Keeping Kosher?

Most (if not all) of the ideas and practices of the Jesus movement of the first century and the beginning of the second century – and even later – can be safely understood as part of the ideas and practices that we understand to be the Judaism of this period.

The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, by Daniel Boyarin

Boyarin continues, moving beyond the ideas of the Trinity – or at least the germs of these ideas – present among Jewish believers before the time of Jesus Christ.

Unlike the caricature, that the Gospels present a radical break from the Judaism of the time, Boyarin sees that Jesus was a staunch defender of the Torah against what He perceived to be threats from the Pharisees.

The notions of Judaism as legalistic and rule-bound, as a grim realm of religious anxiety verses Jesus’ completely new teaching of love and faith, die very hard.

Jesus was not engaged in an argument about whether or not to keep the Torah, but, instead, an argument about how best to keep it. His arguments were, as we know, primarily against the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were a kind of reform movement within the Jewish people that was centered on Jerusalem and Judea.

Their message was one of incorporating seeming changes to the written Torah’s practices that were mandated by what they called “the tradition of the Elders,” an oral Torah passed down by the Elders from the time of Sinai. Some of these “traditions” may, in fact, have their roots in the time of the Babylonian exile. Hence, those Jews who remained in Palestine would have reacted strongly against these.

Jesus’ Judaism was a conservative reaction against some radical innovations in the Law stemming from the Pharisees and Scribes of Jerusalem.

Jesus was not fighting against Judaism, but against a certain interpretation of Judaism. Jesus was part of a Judaism that was being marginalized by another group, the Pharisees. He was fighting against them as dangerous innovators.

This view of Christianity as but a variation within Judaism, and even a highly conservative and traditionalist one, goes to the heart of our description of the relations in the second, third, and fourth centuries between so-called Jewish Christianity and its early rival, the so-called Gentile Christianity that was eventually (after some centuries) to win the day.

Here, I think I would say yes…and no. Yes, I am willing to accept from Boyarin this picture of Jesus as presenting the more conservative view of the Torah than the one being taught by the Pharisees. This “conservative” view, of course, would be clearly the case for those who understand Jesus to be God, the author of the Torah.

But as for this divide between so-called Jewish and so-called Gentile Christianity, early on in the book of Acts we see in the Jerusalem Council this idea that Gentile Christians need not keep all of the Law – specifically circumcision, but also other aspects. However, this was not the case for Jews who became Christian – or, should I say, Jews who followed the Jewish tradition represented by and through Jesus. To my understanding, they were still expected to keep the Law.

Which brings me to note: this aspect of Boyarin’s work, while I find very interesting and enlightening, is not as important to me as that which came before, regarding the idea of two Gods, or a god made up of two persons.

It is not really of any theological issue to me (again, the Jerusalem Council resolved this in my view), but I find it worthwhile to perhaps better understand the time, place, and person of Jesus Christ. I think I can say, after working through this part of Boyarin’s book, that I take some comfort in better understanding this aspect of Jesus and His time on earth.

Returning to Boyarin and the idea that Jesus represented some great change in the Jewish relationship to the Torah, he uses as an example the episode in Mark chapter 7, and the idea of eating with unclean hands where Jesus teaches that instead of defilement coming from without, defilement comes from within.

In other words, Boyarin challenges the notion that Jesus abandoned the idea of keeping kosher.

As read by most commentators, Mark 7 establishes the beginning of the so-called parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity.

From the text:

Mark 7: 5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked Him, “Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with defiled hands?”

Jesus proceeds to call them hypocrites. He later explains to the disciples, who, once again, didn’t understand Jesus’s comments:

Mark 7: 18 And He said to them, “Are you lacking understanding in this way as well? Do you not perceive that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, 19 because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and goes to the sewer?” (Thus He declared all foods clean.)

20 And He was saying, “That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man. 21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. 23 All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.”

Boyarin recognizes that this how much of Christian commentary understand this passage – that Jesus permitted all foods, even those prohibited by the Torah. Many major Christian Biblical commentaries conclude this. Yet, if Jesus was the Son of Man, as He often claimed, He would hardly have treated the idea of kosher so contemptuously.

Boyarin sees this understanding as due to our reading the text backwards in time, from later Christian practices and beliefs.

In contrast, reading the text through lenses colored by years of immersion in the Jewish religious literature of the times around Jesus and the evangelists produces a very different perspective on the chapter from the one that has come to be so dominant.

Immersed in this Jewish religious literature, Boyarin finds, instead, an inner Jewish controversy and not an abrogation of the Torah.

The first thing that must be acknowledged is that while the readers of Mark are clearly expected to be far away from traditional Jewish practice as well as from the Aramaic and Hebrew languages, the writer of Mark is anything but distant from and ignorant of these matters.

Boyarin raises an interesting point, without explicitly stating it: would Mark have so plainly written “thus purifying all foods” without any comment at all if it was to mean that Jews could now eat pork, given that the acceptance of kosher was common among all Jews of the time?

In any case, even accepting every word as written, Boyarin does not understand the text to mean this, the purification of all foods. There are distinctions between different domains of the Torah’s laws and especially the dietary laws, and this is what Boyarin intends to bring to the fore.

To call food kosher refers to its permissibility or impermissibility for eating by Jews as defined in the Bible and the later rabbinic literature…. There is as separate set of rules that define when any food – kosher or not – is pure or impure, depending on how that food was handled and what other things it may have come into contact with.

There are kosher foods that, depending on how these were handled or prepared or what they came in contact with, that might then deem these as impure – even though the underlying food is kosher.

While in English they are sometimes confused, the system of purity and impurity laws and the system of dietary laws are two different systems within the Torah’s rules for eating, and Mark and Jesus knew the difference.

In English, the terms “clean” and “unclean” are used in both cases, confusing the two sets of laws (“purity” and “impurity” vs. “clean” and “unclean”) into one set of laws. It would be better to recognize one set as permitted and forbidden, and the other set as clean and unclean or pure and impure.

In other words, there are permitted foods that in any case, for some specific reason, are unclean or impure. The Pharisees were not questioning the food (bread), saying that it was forbidden; instead, they questioned the unclean nature of the hands, hence making the otherwise permitted bread unclean or impure.

According to the biblical system (to which, apparently, the Galilean practice might very well have corresponded), the two sets of rules are kept quite strictly apart.

For this reason, the practice would have been a ritual hand purification by pouring water over the hands before eating bread, so as not to make the permitted bread unclean or impure.

Jesus protests, asserting that foods that go into the body don’t make the body impure; only the things that come out of the body have that power to contaminate.

And, of course, it is precisely things that come out of the body that represent one of the categories of things that can make a permitted food unclean. Jesus is being very precise in upholding the Torah’s rules; He is not rejecting the rules.

It was thus against those pharisaic innovations, which they are trying to foist on his disciples, that Jesus railed. …This is a debate between Jews about the correct way to keep the Torah, not an attack on the Torah.

It is the Pharisees that have changed the rules, not Jesus. Other non-Christian Jewish texts confirm this teaching of the Pharisees as a change.

Jesus was certainly not sanctioning the eating of bacon and eggs; rather, exactly as the text says, he was permitting the eating of bread without the ritual washing of the hands, quite a different matter.

Jesus is not suggesting to abandon the Torah; instead, He is calling for a deeper commitment to what it teaches.

Conclusion

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.

Just as various bodily secretions cause something permitted to become impure, so can secretions from the mouth – with their source in the heart. Here is the impurity; it isn’t that words are forbidden, it is just that some words are impure. The reading by the Pharisees makes clear that they don’t hear the law at all; they read from the outside, and don’t grasp the inner meaning. Words can cause impurity just as can anything coming out from the body.

There is nothing in this passage that suggests abandoning the Torah:

Mark was a Jew and his Jesus kept Kosher. … 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.

Mark, in Boyarin’s view, is best read as a Jewish text, even in its most radical Christological moments. Nothing in Mark could be considered inappropriate for a thoroughly Jewish Messiah who is also the Son of Man.

…what would later be called Christianity is a brilliantly successful – the most brilliantly successful – Jewish apocalyptic and messianic movement.

Epilogue

Jesus used this opportunity to challenge the Pharisees on yet another of their innovations: a way to avoid supporting their elders. Never let an opportunity go to waste, it seems.