Jesus and Jewish Observance (Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost)

Harry Attridge and Joel Baden discuss Jewish identity, prophetic critique, and washing hands in Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23. The text is appointed for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, in Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary.

More Yale Bible Study resources, including a transcript of this episode, at: https://YaleBibleStudy.org/podcast

Harold Attridge is Sterling Professor of Divinity at Yale Divinity School. Joel Baden is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the Center for Continuing Education at Yale Divinity School. 

Connect with Yale Bible Study:

• Facebook: @YDSCCE
• Twitter: @BibleYale
• YouTube: youtube.com/c/YaleBibleStudy
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/yds-center-for-continuing-education

Thank you for listening!

Transcript

Voiceover Voice:

The prophets weren’t saying that sacrifice is bad or wrong. They were simply saying rote ritual behavior doesn’t get you very far.

Helena Martin:

This is Chapter, Verse, and Season: a lectionary podcast from Yale Bible Study. Join us each week as two Yale Divinity School professors look at an upcoming text from the Revised Common Lectionary.

This episode, we have Joel Baden, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the Center for Continuing Education, and Harry Attridge, Sterling Professor of Divinity. They’re discussing Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, which is appointed for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 17, in Year B. Here’s the text.

[Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23]

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders, and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash, and there are also many other traditions that they observe: the washing of cups and pots and bronze kettles and beds.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.

For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Joel Baden:

 Harry, I've always been taught to think about Jesus as Jewish. I mean, this is one of the sort of major movements in scholarship, certainly in my time, is thinking about Jesus within his Jewish context. In that sense, this passage feels to me like one that certainly could be read a little bit strangely.  I'm looking at Jesus, the Jew, who seems to be saying, forget all this stuff that I think about as sort of what makes Judaism. Am I misreading or am I mis-knowing? [laughs]

Harry Attridge:

I think you're catching something that's going on in this text, but I think it also is useful to think about how Jesus was interacting with his environment and his tradition. I think this text obviously has some editorial elements in it. For instance, the little comment that Jesus declared all foods clean. This seems to reflect some of the debates that are going on in early Christianity about whether to observe kashrut, especially if you're a Gentile.

Joel Baden:

Mm-hmm.

Harry Attridge:

And we know that from Paul's letters, Galatians and First Corinthians that these were hot topics and the Christian community had to make a decision about what was required for people who were non-Jews. And that's reflected, I think, in the way this story is told. But the story itself refers to Jesus and his critical stance toward things that were going on in his environment. And that's not unusual. Not unusual for a Jew, not unusual for someone in the prophetic tradition. And there are certainly passages that we could cite from Amos or Micah, the talk about the priority of ethics over ritual. And that's probably what's lying behind here. Jesus was probably critical of people who he thought were hypocrites in their observance of certain traditions and didn't value the things that were most important. And that seems to be what's at the heart of his concern here. Although what we have here is not exactly an observance of basic law of kashrut. It's not like, don't eat pork, right? It's you wash your hands. And where is this coming from? Maybe you could help me on that one.

Joel Baden:

I mean, you know, I think you know as well as I do, if not better, but there are most of what we think of as traditional Jewish practice, even at this relatively early period in Judaism, isn't out of the Old Testament directly. It's already coming from a whole body of interpretation that's growing up. Sabbath observance is another really good example of this where even I think in the first century or so, the definition of Sabbath in Judaism is like, it's gone wildly beyond what's actually in the Hebrew Bible itself in terms of the law. So here again, with practices around meals in particular, there's the whole body of things, right? Today, Jews, traditional Orthodox Jews, will wash their hands before every meal. There's a prayer for it. This is already being developed at this period. I'm not sure it's quite biblical, but it seems to me, as you say, it seems to me like what Jesus is coming at is, there's a sense of, in the same way that, as you said, in the same way that the prophets were like, you know, sacrificing an animal doesn't make you a good person. It seems here you've got a similar notion of, you're observing the laws, as we've come to understand them, like the tradition of the elders in the language of the text, but it's sort of the rote nature of the thing that's the problem.

Harry Attridge:

Yeah, that's certainly where Jesus is coming out here. I think the business about hand washing, I gather that there's evidence that it was becoming widespread and practiced by Jews of various sorts. I think Philo mentions it and there's a mention in Josephus too that this seems to be an important practice. But for Jesus, it's not the primary thing. The primary thing is getting the ethics right. 

Joel Baden:

Hygiene is one of those things that, for whatever, I was going to say for whatever reason, but I know what reason has sort of attached to Jewish practice since antiquity. It goes back to the impurity laws, obviously, with the requirement to bathe. And that's what's at stake here, is the washing of the hands to remove impurity. I think it's useful to note that if we're going to compare what Jesus is saying here to what Isaiah or Amos, or as you mentioned, the other prophets in the Hebrew Bible say where they seem to be saying, I reject your sacrifices. I have no interest in your offerings. One of the things that we always teach our students about those passages in the Hebrew Bible is the prophets weren't saying that sacrifice is bad or wrong. They were simply saying rote ritual behavior doesn't actually get you very far when what we care about is the ethical. And so, I mean, I think it's useful to sort of, I assume, make the same analogy here. Which is it's almost impossible to imagine Jesus saying, forget the law. It's in its entirety that it's almost unthinkable for a Jew to be saying that. It would be like saying, forget Judaism entirely. I realize that's how it gets taken but it's not that far, is it?

Harry Attridge:

No, I don't think so. There is an edge, an edginess to it here when Jesus talks about the hypocrisy of the people that he's criticizing. And sure enough, I think he probably was a somewhat harsh critic of some of his contemporaries, but lots of people were. So, there's not a rejection of the Torah per se. There's not a rejection of Judaism per se. No, there's an inner Jewish debate going on about what's an appropriate way of living by Torah. And I think that's what Jesus is standing for here. But yeah, the critical elements and especially the denigration of the opposition as hypocrites gets exaggerated then in Jewish Christian debates of the following generation. 

Joel Baden:

Yeah. So when I see, “do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile since it enters not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer”, it's not really saying, it's sort of it's playing with the definition of ‘defile’ rather than saying, no, there's no such thing as ritual impurity. It's saying, there's a worse kind of defiling or a different kind of defiling that's at stake here. And so, if what you're telling me is then the words, “thus he declared all foods clean” are a later edition, to me, that's a really interesting moment of, you're seeing somebody reading that and sort of taking it literally when it may not have been originally.

Harry Attridge:

Yeah, that's clearly an editorial comment. It's not Jesus saying that. 

Joel Baden.

Right. Sure.

Harry Attridge:

It's the authorial voice saying, this is what he meant. And I'm not sure that's what he meant.

Joel Baden:

Is that like the Markan authorial voice? Is it later still? 

Harry Attridge:

It's probably Markan. Yeah. And Mark is reflecting some of those debates that I was referring to earlier on that were happening in the generation after Jesus' death. The fact that those debates were taking place, I think is clear evidence that Jesus did not give a determination on this matter. It's something that the community had to figure out.

Joel Baden:

Yeah. As you say, it's worth noting that this is not an internal, this is not a debate that is unique to this text or this moment. The entire sort of Second Temple period was full of different Jewish sects with different ideas about how this was going to work out. I think often this is portrayed as this revolutionary moment of the undoing of something, or the first breaking of some longstanding tradition. First of all, I don't think any of this tradition was particularly longstanding. I mean, not as longstanding as we think. If you think Torah goes back thousands of years, then it's a really long time. But critically, I don't think even Jews were obeying most of what we consider Torah law probably until the second, third century BCE. Not in the way we think about it. So, this is all very live.

Harry Attridge:

Yeah, no. Clearly there were debates going on. You can see this even in the text of the Mishnah. But more importantly, kind of the evidence we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls now shows that there were intense debates going on about how to understand Halakhah and what it meant practically.

Joel Baden:

Yeah. Exactly along these lines, how word for word does it have to be? How precise? Does it matter what your intentions are while you're doing the act or is the act itself the thing? These are all the kinds of debates that were very much a part of Jewish discourse at the time.

Helena Martin:

Thanks for listening. You can visit our website for more Bible study resources: YaleBibleStudy.org.

Chapter, Verse, and Season is a production of the Center for Continuing Education at Yale Divinity School. It’s produced by: Creator and Managing Editor, Joel Baden; Production Manager, Kelly Morrissey; Associate Producer, Aidan Stoddart; and I’m your Host and Executive Producer, Helena Martin. And our theme music is by Calvin Linderman.