Sunday, December 10, 2023

Did Jesus annul all food laws in Mark 7?

  

. . . not all are convinced that Mark intends to present Jesus as annulling the food laws. According to Matthew Thiessen, within Jesus’s Jewish setting it would simply be assumed that the Torah’s kosher regulations were normative. Therefore, instead of portraying him as announcing that the law’s clear dietary code has suddenly been rendered obsolete, Jesus should be seen as addressing a question that was debated among Jews in the first century: Can one be defiled by consuming clean foods that have been touched by unclean hands? Jesus is not weighing in on whether Jews can start eating pork or shell-fish contrary to the Torah but on whether one is defiled by consuming (kosher) foods with unwashed hands. Thiessen argues Matthew better clarifies the meaning of the pericope. (For what follows, see the discussion in Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 190-91, 194-95) Not only does Matthew omit Mark’s potentially confusing statement that Jesus “declared all foods clean,” the Matthean version concludes with a statement from Jesus that spotlights the heart of the issue: “But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone” (Matt 15:20).

 

That Jesus should be understood as entering an intra-Jewish debate about purity rather than as simply annulling the food laws is supported by another aspect of Matthew’s report: the evangelist depicts the Pharisees and scribes as the ones offended by Jesus’s teaching (Matt 15:12). If Jesus is being portrayed as abrogating the Torah’s food laws altogether, one would expect all the Jews, not merely the Pharisees, to be taken aback by Jesus’s words. In the book of Acts, for instance, Peter is appalled at the prospect of consuming unclean food (Acts 10:14). The idea of eating nonkosher foods is presented not only as new to the fisherman but also as offensive to him. Although this comes from a different New Testament source, it further supports the idea that Jesus’s Jewish disciples believed the Torah’s kosher laws were to be observed. All of this reinforces the view that Matthew is clearer than Mark about how Jesus’s teaching would have been heard in a Jewish milieu. (Michael Patrick Barber, The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology, and the Gospel of Matthew [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023], 14-15)

 

Blog Archive