Purity Practices
Purity Practices
Although a longer book could devote an extensive section to exploring Jesus’ treatment of levitical impurity, we simply pause to note it briefly here. The kingdom was so all-consuming that it took precedence not only over one’s possessions, kinship ties and moral past but even over levitical purity practices (and certainly their postbiblical expansion). From our limited extant sources, it does not appear that Jesus regarded such practices as wrong (cf. in fact Mk 1:44), but rather that he believed that, in view of the kingdom, the heart of the law must take precedence (cf. Matt 23:25-26//Lk 11:39-41; Matt 23:23//Lk 11:42).
Narratives reflecting Jesus’ practice cohere with collections of his sayings and conflicts with rival teachers. Jesus’ violation of his contemporaries’ conventional purity boundaries appears throughout the gospel tradition.84 In the Gospels, however, Jesus does not explicitly address contracting impurity so much as he removes the impurity (hence addresses it far more effectively than levitical separation from it does). Gospel narratives portray Jesus touching the unclean, including lepers (Mk 1:41)85 and (most impure of all) corpses (Mk 5:41; cf. Lk 7:14). They also portray him publicly acknowledging the touch of a bleeding woman (Mk 5:31-33), which should have rendered him impure (Lev 15:25- 27).86 Presumably the writers viewed such cases the way they viewed Jesus’ contact with sinners: the true influence flowed from Jesus to others, not the reverse. Nevertheless, they are no more likely to have deliberately invented this pervasive yet potentially controversial emphasis in Jesus’ behavior toward the impure than they are to have invented his welcome of sinners.
We may illustrate this unlikelihood by way of comparison with a related issue. We have no saying of Jesus explicitly claiming all foods to be pure (suggesting that the Gospel writers did not invent such sayings to address the issues with which the church soon struggled; cf. Acts 10:13-15; Rom 14:14; Col 2:16, 21; Heb 13:9). We have one saying that could be interpreted that way,87 and Mark’s interpretation (rather than adaptation) of the saying along these lines. But whereas Matthew reports Jesus’ saying found in Mark, he omits Mark’s interpretation (Mk 7:19), with which he apparently either disagreed or found unhelpful in his setting.88 Since the Gospel writers did not invent sayings of Jesus purifying foods, which became an issue for them, they had little reason to invent Jesus touching the unclean. Matthew omits Mark’s interpretation about unclean foods, but he nevertheless allows Jesus to touch the unclean.89
As we shall see in the next chapter, a number of Jesus’ sayings (particularly conspicuous in Q) do show that he emphasized inward purity over outward purity (a sentiment shared by some of his contemporaries),90 and disagreed with some of his contemporaries over purity and other matters.