The Jewish Gospels (15 page)

From Jesus' point of view, the “tradition of the elders”—later called the oral Torah—is exactly “human precepts” being taught as doctrines, as in the prophetic formulation. For the Pharisees, and later for the Rabbis, the “tradition of the elders” is divine word and not human precepts (though they were transmitted orally rather than
scripturally).
¹⁷
In this case, moreover, we have an admittedly pharisaic innovation, contested even by some other Pharisees. No wonder that Jesus would balk and protest. What I hope to have shown till now in this section is that when Mark wrote the words καθαρίζων πάντα τ
á½°
βρώματα “purifying all foods,” there is little reason to believe that it meant “thus he permitted all foods,” but rather, “thus he purified all foods,” meaning that he rejected the extra-stringent laws of defiled foods to which the Pharisees were so devoted—not the kosher rules.
¹⁸
Jesus was certainly not sanctioning here the eating of bacon and eggs; rather, exactly as the text says, he was permitting the eating of bread without ritual washing of the hands, quite a different matter. The controversy ends where it began, in a contest over the question of bodily impurity caused by the ingestion of impure foods. It is highly unlikely that in its original context Mark was read as meaning that Jesus had abrogated the rules of forbidden and permitted animals.

What makes this not merely “a halakhic [legalistic] squabble between first-century Jews” (to echo a colorful bon mot of John Paul Meier's) is Jesus' use of the controversy to make a strong theological claim in the form of the parable. Whether or not the Pharisees were hypocrites (I would imagine that some were and some were not), it is certainly the case that to concern oneself with extraordinary performances of external piety while ignoring (or
worse) the ethical and spiritual requirements of the Torah is poor religion, on the order perhaps of preaching that Jesus is love but hates homosexuals. We should remember, however, that “in general, in ancient Jewish and Christian contexts a ‘hypocrite' is a person whose interpretation of the Law differs from one's own,” as Joel Marcus has so sharply put it.
¹⁹
There is a story of the nineteenth-century Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk (the famous Kotzker Rebbe) who said that many Jews concern themselves more with a blood spot on an egg than a blood spot on a ruble, but surely he himself remained just as careful about blood spots on eggs and expected no less from his followers “and all the Jews.” (Recently Marcus has re-cited the Kotzker's apophthegm in precisely this Markan context.) Jesus' homily is indeed in this radically critical Jewish tradition that began with the great prophets and continued for millennia.

Let me repeat some verses from the text:

¹⁴
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand:
¹⁵
there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
^{16, 17}
When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable.
¹⁸
He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile,
¹⁹
since it enters,
not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)
²⁰
And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.
²¹
For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder,
²²
adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.
²³
All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Attentive readers will have noticed that verse 16 has been left out of my translation of the text, as it is in many standard versions. It is usually considered a later addition to the text, but actually it is original and the key to understanding the passage. It reads: “Let those who have ears, hear!” thus signaling that Jesus' statement about the law of purity is a parable, that the law itself has a deeper meaning. But the disciples could not understand the deeper meaning that Jesus' words were meant to convey. And so they asked him to explain. What, teacher, did you mean to teach us with this parable? And Jesus answered them: “Why does the Torah only render impure that which comes out and not that which goes in, if not to teach us something, namely, that morality is more important than the purity rules—and especially allegedly Pharisaic extensions of them?” This has absolutely nothing to do with abrogating the Law; it is just putting it in its place. The explanation that Jesus gives is to interpret the deep meaning
of the Torah's rules, not to set them aside. And it is this deep interpretation of the Law that constitutes Jesus' great contribution—not an alleged rejection of the Law at all. Not an exhortation, then, to abandon the Torah, but a call to deepen our genuine commitment both to practicing it and to incorporating its meanings, Jesus' famous saying can be seen as entirely within a Jewish spiritual world.

When Jesus explains the parable to his uncomprehending disciples, he is showing how the literal force of the halakha itself should be read as indicating its spiritual or moral meaning.
²⁰
Indeed, it is not what goes into the mouth that renders one impure but the impure intentions of a heart, as signified by the halakhic fact that things that go out of the body cause impurity. As I have mentioned above, all of the practices to which Jesus refers as pharisaic—the hand washing, the washing of vessels—are closely connected with the particular traditions of the Pharisees regarding the encroachment of impure foods on the purity of the body. Those Pharisees who believe that impurity (literal, halakhic impurity) comes from without miss entirely the spiritual import of the Torah's rule about impurity coming from within. In other words, Jesus' complaint against them is not a trivial point about unnecessary stringencies (whatever some think, he was not a liberal preacher-teacher) but a vitally important point about the interpretation of the halakha, which in his view the Pharisees have completely distorted, abandoning the Torah
here as well as in the other example given (the support of parents). What Jesus argues is that when the Pharisees misunderstand the law and change it to allow impurity from outside in accord with their tradition, they are also revealing that they don't hear the law at all. They only read from outside and ignore the inner meaning, just as they add external impurity. The halakhic issue is thus a perfect little parable. When Jesus speaks of the purity or impurity of foods, he is not speaking about the kosher system at all, but about the pharisaic understanding of purity practices. Neither Jesus nor the evangelist held, suggested, or implied that the new Jesus movement constituted a step out to form a new religion.

Jesus as a thinker and teacher was, like all thinkers and teachers, part and parcel of a particular historical and cultural context, within which he did his creative religious work and intervened his interventions. His context was the Palestinian Judaism of the north of Palestine (Galilee) in the first century and its religious practices, ideas, and controversies, including controversies with Jewish teachers from other places, such as Jerusalem. Reading the Gospel of Mark in its fullest context suggests that here Jesus speaks from the position of a traditional Galilean Jew, one whose community and traditional practices are being criticized and interfered with from outside, that is, from Jerusalem, by the Judaeans (as is emphasized in the opening sentence of the story itself).
²¹
Jesus accuses these
Pharisees of introducing practices that are beyond what is written in the Torah, or even against what is written in the Torah, and fights against their so-called tradition of the elders (κατ
á½°
τ
á½´
ν παράδοσιν τ
ῶ
ν πρεσβυτέρων), which they take to be as important as the Torah, or sometimes, in the eyes of their opponents such as Jesus, as uprooting or superseding the Torah.
²²
I would assert, moreover, that Jesus' Galilean disciples were following their own accepted traditional practice in their refusal of the (nonbiblical) notion that impure foods could render the body impure and hence their refusal to wash their hands before eating. Jesus' disciples are upbraided by these upstarts from Jerusalem for not observing the purity strictures that they had introduced and demanded on the basis of the “traditions of the elders.” Jesus responds vigorously, accusing them of hypocrisy and of ascribing to their own rulings and practices an importance greater than that of the Torah. There is thus nothing in Mark's version of this passage, let alone Matthew's, that suggests that Jesus is calling for abandoning the Torah at all. The Galileans were antipathetic to the urban Judaean/Jerusalemite pharisaic innovations.
²³

When put into its historical context, the chapter is perfectly clear. Mark was a Jew and his Jesus kept kosher. At least in its attitude toward the embodied practices of the Torah, Mark's Gospel does not in any way constitute even a baby step in the direction of the invention of
Christianity as a new religion or as a departure from Judaism at all.
²⁴

Mark is best read as a Jewish text, even in its most radical Christological moments. Nothing that Mark's Jesus proposes or argues for or enacts would have been inappropriate for a thoroughly Jewish Messiah, the Son of Man, and what would later be called Christianity is a brilliantly successful—the most brilliantly successful—Jewish apocalyptic and messianic movement. In his now-classic book
The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion,
Weston La Barre has the following to say about Christianity: “Indeed, to take a firmly secular view of it, Christianity itself was a crisis cult. Initially it was an ordinary politico-military revolt in the traditional Hebrew mold of secular messiahs, one of whom the Roman governor Pilate straightforwardly regarded as a rebellious would-be King of the Jews of the Davidic line, and executed in a usual fashion.”
²⁵
He follows this “firmly secular” account with a further story about how the Jews never would have thought of a “supernatural Hellenistic Messiah,” and that the idea of the dying and resurrected Jesus could only have come in via “a Neolithic vegetation spirit, the ‘dying god' of the Near East.” Even from a purely historical point of view, this account, cited here as typical of so many, can have no purchase, as it totally ignores the
Jewish
history of the divine, “supernatural” Redeemer that we have been
exploring throughout this book so far. La Barre, oddly enough, writes about Daniel 7 as also being the record of a “crisis cult” but then seems to totally ignore or deny the connections of that ancient text with any later development within Judaism. In the next and final chapter of this book, I'm going to make a case that even the suffering and death of the Messiah can plausibly be traced to the Jewish environment of Mark and his Jesus and, I suggest, to their own further reading of Daniel 7, and that in any case such an idea was hardly foreign to the Jewish imagination.

 

*
The later Rabbis, at least from the second century on, developed a method for invalidating such a vow, which indeed goes against the Torah. It is hard to assess the historical validity of the Markan Jesus' claim against the Pharisees, but it cannot be denied that it might very well have been the case, especially given his accuracy in other matters of Jewish, and especially pharisaic, practices.

T
HE SUFFERING JESUS ON HIS CROSS
may be in some ways the central, defining image of Christianity, and even Christendom for most of us. Christians wear the cross, and they cross themselves. For centuries, artists have depicted the scene of the suffering Messiah myriad times; in modernity, even Jewish artists such as Chagall have represented this iconic Christian emblem. Over and over again, we find the commonplace (and commonsense) statement that what divides Christians and Jews most sharply is the idea that the divine Messiah could suffer and die; indeed, many hold that it was this belief (produced, supposedly, after the fact) that was the most tangible marker of an absolute break between Jews and their new rivals, the Christians. In his now near-classic statement of the absolute difference of Jewish from Christian ideas of the Messiah,
The
Messianic Idea in Israel,
Joseph Klausner, the important Jewish historian of the Second Temple, makes the following argument, or rather, offers the absolutely dominant and prevailing view of this matter: that initially the only difference between “Christians” and “Jews” was that the former believed that the Messiah had already come while the latter believed that he was yet to come:
¹

But because of the fact that the Messiah who had already come was crucified as an ordinary rebel after being scourged and humiliated, and thus was not successful in the political sense, having failed to redeem his people Israel; because of the lowly political status of the Jews at the end of the period of the Second Temple and after the Destruction; and because of the fear that the Romans would persecute believers in a political Messiah, for these reasons there perforce came about a development of ideas, which after centuries of controversy became crystallized in Christianity.
²

According to Klausner's generally held view, the idea of messianic suffering, death, and resurrection came about only as an apology after the fact of Jesus' death. In this view, it is simply a scandal for Christian messianic thought that Jesus was scourged and humiliated as a common rebel, despite the fact that he was the Messiah. In that case, “then why did God allow His Chosen One, the Messiah,
to undergo frightful suffering and even to be crucified the most shameful death of all, according to Cicero 24 and Tacitus 2B and not save him from all these things? The answer can only be that it was the will of God and the will of the Messiah himself that he should be scourged, humiliated, and crucified. But whence came a purpose like this, that would bring about suffering and death without sin?”
³
The answer to the question of Jesus' suffering and death, according to Klausner (and nearly everyone else), is that the suffering of the Messiah was vicarious and the death an atoning death—in other words, the common Christian theology of the cross. After the Messiah Jesus' humiliation, suffering, and death, according to this view—held by many Christian thinkers and scholars as well as Jewish ones—the theology of Jesus' redemptive, vicarious suffering was discovered, as it were, in Isaiah 53, which was allegedly reinterpreted as referring not to the persecuted People of Israel, but to the suffering Messiah: