers get away with this caricatured contrast?
• It makes for good rhetoric and storytelling
• Their portrayal taps into a broader Mediterranean stereotype (not mentioned by Thiessen)
• Jews are obsessive about minutiae (Epictetus, Diatr. 1.224)
• There is no good reason for avoiding pork (Plutarch, Quae. conv. 4.5)
• Jews are superstitious (Plutarch, Super. 8)
• Jews are exclusionary and hateful (Juvenal, Sat. 14.100-106; Diodorus Siculus 40.3.4)

Historical Problem #2: Jewish Purity Expansionism

• For other Mediterranean cultures purity was almost exclusively focused on sacral times, persons, and places
• Some/Many Jews tended to expand purity regulations into everyday life (see Kazen, Jesus and Purity Halakah)
• Egyptian Priests vs. All Jewish Men (Josephus, Ag. Ap. 2.137-141)
• Food practices became a key point of cultural differentiation (3 Macc 3:4; Let. Aris. 139-142)
• Spread of miqvoth in colonized Judea (Sawicki)
• Early Christians (and Jesus?) were on the opposite trajectory (Mark 7:19; Klawans)

Exegetical Issue #1: Mark 1:40-45

• Jesus is “angry” (contested) at the man with a skin disorder
• Because he questions Jesus’s “willingness”?
• But 3^rd class condition
• But Jesus’s ritual instructions are incomplete
• But contextual emphasis on the problematic crowds

Exegetical Issues #2: Mark 5:25-34

• Some echoes of Leviticus 12 and 15, but repeated emphasis on body/medical terms
• An impure woman intentionally touching Jesus violates the law and thus IS sinful
• No explicit mention of purity issues or ritual action (cannot be assumed from Mark 1:40-45)

Reframing Jesus and Trajectories of Purity

• Ritual purity should be embedded in a larger, more diverse cultural-cognitive framework to see interconnections
• Beyond Thiessens’s dichotomy: a range of responses from Jesus (affirm, modify, ignore)
• Jesus Christ at the crossroads of trajectories of purity: Jesus can abide by purity norms but often works within a “priestly” frame to relativize ritual purity expansion in ways that emphasize moral purity