Matthew Thiessen has written a clear and engaging description of Jesus’s conflict with impurity in first-century Judaism according to the gospels. He claims that the gospel writers intentionally depict Jesus as the embodiment of holiness and destroyer of impurity and death. Thiessen systematically focuses on each of the major impurities in Jewish law and unpacks the gospel narratives in light of this material. He also supplies ancient world ideas on impurity and finds large compatibility between Jews and their neighbors in this regard. His book invites a response on the important subject of impurity, mortality, and Jesus.

Impurity and Mortality

I find the connection between impurity, mortality, and Jesus most interesting. Let’s start with the association of impurity and mortality. Impurity, i.e., ritual impurity, is a condition which results from the human body due to the natural cycle of life. The main impure conditions stem from the processes of birth, sex, severe scale disease (which depicts death in ancient minds), and death. All of these, with the exception of scale disease, are common to humanity and, from a physical point of view, distinguish what it means to participate in the life cycle, in a word, to be human. From a negative perspective, all of these processes emphasize the body’s decay and terminality. Following Jacob Milgrom and others, both anthropologists and biblical scholars, Thiessen confirms that ancient sources, both Jewish and non-Jewish, connect impurity and death (17).1 I turn now to the particulars of these impurities.

Childbirth. Thiessen supports Milgrom’s view that childbirth impurity has to do with the loss of life forces, citing several examples from the ancient world which associate birth and genital discharges with death (74). The blood flow from a woman’s reproductive organ is a major source of impurity. Not only is it associated with a life-giving organ, but it carries the threat of death. Without modern medical care, the mortality rate of both the new mother and her infant was high in the ancient world.

Thiessen raises the question of whether or not both mother and child were considered impure after the process of childbirth. Leviticus 12 is clear that the mother becomes impure but does not address the status of the newborn. It is most likely that both were considered impure. The author of Jubilees regards Adam and Eve impure like newborn babies, forty days for a boy and eighty days for a girl (just like a parturient), prior to entering the garden of Eden. The Damascus Document (one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 4Q266, 4Q267) mentions a wet nurse perhaps to keep the newborn away from the ongoing impurity of its mother.

Leprosy. The lepra of Scripture is not modern leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, which the Greeks referred to with a different term, elephantiasis (see Thiessen, 48). Biblical leprosy (lepra/tsara’at) results in white, flaky skin, not shrunken limbs. The leper has been described as the “walking dead” since the flakiness of the disease visualizes the deterioration of a corpse (51). The ancient association of death and leprosy is reflected in the Bible (e.g., Num 12:12, where Aaron pleads with Moses not to let Miriam remain a leper, “as a corpse”; Job 18:13).

The contagion of a leper is a source of great concern to ancient Jewish authors. The Temple Scroll resorts to exclusion of the leper even from ordinary cities and adds an extra week of purification (cf. Thiessen, 52–53). The most threatening contact of a leper is with holy items. Indeed the mixture of holiness and impurity is explosive and can result in death (cf. Lev 7; Lev 15; Num 19). Apparently this was an issue in Second Temple times. The writer of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls rebukes his addressee for allowing even a purifying leper to touch sacred food (4Q396 III, 4–11). The Temple Scroll allots places outside the Temple City for lepers (11Q19 XLVIII, 14–15).

Dead Womb. Thiessen helpfully characterizes a zabah, a woman with an abnormal menstrual discharge, as a woman with a dead womb. In other words, because of her abnormal blood flow, her womb is not fruitful and cannot produce children. Scholars continue to debate as to whether those with abnormal genital flows were quarantined in Second Temple times. Numbers 5 expels such people from the “camp” while Leviticus 15 does not (Thiessen, 73). The Temple Scroll, nevertheless, requires the seclusion of zabim both outside the temple city and within ordinary cities (11Q19 XLVI, 16–18; XLVIII, 13–17). Josephus in Antiquities 3.261–62 prohibits even menstruants from the city of Jerusalem (but see War 5.227, which excludes them only from the temple precincts).

Death. The most powerful impurity among ancient Jews and their neighbors was corpse impurity. Even the gods avoided it. Unlike the concept of burying Christians in hallowed ground, in Judaism, the dead are buried outside of the city, a good distance from the community. This tradition is documented from ancient times (cf. the distance between the Qumran cemetery and the inhabited area).

There is no purification for the corpse but there is a strong onus on everyone who has come into contact with the dead, whether burying one’s parents or simply visiting a house where the body is present, to purify themselves. Priests are not allowed to touch the dead except for the burial of certain close relatives (Lev 21:1–2). The purification process takes one week and requires a special temple ritual with the ashes of a red cow. Some Second Temple texts mention a required ablution on the first day of this week which allows the purifiers to attend to normal processes of preparing food and other social functions which do not require contact with holy items, e.g., going to the temple (11Q19 XLIX, 17; Temple Scroll; Philo, Special Laws 3. 206–7).

Secondary pollution becomes an issue for all sources of impurity but especially for those who come into contact with a corpse or enter a house of the dead. By definition, secondary defilement pollutes at a lower degree of impurity than the original source. For example, a person who has touched the dead becomes secondarily defiled and can pollute other persons and items as well. This type of secondary and tertiary defilement becomes a major concern in the matter of food. If food has been polluted by some external source (e.g., dead rodent or an impure person) or perhaps it has been left open in the house of a dead person, it becomes secondarily polluted. The question is, does this impure food then pollute others who handle it? The Pharisees would say, yes; Jesus, no (cf. Mark 7).

Demons. Although demons do not form a part of the Jewish ritual purity system either in the Bible or the Mishnah, they are linked in the popular mind. As Thiessen correctly notes, the priests of Leviticus and Numbers suppress the demonic, but the general populace in Second Temple times did not. Impurity was considered an evil force, and Jews eagerly awaiting the ultimate conquest of all forces of darkness (Thiessen, 126). Those with severe conditions, e.g., leprosy or abnormal sexual discharges were often considered sinners.

Jesus and Impurity

Let us move on to Jesus’s position in the ancient association of impurity and death as presented in the gospels. I will focus mainly on Mark who is generally considered a primary source for Matthew and Luke. In his short work, Mark devotes a large amount of attention to Jesus’s confrontation with impurity.

Childbirth. Although Mark does not include a birth narrative in his biography of Jesus, Luke reports that Joseph and Mary went to the temple in order for her and the baby to be purified from the impurity of childbirth (Luke 2:22). Hence, Luke places Jesus in an observant Jewish family where there was nothing unusual about performing purification rites from the time of infancy. This was simply a routine visit to the temple; the uniqueness was in the identity of the child.

Leprosy. Jesus continues to follow the biblical laws of impurity throughout his ministry. Thiessen is surely correct that Jesus’s touch of a leper does not mean he ignores the purity system (Thiessen, 62). Although he miraculously heals the man, he defers to the priest to make the pronouncement of purification and authorize the man’s reentry into society (Mark 1:44). Still the question arises, if the gospel writers wanted to assert that Jesus recognized the power of impurity and followed the law, why don’t they record any act of purification? The presence of ritual baths throughout the land of Israel indicates that many Jews did purify themselves, even when they weren’t going to the temple. Indeed, Numbers threatens excision on impure individuals who do not purify themselves (Num 19:13, 20).2

Dead Womb. The hemorrhaging woman of Mark 5 appears to be a zabah. She has an abnormal blood flow of twelve years. Although the text does not explicitly warn against any impurity threat, Thiessen points out the widespread concern for these kinds of impurities both in the Bible and in the ancient world. He also notes that Mark uses the same terminology as Leviticus 15 for the woman’s condition. Quite interesting in this story is the method of Jesus’s healing of the woman. She reaches out to touch the fringe of his clothes, he stops the pressing crowd to state that someone had touched him and he had felt power leave him. This dynamic of healing the woman through his clothes has a strong resonance with Jewish traditions related to the impurity of sexual flows. A distinguishing feature is their contamination of other items via fabric. For example, the bed of a zabah is polluting to anyone who touches it and that person must wash their clothes (Lev 15:25–27). In the narrative of Mark 5, however, the fabric of Jesus’s garment becomes an agent of healing. Is Mark perhaps making a point that Jesus can reverse the process of pollution and neutralize it altogether?

Death. Death is the archenemy of humanity and the chief source of impurity. Hence, Jesus’s death and resurrection of himself and others make an implicit statement of his power. The methods Jesus uses in raising the dead invite comment. As noted above, handling the dead would normally produce secondary pollution. Jesus ignores this eventuality and, taking Jairus’s daughter by the hand, raises her from the dead (Mark 5:41). Other gospels picture Jesus as immune to corpse impurity as well. When raising the widow of Nain’s son, Jesus does not touch the corpse, only the bier (Luke 7:11–17; Thiessen, 113). According to rabbinic sources, the bier would have been polluting. However, Jesus revives the boy through this vehicle of impurity and death. Most dramatically, Jesus raises many other dead people when he himself rises from the dead (Matt 27:50–53).

Demons. In contrast to the power of evil, which was commonly believed to stand behind impurity, the gospels represent Jesus as the embodiment of holiness, an opposite and far greater power. From his opening chapter, Mark presents an explicit contrast between evil spirits, impurity, and death, on the one hand, and the “Holy One of God,” on the other (e.g., Mark 1:5). Jesus receives holy pneuma at baptism and then baptizes others in it (Thiessen, 146).

Conclusion: If impurity points to mortality and Mark’s Jesus is the master of impurity, what is the end result? What is the gospel writer trying to say? Jesus’s disagreements with the Pharisees reveal that although Jesus takes impurity seriously (e.g., sends the healed leper to the priest), he does not ascribe as much power to it as the Pharisees. He disagrees, for example, that ritual handwashing should be required before eating. Most importantly, Mark’s Jesus is able to reverse all the major biblical sources of impurity (death, leprosy, and genital discharges). Recycling language from the priestly purity system throughout, Mark presents Jesus as a source of holiness, culminating in his own death and resurrection.

It seems that the gospels’ Jesus claims power beyond the temple to heal, forgive, and conquer death. Implicitly, he claims the temple and prevailing religious system is limited, insufficient to handle human need. Mark even introduces Jesus as the holy one of God (Mark 1), which Thiessen points out is a title for the sanctuary itself (Lev 21:23 LXX). Unlike Moses and Elisha, Jesus does not need to pray or to use a ritual to heal but exudes a contagious holiness which sometimes heals involuntarily (Mark 5). Fulfilling the prophetic promise of an end to impurity, sin, and death (Isa 25:6–8), Jesus is the agent of a new creation; his kingdom will not be subject to death but offers eternal life. Thiessen claims this is not supersessionism, because it was a Jewish idea already (183). However, the Jews expected these blessings only from God not from human hands.

So is Mark saying Jesus is divine? A demigod between Elisha and God? Thiessen stops short of such claims. He rather presents the gospels’ Jesus as a good Pharisee with a commitment to halakha but with extra powers. In his efforts to place Jesus as part and parcel of the religious system of the day, the reader wonders how Jesus ever came into conflict with the religious authorities. If they were all in agreement about the temple and the place of ritual impurity, and the prophetic vision of a new order in which death will be conquered, what was the problem? In my view, for all the reasons Thiessen has eloquently presented, the gospels implicitly claim Jesus to be divine. He has the ability to neutralize the severest impurity, heal and raise the dead, and forgive sin; his opponents considered that blasphemy.

Jesus and the Forces of Death is an examination of the early Christian movement from a “within Judaism” perspective. As such, it is a helpful corrective to the common, more disjunctive approach to Christian origins. Much of the New Testament shows a more nuanced engagement with the movement’s Jewish roots and the issues tied to law than the bifurcation we commonly see. As the book opens, “The gospels writers portray a Jesus who really was that Jewish” (2). Such a view rightly fights against seeing Judaism as strictly about legalism as it has often been portrayed. The core thesis that Jesus’s actions challenge the source of ritual impurities and is not directed against the law has merit. A question remains whether this is as either/or as the book suggests. In short, if Jesus has dealt with the source of such impurity, then what need remains for a law to cover it? Does not that redirection necessitate or give room for the relativizing of the law as a result? I will make four observations, one is a matter of introduction, while the others deal more directly with the topic.

First, I want to consider the idea that Luke is not a Gentile (40). Thiessen argues that the author shows a deep knowledge of Judaism, implying that this suggests a Jewish origin. This rules out an option that could exist for a writer decades removed from the events he describes. It is that Luke could be a Gentile who came to his faith through a previous journey through Judaism, a God-fearer who became a Christ follower or one who came to know many Jewish believers. At one level this changes little to nothing of the larger argument in the book. However, at another it could obscure the ethnic mix that fueled the new movement after a time. This could explain two features of Luke-Acts: (1) the awareness of Jewish practice the two volumes do display as Thiessen notes and (2) the sensitivity with which Luke-Acts portrays God-fearers and other Gentiles who are kind to Judaism. A Gentile pulled into a mixed community of faith may have over the decades learned a lot about that faith, whether his exposure to Judaism came after or before his move into the emerging community. This is an origin I and others, such as John Nolland, have contended for as part of the commitment Luke-Acts has as it describes both ethnic groups.

Second, there is the recognition that purity laws had a compassion tied to them because of the perceived risk that impurity posed in sacred space that could lead to judgment. The need to be protected is a key observation about a function of the law as forming a people with a special sensitivity to issues tied to holiness and the normal (not abnormal) functions of life (72). However, some of these texts appear to suggest that such a sensitivity overdeveloped goes too far. For Jesus to act out of compassion and yet not viewing these restrictions as applying so strictly as others sought to suggest may mean that the compassion Thiessen points to may be incomplete. What this could show is that ritual purity is not rejected as such, but its scope is very much under challenge so that the context and extent of how it is passed on or not does matter. This is an internal Jewish question for sure, but the reduction of its scope from where many had it may raise a trajectory the latter Jesus movement picked up on. Thiessen is correct to highlight that the passage stresses Jesus’s power over uncleanness, his reversal of it. However, if that is so, where does that leave the person now cleansed by Jesus? What happens if such cleansing is seen to be permanent? If Jesus, to use Thiessen’s words, destroys “impurity’s sources” then where does that leave the law dealing with it (96)?

Third, there is the way in which Jesus handles death and the impurity tied to it in relation to Jairus’s daughter. It is pictured as a sign of new life and illustrative of that larger power. This does point in the direction of a permanent solution as I am raising above (109). Yes, she is to die again, but in the movement’s view such a death is not an end but a transition, as it is rooted in the hope of resurrection and a call to new birth which impacts the way one sees and lives out one’s identity.

Fourth, dietary laws represent the issue that is perhaps most challenging for Thiessen in my view. He has spent much energy, even beyond this book, to argue for the vision of Acts 10 not representing a challenge to Jewish dietary laws, treating the vision as a picture of relationships versus being directly related to an instruction to Peter about meal fellowship. The appeal is similar to those where the argument is that Paul’s remark that circumcision is nothing still does not represent a challenge to the law (1 Cor 7:19). In both cases, what is juxtaposed is the idea of keeping God’s commands. In the Acts vision, it is a vivid visual with the perceived command that leads Peter to initially refuse to go there in terms of the food multiple times. So God’s now former (?) law is portrayed as transgressed. In Corinthians, the remark on commandments is stated directly. Given the concern that table fellowship did engender for scrupulous Jews, the ability to sever these topics seems problematic. One act does symbolize the other for a reason. I am reminded in this light of how Paul handles meat offered to idols, where restriction only comes when the meat is directly tied to the temple, either while there or at a meal where the connection is made. Otherwise there is no need to ask questions. Something is going on here that moves in the direction of a greater sense of liberty than the law tended to generate, a contrastive attitude one can see when one sees the detail the law generated in a work like the Mishnah. All of this strikes me as far more than a “coded vision” (195). It is the vision that makes the point with a pointed application. Acts 11:3 as well seems to assume something more comprehensive took place here. Peter’s reply does not reject the charge of eating with Gentiles but defends and explains the action as justifiable. This also fits with Galatians 2. Paul reacted because Peter’s separation from Gentiles appears to have been motivated by something more than just race or ethnicity since Gentile salvation was a given for both Peter and Paul. The issue had to be about practice, something specific about the table setting that was troubling. If Peter were kosher in his habits, that defense should have sufficed as an explanation. Nowhere do we get that reasoning.

What seems to remain, then, is an option to the way Thiessen sees Jewish believers functioning, while respecting the law from within the movement, but something short of a requirement to do so. Some probably did live this way, but others probably did not and argued for that space. One could respect the law as a Jewish believer as the crowd tied to James appeared to do in ways Thiessen describes, but others handled the choice in ways that non-believing Jews would not have thought respected fully the law. What the Pauline epistles seem to suggest is that fighting over this in house should not be done and the reason is not made clear that the distinction is between Jewish believer / Gentile believer one, but a distinction more generic to the faith.

This is a far more complex discussion than one tended to have a half century ago. That shift is the result of a positive development in New Testament study, a more engaged interaction with Second Temple sources and the surfacing of a broader study of texts from the period along with their wider availability for study. This book is a fine example of the fruit of such study, for which we can be grateful.

Matthew Thiessen’s volume synthesizes and leverages a scholarly trend that can be traced to the Christian Hebraism occasioned by the Reformation.1 The simplicity of the premise that the gospels’ portrayals of Jesus as a self-confessed Jew ought to be taken seriously does not belittle its brilliance and complexity, either in the work of Thiessen or in that of his forebears. Jesus was and remains a primary religious symbol in Western Civilization, no matter what our respective degree of acculturation or secularization. The discovery, or perhaps the re-creation of a Jewish Jesus, at every turn of the step, has to face a historical culture that is predicated on overcoming the very notion of Judaism, as David Nirenberg, Peter Schäfer, and many others have abundantly illustrated.2 Memorably, my teacher John Gager once cautioned me that no matter how subtle and developed our hermeneutics, no matter what our scholarly or religious identity, the moment we lose focus even for a second, if our attention slips even for the blink of an eye, established cultural paradigms reassert themselves in our readings. Holding one’s attention long enough to conceive of Jesus’s Jewishness throughout all three Synoptic Gospels and sparing some moments even for John remains a daring feat, and a great accomplishment by Thiessen.

Yet apart from such mere trifles as historical truth, what difference does it really make if Jesus kept kosher, if he abolished not the Jewish purity system but the underlying causes of impurity such as death and disease? After all, the vast majority of Jesus’s Christian interpreters had understood him as abrogating biblical purity law, so what, beyond the entertainment of self-congratulatory religious historians such as yours truly, makes Thiessen’s book so relevant? Well, establishing a point of history and recovering the past have hardly ever been exercises for their own sake. This is the caseeven more so at a moment when the notion of demonstrable truth finds itself under prolonged assault, the like of which we may not have seen since the times of Walter Benjamin. There are, moreover, a myriad of implications for contemporary culture and religious practices if one takes Jesus’s, or at least the gospels’ Jewishness seriously. I would, for example, suggest reconsidering not only how contemporary anti-Semitism, but also how the widespread phenomenon of Islamophobia relates to conceptions that juxtapose Jesus to purity.

For the present publication, however, I have,  not been tasked to reflect upon the broader relevance of Thiessen’s book, but on how it relates to my own work as a historian of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The answer, in short, is that the Jewishness of the Synoptic Gospels, and their endorsement of Jesus’s battle not against ritual purity but against its origins, constitute a useful and in some ways even an essential starting point for our understanding of late antique Judaism and Christianity and of early Islam. Three interrelated examples, focusing on the notions of legal hermeneutics, on the Torah’s laws for gentiles, and on the emergence of Islam, show what difference it makes if the gospels did create their stories within the framework of ritual purity.

First, legal hermeneutics. A little while ago, I suggested that the notion of originalism, a concept here borrowed from US constitutionalist debates, may help us explain the legal debates in the Gospel in Matthew.3 Originalist jurisprudence of the more sincere kind (and there are many others) seeks to apply the constitution as it was understood by the people in the time of its original promulgation. The concept of originalism is best conceived of as a juxtaposition to its counterpart, the concept of a “living constitution.” The latter bases jurisdiction on both the original document and especially on its established history of interpretation over the centuries. Neither concept makes sense on its own, and their very juxtaposition finds an intriguing parallel in early Judaic legal debates. Here, both in Josephus and in the Gospel of Matthew, the Pharisees are accused of adding their “traditions of the elders” to the received written Torah (Ant. 17.41; Matt 15;), and this tradition often interprets how the written Torah is to be understood. The Pharisees can thus be compared to those who base their jurisprudence on “established interpretation,” making them ancient proponents of a “living constitution”— in the rabbis’ much later description of their own post-biblical legal traditions, they state explicitly that “these and these are the words of the living God” (Bavli Eruvin 13a). In light of the notion of “traditions of the elders” in texts depicting the Pharisees’ legal hermeneutics, I have suggesting naming this pharisaic and rabbinic tendency “traditionalism.”

The Pharisees’ opponents, among them the Sadducees and the author of the Gospel of Matthew, reject any addition to the written Torah, and claim to fulfil the Law and nothing but the Law—even if such legal purism was as hard to achieve in the first centuries of the Common Era as it remains to this day. Matthew, in my view, was thus an ancient proponent of originalism. Thiessen’s broader reading of all three Synoptic Gospels as affirming Torah law may indicate that the concept of originalism may indeed apply to a broader intellectual tendency within the early Jesus movement than I had once suspected. If this turns out to be the case, then a more widely attested originalist tendency within the Christian tradition would also offer a plausible counterpoint against which to assess the history of later rabbinic legal hermeneutics. In contrast to the early rabbinic Tannaim, the later Amorarim seem to highlight their traditionalist credentials to the point of the hyperbolic exaltation.4 Thiessen’s book offers the groundwork upon which one could reconceive aspects of rabbinic Judaism as the result of a polarization that already begins in the first century CE.

Secondly, laws for gentiles. The work of Jürgen Wehnert and others has demonstrated that the Acts of the Apostles conceives of a clear set of Torah laws that are applicable to non-Jews. He has shown that the so-called “Apostles’ Decree” is based on the laws given to the biblical “resident aliens” (gerim), the non-Israelite denizens of the Holy Land (Acts 15).5 According the Bible’s Holiness Code, the Biblical residents had to observe laws that obviated both “ritual” and “moral” impurity, to use Jonathan Klawans’s terms. By contrast, the gentile believers in the Acts of the Apostle are explicitly instructed to obey only those prohibitions whose transgression would lead to moral impurity.6 Now, conceiving of the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as engaged with those forces of impurity that apply to Israel, as Thiessen does, equally offers itself to renewed scrutiny how, exactly, these forces relate to gentiles—both those that appear in the gospels, and those to whom the apostles are eventually sent. (Neither group makes much of an appearance in Thiessen’s book beyond the discussion of Luke’s putative gentile ethnicity on pp 40–41.) Again, if we are dealing not only with Matthew but with the entire synoptic tradition as affirming purity law, then we could learn much about the early Jesus movement as a whole (including Paul), when seeking to trace how it dealt with the distinct laws for gentiles we find first in the Hebrew Bible and then again in parts of the New Testament.

Thirdly, the emergence of Islam. Thiessen’s portrayal of the Synoptic Gospels has implications that help us contextualize the qur’anic community more broadly, and more specifically the Qur’an’s portrayal of Jesus and of purity. In a thesis I published a few years ago, I sought to retrace the late antique legal narrative that depicts Jesus as a law-giver who affirms the eternal “primary law” yet rejects the punitive “secondary law” that had been given to Israel as a result of their sins. This view with roots also in Greek and Latin Christianity became prominent especially in Syriac Christian literature, and informs the qur’anic image of Jesus and even the nascent Islamic legal self-identity.7 This narrative about Jesus as affirming and partially abrogating Israelite law combines two of the aforementioned tendencies: the restoration of the eternal primary law, namely constitutes an originalist tendency, whereas the content of this law, both in the relevant Christian traditions and in the Qur’an, is largely congruent with those rulings established as gentile law by the Hebrew Bible as channelled by the Apostolic Decree. This holds true even more for those Christians who understood the Apostolic Decree as ordaining both the observance of moral and of ritual purity upon gentiles. If not only Matthew but all the Synoptic Gospels should indeed portray Jesus as a law-affirming originalist who pushes back against secondary legal additions, as I understand Thiessen’s thesis on Jesus’s battle against impurity to intimate, then we once again have a much broader point of departure from which to consider the many pathways that led from the early Christian understanding of purity to the emergence of Islam.

To conclude, then, Thiessen’s book invites us to reconsider the role of law and of purity not only within Jesus’ Jewish framework, but also among late antique gentiles. All Christians subscribed to the notion that “moral” impurity of body and/or soul must be avoided by gentiles, as detailed by the Apostolic Decree. As Karl Böckenhoff has long shown, an overwhelming majority of Church Fathers, councils, and other authorities understood moral purity in terms of a clear prohibition of consuming meat sacrificed to idols, of consuming animal blood or carrion as foodstuff, or of engaging in sexual intercourse during a woman’s menses.8 (Augustine and Chrysostom, both of whom allowed the consumption of animal blood, are two noteworthy exceptions, yet in this case these fathers represent only a small minority of the late antique legal culture.) At the same time, Christians expressed a broad range of attitudes towards the question of “ritual” purity. The questions whether one should one wash after sexual intercourse or before prayer, whether a woman should receive the Eucharist during her menses or after childbirth, or how to deal with the impurity of human corpses were hotly discussed topics in Christian communities from North Africa to Anglia, and from Armenia to Ethiopia. Among these topics are some of those addressed in Thiessen’s study. The fact that a majority of those church fathers whose writings have been preserved—yet by far not all—eventually rejected the notion of “ritual” purity in their quest to highlight the moral type in no way indicates that the former concept would have been moot. Rather, either by sustained polemics against such practices or by their endorsement, the plurality of writings from the second to the seventh century indicate that a considerable number of Christians within mainstream communities continued to consider aspects of purity as obligatory for gentiles. The Qur’an here is a case in point in so far as it does not endorse an Israelite self-identity and stands in detailed continuity with those Christian interpretations of the Apostolic Decree—and thereby with the Bible’s laws for the “resident”—that see both moral and ritual purity as applicable to non-Jews. Thiessen’s volume, highlighting the importance of the gospels’ affirmation of purity discourse, provides a basis from which to reassess all of late antiquity from the particular perspective of purity discourse. It thus makes a big difference for the history of Judaism, of Christianity, and of Islam if, and how exactly, Jesus kept kosher.

In this groundbreaking work, Matthew Thiessen convincingly demonstrates that the Synoptic Gospel writers believed that Jesus viewed the ritual purity system which governed much of Jewish life in first-century Judea as authoritative. Rather than viewing purity laws as a nominal, structural category devoid of inherent meaning, these gospels portray Jesus as approaching Jewish purity laws in ways that affirm their function as protectors from ritual impurities that could potentially violate sacred Jewish spaces. As an overpowering force which effectively, and often shockingly, serves to nullify ritual impurity, Jesus’s purifying energy does not deny the essentialist reality of other purifying and impurifying sources. In fact, its dominance over these sources validates the reality that Jesus accepts them as effective and potent. In a series of analyses centered on healing stories, Thiessen demonstrates that the Synoptic Gospel writers believed that Jesus operated within a fully Jewish context, and accepted the rules of the ritual game.

Besides his sharp close readings of well-known stories, one of the pleasures of this book is Thiessen’s blunt refutations of scholarly readings of the New Testament which presuppose Jewish legalism that contrasts with Christian universalism, a problem that is prevalent in scholarship pertaining to Jewish ritual purity laws. I took delight in reading a passage that underscores Luke’s knowledge of Judaism, and cleverly laments that it is “ironic that modern (and predominantly Christian) scholars accuse an ancient author of having only book knowledge [italics his] of Judaism as it was practiced in Jesus’s day, for it is we modern readers who have only a book knowledge of ancient Judaism” (38). Thiessen’s more measured refutation of scholars who analyze the New Testament through a feminist lens and falsely conclude that Judaism is uniquely and exclusively misogynist in the ancient world (69–70) was equally engaging, and a profoundly necessary correction to problematic scholarship which betrays unfortunate misunderstandings of early Jewish practice and thinking.

While I was hoping that Thiessen would conclude his study with a contextualization of his findings within the broader scope of early Judaism, perhaps such an expectation is unreasonable. As it stands, the book is trailblazing enough. Nevertheless, since I have been asked to write a response to Thiessen’s book, I will share three comments that derive from my perspective as a literary historian of early Jewish texts, and from my desire to consider the full ramifications of Thiessen’s findings. My first comment regards Thiessen’s engagement with Jewish sources, both biblical (which I label here as “Jewish” in the sense that by the first century, scriptural texts were read as the authoritative texts of practicing Jews) and rabbinic.

The Jewish laws pertaining to ritual impurity are, as far as we know, either derived from biblical laws or developed by early rabbinic communities who recorded them in rabbinic documents beginning in the early third century. The world of Jesus stands between and in both these two worlds: Jesus’s world was biblical in the sense that biblical laws were, at that time, part of an as-yet unclosed canon of authoritative texts that were subject to radical interpretation. It was also rabbinic, in the sense that later rabbinic literature would cite rabbinic authorities who could have been Jesus’s near-contemporaries. The biblical laws which Thiessen cites were considered by first-century Jews to be ancient, and had long been subject to centuries of oral transmission, analysis, and reworking. While Sadducean Jews may have read the purity laws in Leviticus and elsewhere in their scriptures as literal and unsupplemented, most Jews practiced their purity laws with a supplementary oral tradition in view which was subject to active and ongoing interpretation.

Despite his meticulous scholarship, Thiessen downplays the complex analyses required for scholars to determine what rabbinic sources truly derive from the first century, and tends not to engage with the rabbinic sources that he cites on a source-critical level. And yet, Thiessen is no doubt aware of this problem, and thus responsibly refers to much rabbinic literature as “later” rabbinic texts. But the very method of looking at the world of Jesus through the lens of rabbinic conversations, even conversations in which legal rulings are not well established, has pitfalls in that it serves to collapse and essentialize the rabbinic perspective. As Anthony Saldarini has warned, “the integrity, vitality and legitimacy of the Jewish community and tradition is lost in the Christian quest for facts to clarify New Testament passages.”1 Though Saldarini wrote these words out of concern for the practice of comparing New Testament and rabbinic sources in ways which cast the latter in a negative light, any comparison between these corpora must recognize the vastly different historical context of the two collections.

Moreover, Thiessen does not highlight the reality that rabbinic literature has no single historical context: What can we learn from the fact that the Synoptic Gospels portray Jesus as engaged in conversations which have literary corollaries in, to state only a few rabbinic collections, Numbers Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, Genesis Rabbah, Babylonian Talmud, the Tosefta, and the Jerusalem Talmud, collections which span centuries, and which were not all edited in Judea? But perhaps this is exactly the point. Thiessen recognizes the diversity of Judaism and takes it as self-evident. The debates preserved in the gospels are simply further evidence of the live and ongoing legal debates among Jews over the course of centuries. Nevertheless, the incorporation of more secondary literature illuminating the complex and layered world of the rabbis would have provided Thiessen’s readers with an even greater appreciation of Jesus’s Jewish context, and of the impossibility of making derivative generalizations about a rabbinic—and by extension, a Jewish—population.

My first point, then, can be summed up as a question: rather than reading rabbinic sources back into the first century (which, despite all of Thiessen’s careful references to “later rabbinic literature” phrases, he still does), could Thiessen have depicted the Synoptic Gospels as participating in intra-Jewish conversations which led to the complex formation of later normative Judaism, particularly given his compelling argument that Luke was probably Jewish?

My second point regards Thiessen’s engagement with late Second Temple sources. Thiessen knows that, ideally, evidence that Jesus was engaged in intra-Jewish discussions regarding the nature of ritual purity should come from documents recorded in the first century CE. But most of the Second Temple texts that he cites are sectarian, such as documents preserved at Qumran, and the book of Jubilees (which was preserved at Qumran in fifteen separate manuscripts, but was likely composed outside of the community). And while Thiessen cites some information from Philo and Josephus, the vast majority of the Second Temple documents that he cites are Judean and of those, mostly sectarian. I think that Thiessen is correct to cite these important sources, which properly situate Jesus into his Jewish context. But again, Thiessen’s collapsing of Jewish sources as being of equal “Jewish value” denies a historical reality which makes his argument even more intriguing: The Second Temple sources that Thiessen uses are predominantly Judean and disproportionately sectarian. Thiessen is at a disadvantage when it comes to the sources that he uses which place Jesus’s arguments into the context of a broader Jewish conversation. As he admits (in the same outstanding passage cited above), “we are able to piece together fragments of that world, but our knowledge will only ever be imperfect at best” (38). Surviving Jewish evidence from the first century is skewed towards the sectarian: the majority of the Jewish literature that we have this period represents a minority of the Jewish people who lived at that time.

For this reason, we cannot conclude that Jesus was a typical “Jew” (if there was such a thing), but only that he was a typical Galilean Jew, with access to a tiny sectarian world in which conversations about ritual purity and impurity would have had particular meaning that outsiders would not have understood. Would a Jew in Alexandria, Rome, Antioch, or in eastern regions of the Roman world have appreciated the import of this ritual “inside baseball,” these debates which so occupied and engaged Jesus and his interlocutors? Would they have taken a similarly essentialist approach to the notion of ritual impurity? Would they have been compelled by Jesus’ arguments, or by some of the Pharisees’?

It is precisely because Jesus understands the specific interpretations of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and likely the Essenes that I find the argument in Thiessen’s appendix to be strange. There Thiessen argues that Jesus is engaging in a specifically Pharisaic debate about how impurities travel, and that Mark’s declaration that Jesus declared all food to be clean must be contextualized into a broader discussion about handwashing before eating. And yet, Thiessen’s entire book, and the majority of the texts that he uses, may be similarly embedded into insider debates among sectarian Jews. The recognition of Jesus’s very specific milieu, which in fact does not represent a wide swath of Jewish life, would not minimize the import of Thiessen’s argument that Jesus was a Jew. But it would serve to effectively demonstrate what kind of Jew he was.

My third and final point has to do with what I find to be the most intriguing footnote in the book, which engages with the question of whether theology drives ritual practice. Thiessen writes,

[EXT]Such rituals likely did not arise out of theological reflection; rather, the rituals gave rise to theological reflection that connected corpses, lepra, and genital emissions with death or mortality. [Lemos] rightly cautions that “the type of analysis that seeks ever to schematize almost always sees ritual as secondary to belief and the body as secondary to the mind.” . . . Or, as Walter Burkert puts it, “Ideas do not produce ritual: rather, ritual itself produces and shapes ideas, or even experience and emotions.” (17n18)[/EXT]

This little aside imploded my understanding of Thiessen’s entire book. If it is indeed the case that ritual precedes the systematic development of theological ideas, which serves to retroactively explain the rituals, then has Thiessen made the great defense of the integrity of the Jewish purity system which he purports to make, or has he only made the argument that Jesus was a good Jew who bought into a system that was founded on empty superstitions, but were at a later point retroactively imbued with meaning? If this is the case, would it not be a conceptual jump to presume that all Jews who accepted the rules of this system correctly perceived its agreed-upon theological meaning? Above all, is Thiessen implying that Jesus was a good Jew, but nevertheless, that the core ideas which ground the ancient Jewish purity system, ideas laid out in Milgrom’s famous commentary to Leviticus and Mary Douglas’s work, were simply a theological tail wagging the ritual dog?

I make these points with the intention of situating Thiessen’s work into the broader context of a time when the majority of Jews were not sectarian, when the majority of Jews did not live in Judea, and when the majority of Jews were probably not routinely concerned with eradicating the forces of ritual impurity from their lives. Does it matter that Jesus was the kind of Jew that was not particularly representative of most Jews of his time? I hope that these brief comments are not read as challenges of Thiessen’s argument, but as the responses of a grateful reader for an outstanding work of scholarship that merits further exploration.