Prof. Lawrence H. Schiffman

The Supper at Emmaus, Pedro de Orrente, 1620s

We will now look at some passages that indicate that Jesus broke other boundaries as well, choosing to eat with transgressors and others who for ritual reasons were shunned. Mk 2:15-17//Mt 9:9-13//Lk 5:29-32 described the confrontation in which Pharisees (and scribes in Mark and Luke) accuse Jesus of eating with sinners and tax collectors. The latter, as we know also from rabbinic sources, were a specific group of transgressors who collected taxes on behalf of the Romans as minor tax farmers, often overtaxing the poor to increase their own incomes. When confronted on this issue, Jesus defends himself by asserting that it is the sick that need a physician, not the healthy. In other words, religious leadership is obligated to mix with the common people, even the transgressors, in order to bring them back to the path of God.

This notion is made explicit in Luke 15:1-7 where, again, Pharisees and scribes are seen as complaining about Jesus’s eating with publicans and sinners.  Here he explicitly explains that he does so in order to bring them back to repentance, as the owner of sheep might search for lost sheep, leaving the… Continue reading →

The fundamental passage for our inquiry in the Gospels is Mk 7:1-23, partially paralleled by Mt 15:1-20, which is apparently dependent on it. We should note at the outset that contemporary New Testament scholarship views these passages as reflecting the early Christian community, and not the historical Jesus. From our point of view, the attempt to assign particular passages to the historical Jesus represents a concern primarily generated by faith issues, and our concern is, rather, with the early Christian community in which these texts came into their present form. We presume that the raw material and earliest traditions underlying these texts originated soon after the death of Jesus and that they were redacted into the text of Mark by sometime around the destruction of the Temple and into Matthew in the next 20 years or so.

Mk 7:1-5, paralleled by the much shorter version in Mt 15:1-2, contains the accusation by the Pharisees and scribes that Jesus’ followers transgress the “tradition of the elders” in that they eat bread without washing their hands.  The Markan version, in verses 2-4, contains a parenthetical aside explaining the customs of the Pharisees and “all Jews” regarding ritual purity and impurity to… Continue reading →