. . . 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)
