Purify This!

So I find two examples where there’s something going on which there isn’t a name for, but I give it a label and I call it the nominative absolute circumstantial participle.

All right, fine, fine. If we’re gonna go there, let’s go there.

No, you need to do what the 19th-century Germans did and just name it after yourself. The Logan Rule.

Logan construction. Yeah, yeah, no, I’m not that vain.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat that ever-present misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Things are great. I’m looking forward to our guest today. I’m thinking about very little else. We are, interestingly, right—we’re recording this right after a certain election happened, and I am trying not to think too much about that. So let’s dive in and introduce our guest.

All right, today, welcome Logan Williams to the show. Logan is the Kirby Laing Research Fellow in New Testament up in lovely Aberdeen in Scotland. Thank you so much for joining us today, Logan.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Well, we appreciate it very much. And you recently published an article that we’re here primarily to talk about. Hopefully we get to talk about some other stuff, get into it a little bit regarding some Christological controversy. But you published in a journal called New Testament Studies an open-access article, “The Stomach Purifies All Foods: Jesus’s Anatomical Argument in Mark 7:18-19 ,” which is addressing something that I actually talked about a little bit in a video a while ago. I was just sharing my understanding of the received wisdom. And I can’t remember if you responded on Twitter or Facebook or something like that, or if somebody else was like—

“Hey, man, get caught up with someone.” Like, “What do you think about Logan’s argument?” And I was like, that’s not really fair because it’s not out yet, you know. And I remember replying like, you know, no shade on Dan. He’s stating the consensus. And I have this really idiosyncratic view which some people have argued something similar before. Yeah. But I was like, yeah, just wait till it comes out. Don’t, you know, stop being a reply guy to anyone. I get this all the time. Like, some random pastor will be like, “Jesus freed us from the food laws.” And they’ll be like, “But Logan!” And I’m like, “What?”

Like, yeah, don’t bring me an article.

I’m like, that’s not helpful. Like, what—what is that supposed to do for people? I mean, I did have a video of like an old presentation I did on it that has developed—the argument has developed quite a bit since then—but it was like there was some rumble before it was out, which I felt like was just like, not helpful because I was like, I think—what are people gonna do?

Like, as we get into this, one of the interesting things of this will be that this is something for non-scholars like myself. This is one of those moments where you really can—you get a sort of window into what the world of biblical scholarship looks like. Because I’m, you know, I’m not used to that world. Until I started doing this podcast, I was not used to the world of biblical scholarship. Your article hinges on four Greek words essentially. And like the minutiae that you people get into is pretty amazing. But those four Greek words, depending on how you interpret it—and you know, you go into a whole bunch of, you bring in a bunch of different stuff—it’s not, you’re not just talking about four words, but it changes kind of everything. So can we just start by talking about sort of, you know, you discuss what the received, what—what the sort of consensus view has been.

We’re in Mark, chapter seven.

If it’s okay, I want to back up a little bit and just kind of orient the listener because right now they’re like, “What the hell are they talking about?”

Right.

And we’re talking about purity laws, legislation, purity ideas within first-century CE Judaism, which is the world into which the New Testament is being written. And as soon as—going back to my little fumble on social media—as soon as people started mentioning this, I was like, “Oh no, Matt Thiessen is going to jump down my throat,” because I should have recalled he wrote this wonderful book a couple years ago called Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism, which was kind of—which is doing a—it’s kind of pointing in the same direction that you’re pointing, Logan, where it’s engaging with this received tradition about Jesus overturning Jewish ideas about purity and basically saying they’re all invalid.

Jesus is presenting himself as, as kind of the, the purifier the solution to the problem of ritual impurity without just saying it’s all invalid. And can you describe a little bit the. The describe where we’re coming from in this article? What is the conventional wisdom that’s. That you’re engaging in this article?

Yeah. So for about maybe 150 years or so. Well, let me back up a little bit. Previously, the Textus Receptus, or the received text. Right. The Greek text on which the KJV is based on had a different. Had one different vowel in the first word of that final phrase in Mark 7:19 . So Mark 7:18-19 , translated in the NRSV. I’m going to butcher it. But from memory. It’s something like, do you not understand that whatever goes into a person is not able to defile them because it enters not into their heart but into the stomach and is cast out and goes out into the latrine? And then there’s a parenthetical statement in most English translations, most modern English translations that say, thus he declared all foods clean, or thus purifying all. You know, thus he purified all foods. Or, you know, there’s some more dynamic translations that say something like, thus he permitted all foods as, you know, permitted to eat, or something like that.

Right, right. The key point is that they take that final phrase to be something that Jesus does. Right. So it’s Jesus that’s doing the purifying.

And, and, and the thing that he’s doing is roughly like. Or the thing that they’re saying he’s doing is roughly that he is saying, we don’t have to worry about kosher laws anymore.

Exactly. Or, or, you know, sometimes that’s also coupled with the notion that he’s also saying we don’t have to care about any purity laws whatsoever. Right. Or some scholars will say Jesus’s statement says that there’s no such thing as impurity in the material sense. Now, we should, eventually, we should talk about the distinction between kosher laws and purity laws.

How they may overlap and how they won’t. But I’ll back up.

I’ve got notes here about kashrut versus tohora, ritual impurity versus impure animals. And I’m just. I, look, I took notes. I was trying. I really worked to follow this thing because I do not have the background to really understand a lot of this. So it.

Yeah, I will say it’s kind of a baptism by fire article because in order to even kind of begin the conversation, you have to. I had to lay all this groundwork about Jewish law. Yeah. And I had to assume that most scholars weren’t that familiar with these categories or necessarily familiar with these categories. Some of them are who work on it, but it’s kind of a niche, weird thing. So I kind of had to do a good. Like, you know, one third of the paper is kind of just like. Let’s just. Let’s just set the ground rules here.

Well, kind of thing.

You’re quoting an awful lot of German, too, for the, for the reader.

Yeah. There’s German, there’s Greek. I am wading through the thicket in this thing. It was. It’s pretty amazing. But I’m very glad that you did have to lay down those. Those ground rules because, you know, whatever. You know, the. Whatever background the scholars don’t have, I definitely don’t have. So. Yeah, it’s. It’s. It’s a. I was very grateful for all of that. So, sorry, go on with what you were saying.

Yeah. So back in the day, Right. KJV time. Right. The Textus Receptus had the word katharizon, which is the word usually translated thus. He declared all clean or something like that. Right. So we’ll get into that a bit later. But it’s the word for purify or to declare pure, declare clean, katharizo in Greek. And. But that word is a participle. And the Textus Receptus had a neuter participle, where our modern Greek Bibles. Not modern Greek, but our updated Greek Bibles have an omega. The difference with that is that if you have an omicron, which makes it a neuter participle, then it means that the subject of the sentence or the. Sorry, the subject of that participle can’t be a person. So it. If. But now that our updated Greek Bibles have a masculine participle for that reason or for similar. For some reasons that we get into in a bit, it. People think that the subject has to be Jesus.

So if you have the neuter participle, what it looks like is that that phrase is a kind of big appositional phrase to the previous clause, cast out into the latrine. And there is some evidence in Greek that katharizo can mean purge.

Every. Pretty much everyone thinks that it means purge. Some people think it means purify, like make clean. But they’re. They’re definitely in the minority. Then Westcott and Hort come along, right? And they do all their. All of their reconstruction of the New Testament. So around, what is it, Dan? Like around the 1850s, maybe, like around the century. I think Westcott and Hort is—So the. Basically a bunch of scholars are coming together and realizing that the textual tradition, in the Byzantine tradition or the Textus Receptus, is probably not the most reliable Greek text, that it doesn’t as faithfully represent the original as a number of other manuscripts that were found around then, including, for example, Sinaiticus and, you know, other manuscripts. And so after Westcott and Hort, our Greek Bibles change pretty much. I haven’t actually traced exactly when this happens, but sometime around the mid 19th century, our Greek Bibles changed so that that word, which was katharizon, becomes katharizon.

Now, this presents a huge issue. The neuter reading is pretty grammatical, grammatically, like, easy to explain. Yeah, we have copious examples of a neuter participle being used in apposition to an entire clause. So the whole it’s cast out into the latrine. And this is purging all meats. It’s a totally normal construction. What’s not normal or what’s really weird about the masculine reading is that usually a participle, the subject of a participle latches onto something else in the previous clauses or previous clause. And if it’s functioning adverbially, which everyone would agree it’s functioning adverbially here, then it has to be that if, or in most cases, if it’s adverbial, the subject of the participle matches the subject of the verb that it’s modifying. Now, here’s what’s weird. The subject of the previous two verbs, it goes in, you know, or rather, you know, that whole sequence of speech about whatever goes into a person is not able to defile them.

But blah, blah, blah, blah. The subject of all those verbs is a neuter noun. That which is going in from outside is a neuter. So the whole going in coming out has a neuter subject. So if the participle is masculine, then what’s the subject of that participle? It can’t be the subject of the proximate verbs because that’s neuter. So what people posited is, okay, well, way, way back at the beginning of verse 18, you have legei, he said, and that the subject of that is Jesus, which is a masculine singular noun. So people have pretty much since the beginning of Westcott and Hort thought, or, you know, Westcott and Hort’s Greek Bible, they thought, okay, well, it probably is the case that katharizon jumps over all of these verbs and modifies legei, which means that the subject of katharizon has to be Jesus.

There are some exceptions to this, namely some of the Germans who, German scholars who argue that it’s modifying the previous word latrine. And they say that the latrine purifies all foods or purges all meats or something like that, however they take it. But that definitely hasn’t been the majority in English translations or in Anglophone scholarship. So that is why if you look at translations before the mid 19th century, they will all say, pretty much all say purging all meats. And. But afterwards, all of our English Bibles say something like, thus, he declared all foods clean. And it has to do with literally the change from a short O to a long O. Wow. Which would have sounded identical in the mid Roman period.

And that also changes. It changes it from reported speech to part of the narration as well. That’s an unnecessary change. So it’s this exact parenthetical.

Yeah, so. So the. Yeah, the difference then becomes. Is this something I’m just gonna recap just for anyone who didn’t follow that.

I mean, yeah, we just, we just had like a crash course Greek lesson on participles. So, yes, right at the opening of the podcast. So I hope, I hope people are.

Still with us that a few of our listeners don’t even know what a participle is. I’m not saying I don’t know what a participle is. Of course I do. But some of our listeners might, might not have that knowledge. And that’s fine. But what we’re saying is the, the. So I’m going to read the entire verse 18 and 19. Just, just again, you already said it. But it’s. So we’re saying. Yeah, because it’s basically one sentence. He said to them, he being Jesus, said to them, then do. Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that when whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart, but the stomach and goes out into the sewer. And then, at least in the NRSV, there’s a parenthesis, and it says, thus, he declared all foods clean. And that. That is. That is the post. That is the. The more recent version of this. Whereas before it wasn’t a parenthetical phrase.

Thus he declared all foods clean, but rather it goes into the sewer. And therefore somehow that’s. That. That purifies it.

Is that the difference that we’re saying?

Yep. Yeah. So the. The latter or the. The newer version takes it as a comment by Mark. Right, right. An explanation of what Jesus did when he said right at the beginning of 18. So that.

So it takes it from a continuation of. Of his sentence to. This is what that sentence did.

Exactly. Yeah. Correct.

All right.

Now talk to us about your theory, which differs from the idea of turning it from in. Into this parenthetical and. Yeah, and we’re gonna have to get.

Into the weeds about, like, we’ll get into the weeds.

Purity. And, you know, we. We sort of teased the idea of ritual impurity versus the. The purity of eating specific animals.

Which would be the. Sort of the Torah kosher laws. So. So talk a little bit about that. Talk a little bit.

Yeah. So I’ll start with the. The grammatical point, and then we can move to the. To the broader. Okay. Point about categorization of purity laws. So the difficulty is like. So I agree. And this is. Right. I agree that the. The correct reading is masculine. Okay. The masculine participle. So I think Westcott and Hort were right to change the business. The. The Textus Receptus or. Or propose a better reading than the Textus Receptus. They didn’t change the Textus Receptus. Right. So. So I agree with them. Now, the question then is, no matter what way you cut it, this is just a ridiculously weird participle. Like, it just. You have to do something odd with it because it can’t modify any of the proximate verbs. So one option is to do what the modern translators have done in English and say, okay, this jumps over all of the verbs, right? Going in, not able to defile, going into the stomach, not into the heart, into the latrine.

All of those verbs in Greek, there’s many of them. I think there’s like 35 or 36 words intervening, he said and that. And like, you know, multiple. Multiple verbs. And then all of a sudden, that final phrase Just skips over all that and modifies like the beginning verb in 18, right? Now this is, to my knowledge, there’s nothing like this in Greek. I couldn’t. I mean, of course, you know, the, the corpus of Greek literature that we have is massive. So I’m not claiming to have looked at every single participle in the world, which would take me a lifetime, right, because be sitting on Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for, you know, for years doing that. Right? But I can’t find or, and, and neither has anyone ever proposed to my knowledge, an example where someone says he said and then it reports direct speech, right? Not he said that, but. But he said. And then a long quotation and then a random dangling participle that modifies the verb all the way before all those other intervening things.

Like there’s just. I’ve never seen anyone propose an example of anything like that. The other issue is, and this is something Kevin Grasso brought up to me is what. What verbs, what nouns and subjects and entities are in view when you’re reading this, right? There’s all sorts of things that go in latrine, person, heart, stomach, all of these nouns are kind of in view. But Jesus, right, is not the kind of, in the proximate frame of this, of this discourse, at this point in the verse. So how likely is it that someone would just automatically, just like speed reading this native speaker in Greek, just blowing through this would automatically pick up that katharizon is picking up the subject Jesus.

And a finite verb where there isn’t a finite verb. He declared clean. But we don’t have either of those in Greek. We don’t have a full sentence. So this is kind of raising the orange or red flags. This translation can be questioned. So what I did in my article is I found two examples from the Septuagint of what I think is a very, very rare construction that nonetheless exists in Greek, but might be a product of translation Greek. So I’m not entirely sure if there’s examples of this in non translation Greek. But as we all know, septuagintal language that might have not been natural or kind of, you know, standard in the ancient world seeps into the speech patterns of Jewish Greek speakers.

Because they’re raised on this text. Right. It’s similar to the way we speak in KJV phrases all the time, and we don’t realize it. Right. We have so many things in our vocabulary that were introduced into the English language or popularized by the KJV, and we have no idea. And that might have been weird in the. In the original context. So it’s similar. The Septuagint, you know, invites a lot of, you know, speech patterns or develops, you know, help helps Jews or incites Jews to develop certain speaking patterns that might not have otherwise been popular. So I find two examples where there’s something going on, which I. There isn’t a name for, but I give it a label and I call it the nominative, absolute circumstantial participle.

All right, fine, fine. If we’re gonna go there, let’s go there.

No, you need to do what the 19th century Germans did and just name it after yourself. The Logan rule.

Logan construction. Yeah, yeah. No, I’m not that vain. And. And what I think is happening here is that. Is that basically without getting. I’m not going to get into these weeds because we’re already deep enough. But basically, it’s an example of a dangling participle at the end of a series of phrases where the participle is not picking up on the subject of the previous verbs, but the implied agent depicted by the verbs. So this is usually God. So it will say something. I think one of the examples I give is from the psalms, like, from the works of your hands, the earth will be fed, thus you causing green grass to grow. Or. I forget the exact example, but it’s right. The. The earth will be fed. And then there’s a masculine participle at the end that’s not a complete sentence that just says, causing grass to grow. And so what that’s doing is the participle is picking up on the agent of who’s causing.

Or, sorry, who’s feeding the earth, which is implied to be God. So I say this is. Actually, I give a little table for those who are interested. I’m not going to get two more in these weeds, but I give a table comparing these two other examples to show that actually the construction is intelligible. If we compare it to these constructions, if we consider it to be a nominative, absolute circumstantial or adverbial participle. And thus what the result of that is, is that we would have to posit that the subject of katharizon is not Iesous, but anthropos, that is the person that’s being talked about in these verses. Right. So there’s nothing from outside going into a person that is able to defile them because it goes not into his heart. These are all nouns in the masculine singular that are. That are referring to an anthropos, a human being, his heart, but it’s cast out into the drain. Thus, the person, that person who ingested the food, purifying all foods.

And importantly, the. And again, Kevin Grasso pointed this out to me. The language nerd. The. There’s an article on foods there. So it implies, i.e. the food that. That particular food that’s been ingested by the person. Yeah.

So not. Not all foods that exist, but all the food that he ingested.

Exactly, yeah. Becomes. Becomes pure in the process of digestion.

And just for those who are interested, Table 1 here refers to Isaiah 28 , verses 5 and 6 in the Septuagint. And then Septuagint, Psalms 103 , 13, and 14, where you have the list and then the implied subject of the participle, if you want to go look those up.

Okay, so now. Now that. Now that we have. If. If we are to take your theory.

On and we have any listeners that remain. Yeah.

If anybody’s still with us whatsoever, I. I’m having fun with this. This is good. But I’m gonna do my. Another recap and try not to be too. Too wordy about it. But. But now we. We’ve implied a. A person, a. A new subject that is implicit rather than explicit. It has, like that. That human is not spoken, but is. But is implied. And so you’re saying the participle refers to this implied noun.

Well, so no matter what way you cut it, which way you. You cut it, the participle has an implied subject because it’s not stated. Right? Right.

Yeah. But it is explicit in the sense that there are three nouns directly preceding in the previous clauses that refer to the anthropos. So you have the anthropos and then two instances of the masculine singular pronoun. So three instances of masculine nouns that are referring to the person. And so I just think, like, you know, if we have to choose either—no matter what, this participle is doing something weird—so that either we say that the proximate subject that it’s pulling from is the implied Jesus from the legei in the beginning of 18, or—and this is the contribution of my article—we can say that it’s. It’s also possible that it picks up on a more proximate masculine singular noun, which is anthropos. And I just think, you know, the way that people would be processing information when they read that verse, they would immediately think that the subject is the anthropos because it’s the more proximate masculine noun and not jump all the way back to Jesus, who isn’t even.

Who isn’t even stated. Right. It just says legei. It doesn’t say. It doesn’t say Jesus said. It just says said. Yeah. So. Yeah. So either way, it’s implied. But I think it’s. This is the more explicit and more proximate noun that it could be picking up on.

We don’t have Jesus until it’s like. It’s not even anywhere in the chapter. Like, you gotta go back to chapter six. Yeah, at least in the translations. I’m like, let me see. I’m not seeing Jesus anywhere in chapter seven. All right, well, sorry, I interrupted. Continue.

That’s the point. Yeah, yeah.

So we. So. So here’s. Let me just see. If I’ve tracked. If I’ve tracked this. We’ve gone from KJV basically implying that what. That what had happened was that the food entering the heart, the stomach, and going into the sewer somehow made the food clean or made the food pure or something.

Or. Or it just expels it from the body. So I think. Yeah, okay.

Yes. Okay. So. So there’s that. Then we have this understanding that it’s Jesus declaring all the foods clean. And now your proposal is that it is actually the ingestion of the food that has somehow made it clean. The person makes it clean by ingesting it.

Digesting it. Digesting and expelling.

Yeah, sorry. Digesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, that’s interesting. So talk a little bit now, finally, about. We’re talking about cleanliness. We’re talking about purity. We’re talking about these laws, you know, because. Because the interpretation of “Thus he declared all foods clean,” suddenly, is Jesus saying the laws from the Torah about clean foods and unclean foods don’t apply anymore.

And you’re saying that may not be the case.

I’m probably saying it’s definitely not the case. Okay, but I’m gonna understate.

I’m gonna. I’m gonna go on record as saying I love that you just.

Probably.

Definitely.

Yeah. Well, just in the sense that I think the language of my article is. Is is quite firm. I don’t pull punches in it. Right, okay. And. And maybe this is like a fault of my rhetoric, but I feel like it’s a bit punchy. I’m just like, you know, maybe this is just like, you know—I say go for it—a fault in my personality that I’m like, no, it’s definitely this, like, I like it.

And hey, just so you know, I’ve been on the other end of some of your published punches.

It’s.

It’s okay. It’s okay.

Well, I mean, you of all people should definitely be able to handle that. Right, because you, you could dish it out for sure.

No, I, I didn’t find anything you’ve said to be. To be harsh. Yeah, you can be, you can be curt but fair.

Yeah, yeah. So.

So talk about that.

Yeah, yeah. So the first, the first thing we have to do is, is think about how we categorize and understand certain laws in the Torah. And also one of the important things, actually probably the most important thing is that. And this is just gonna maybe sound weird to a lot of your hearers and also maybe not if you’ve watched Dan’s channel enough, but you can’t understand what Second Temple Judaism was like by just reading the Torah. You can’t just figure out what Jews were doing just by reading the Torah. Now why is that the case? The reason that’s the case is because the Torah is a really difficult text to interpret and to figure out how to apply. And Jews in the Second Temple period interpreted a lot of these laws in ways that we would think are really counterintuitive and really difficult to justify.

So that. Can you give an example? I. Well, actually there are really relevant examples I’m about to tell.

Okay, yeah, sorry, sorry.

We’ll get into the weird ones right now. Yeah. So we can, we can maybe talk about two broad categories of things. Right. One is certain laws that kind of all Jews generally agreed about, about how to obey them. And they did obey them. Right. So I generally ascribe to what E. P. Sanders calls Common Judaism in the late Second Temple period. Right. But after the Hasmoneans, after. Right. The Maccabees, as Jonathan Adler has really helpfully shown, Jews started obeying the Torah like writ large. Right. Judeans, Ioudaioi. Jews became a Torah observant culture through the Hasmonean dynasty and their implementation of the Torah as the civil law of the land. And so this is why I talk about late Second Temple Judaism, because there’s very minimal evidence that in the early Second Temple era, Jews were actually obeying the laws that we now find in the Pentateuch. So we can talk about things that generally were agreed upon and then a lot of things that.

Things that people disagreed on. Obviously there’s a lot of overlap between these things. But the reason why you have all these different sects in Second Temple period, right, the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the Zealots and the Essenes, right, and the early Christ groups, right, is because there are lots of different ways of thinking about and construing this material from the Torah. So obviously, you know, the Sadducees and the Pharisees are the classic example of people who disagreed about what it meant to obey God’s law. But there are some things that there was a consensus about and things that might seem really weird. So, for example, and this is really key to the article, in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14:1 through 21:23, around there, you have a list of a bunch of animals that you’re not prohib. You’re not permitted to eat, or at least, sorry, Israelites are not permitted to eat, right?

So it says, you know, X is unclean, this is unclean, whatever. This, you’re not allowed to eat, whatever. And it uses the language of impurity to describe these animals that are prohibited. So if you just go read Leviticus 11 , they’ll say, these are unclean to you. X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, whatever, a bunch of stuff. And then at the end it says, previously it uses the language of impurity. And then it uses the verbal forms at the end. So you get shiqqetsu. Do not abominate your souls with anything that creeps on the earth. Or, sorry, with anything that creeps or any creeper that creeps. Do not defile yourselves with them and so become defiled by them. That’s Leviticus 11:43 .

And then in 44, it picks up the defilement language again and it says, Do not defile your souls with anything, any creeper that roams on the earth. Now, what this, you know, would make people think is, oh, this is just the same as a bunch of the other stuff, right? That’s impure in Leviticus, right? Like menstruating women and men that have had any kind of seminal emission and women who have just given birth to a child and people with what is often translated as leprosy, which is a bad translation. We’ll just call it lepra. People with lepra and houses with weird spots. Right? Now, what’s really weird is that those laws appear right next to each other in Leviticus. So Leviticus 11 is all about prohibited unclean animals. Leviticus 12 through 15 and you can include 16 if you include the Day of Atonement is all about these various things that make you impure in how you have to wash yourself and how you have to go through rituals to purify yourself and whatever.

Now it’s wildly, you know, will probably seem wildly counterintuitive is that Jews in the late Second Temple period, so it seems, or many of them at least just completely siphoned off chapter 11 from 12 to 15.

So you can go. Usually it’s just you kind of immerse, you wait until evening and then you’re pure. Other times you have to wait a long time, immerse, give a sacrifice. Right. The to become pure from lepra impurity, from leprosy impurity, is a multi-step process. The craziest one is in Numbers 19 where you have to go through this, what’s called the Red Heifer ritual, where you have to do this a lot of different really interesting things to purify yourself if you touch or become impure by a dead body.

So this is what we can that kind of impurity that’s transferable and that’s ameliorated by certain activities, by certain ritual activities. People or scholars have called that ritual impurity. Now I think I’m pretty sure Jonathan Klawans invents this phrase. The category itself or the intuition that this is a specific kind of impurity goes back, you know, through, you know, ancient Judaism. Sometimes it was called Levitical impurity. In certain Anglophone scholarship earlier now it’s just referred to as ritual impurity. And so this is the ritual impurity that you can transfer, that you can get and that you can ameliorate and that you can pass in and out of.

So it’s, it’s sort of a becoming unclean and then a cleansing thing. Is that correct?

Yeah. Is that, yeah. Okay. And there’s nothing. In principle, acquiring impurity is not immoral.

Now, not doing something to ameliorate your impurity can be really bad in certain circumstances. And if you’re a certain kind of person, you’re not permitted to acquire certain kinds of impurities. So, for example, the high priest is not allowed to ever contract corpse impurity.

Right.

I did notice, like, as I read through some of these. Sorry. I did notice that.

It doesn’t say you can never do this. It just says when you do it, when you, when you touch this animal or when you eat this animal, then you have to do X, Y and Z. Yeah. And it doesn’t seem like, it doesn’t seem like it’s this big problem. It doesn’t seem like it’s this, you know, moral issue. It’s just when it happens here, wash your hands, wash your clothes, and then by evening, you’re done, you’re good.

Totally. Usually, yeah. And like, you know, every time a couple has sex, they’re impure. Right. So this, this, Right. Having a child makes them impure. You’re required in Deuteronomy 21 , I think, to bury a dead body. If you see it on the street, that would make you impure. So actually, there are times where in order to obey the law, you have to become impure. Yeah. So there’s definitely, in principle, acquiring ritual impurity is not an immoral thing. Okay, in principle. Right. There are certain circumstances where it is, but in principle it is not. Okay, so now let’s go back to Leviticus 11 . Tell me, guys, you guys probably know this because you’ve read my, read my paper, or actually, for our listeners, for those who have read, you know, something in the Torah, can you tell me what the procedure is to ameliorate the impurity you get from eating an animal? That’s prohibited.

Give people a second to think.

Yeah, I, I, I feel like, I, I feel like I’m in school and you’ve just called on me for something.

And I’m giving you a trick question. Yeah, yeah.

And, and this is one of the things that you, you talked a little bit about the, the pluriformity of the different approaches to the Torah. One of the first things that they notice when it’s like, okay, here’s the Torah. This, you, this is now in charge. They’re going to be like, moment, I don’t know if you noticed this, but one, we got a bunch of contradictions, two, there are a lot of gaps. And so this is what the, what a lot of the halakhic literature is trying to do is imposing things, is trying to harmonize things. But that stuff’s not written down for a while.

Absolutely.

And so you have, and you know, I think of the Seinfeld episode where, oh, suddenly there’s lobster in this and now, you know, we’ve been, we’ve been tricked. There’s got to be some way of, of doing this. Certainly at some point they were like, hey, what if we accidentally. Because they asked a lot of weird questions of the Torah in, in that early literature. So, yeah, the notion they didn’t have an answer is, is nonsense. So.

Yeah. And because, you know, there’s a question of whether this literature originated as actual, like, you know, ideal literature or whether it was actually implemented. Right. But when you put it all together and then you try get to, you get people to obey it, you realize it’s really not self explanatory.

Right. And this is why, like, you have, you know, so many volumes of Jewish law is, is in part, you know, in terms of the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Talmud. Right. What all those other things is because it’s actually, it’s really difficult to know what to do in a, in a lot of situations and, and lots of different schools and people had different opinions about rulings, about, well, to obey this law in this circumstance. What does it mean? Right. Like the classic one is the Torah does not tell you how to, how to deal with this. Right. Let’s say you think that circumcising a boy constitutes work. And every Jew seemed to think that it did. Okay. You’re commanded not to work on the 8th. Sorry, on the 7th day. Right. And you’re commanded to circumcise your sons on the eighth day. So what if the eighth day of your child’s life falls on a Sabbath, right. What do you do?

And you got all these guys.

Yeah. You have to, you have to systematize and you have to be able to find a way to rate commandments. And pretty much every Jew agreed that circumcision overrides Shabbat. Okay. Always. But that’s, but this is the kind of questions that they had to deal with. Right. Once you actually start obeying it practically, you’re like, oh, wait, that’s not clear. Let’s have a discussion. And figure this out and figure out how to do it, right? So it’s, this is part, part and parcel of just like what it meant to interpret and apply the law in the late Second Temple period. Okay, so back to the question, right? All of you have had a lot of time to look at this for our listeners. What is the purification procedure if you ingest a prohibited animal? And the answer is, there isn’t one, right? In Leviticus 11 , there isn’t one. It just says, don’t defile yourselves, don’t abominate your souls, don’t eat, don’t defile yourselves by them, and so become impure. And then the next question is, okay, well, if I do that, do I immerse myself? Do I have to bring a sacrifice to purify myself?

You know, do I give some kind of purification, purgation offering? What do I do? Torah? And the Torah just goes, hey, if any, if any woman gives birth to a child, right? Like, then it moves on, and it just moves on, right? And so the way that Jews understood this was, okay, it must mean that actually when you eat a prohibited animal, it doesn’t transmit ritual impurity to you, because if it did, the Torah would tell you how to ameliorate that. But it doesn’t. So we’re exegeting the blank in the narrative, right? The omission is significant, right? So the way that it’s kind of just universally interpreted was the impurity language just means this is not cool. Like, don’t do this. Right? That’s it. It’s not because they transmit ritual impurity to you, because that also wouldn’t, wouldn’t be prohibited anyways. Right. In principle, it’s just because the impurity language is a way of saying, don’t do this.

Okay, now was that in line with the original intent of Leviticus, whatever that might mean? Right, Right. Definitely not. Like, there’s no clear cut distinction between Leviticus 11 and 12 through 15 in terms of how they understand impurity. But this is just how, you know, Jews understood it. And the clear evidence for this is if you go to the Mishnah and you open up Seder Taharot. Seder Taharot is the order, major section, major division of the Mishnah that’s dedicated to all things ritual impurity. It is very dense and it’s the longest tractate of the Mishnah. Like, I wish I had my Mishnah behind me, but I’m not in my office because, you know, we had that whole experience where my internet didn’t work. But you can just look at the size of each of the tractates, if they’re contained in one volume and Seder Taharot, just like, boom. Like, you can just pick it out.

There’s not even, like a rabbi that’s like, hey, does Leviticus 11 come up here? And then the sages say, no, you’re wrong, right? Like the dispute. No dispute arises. There’s no, like, oh, I might think that Leviticus 11 is relevant here as well. Like, what we see a lot in the Mishnah, right? Oh, I might think this, I might think that. Nothing, absolutely nothing in any of that whole order about prohibited animals. Okay? So if that means this is recording disputes that go back to the first century, there’s not a dispute over that. It’s probably a pretty widespread opinion. Now, someone might object to that and say, ah, well, the rabbinic tradition is a specific kind of sub-tradition, right? Of Judaism. And you can’t project that onto all Judaism. And I go, okay, you know, but can you show me a text from the Second Temple period that says I accidentally ate a prohibited animal and then I immersed? Like, it just doesn’t. It’s not there. And so we just have to assume that even though it’s super counterintuitive, the impurity of prohibited animals is not included under the category of—

or as we would analyze it, ritual impurity. So eating a prohibited animal is prohibited because God says so, that’s it, right? Not because it transmits anything to you.

Okay, so what does that mean?

That’s the kind of pillar, right? Okay, right. So that’s a really important pillar that probably will be difficult for a lot of people to stomach. But trust me, bro, you can read more in the article for it. But if you want to dig in more. Okay, so then we have to ask. In Mark 7 , there’s all this impurity defilement language, right? And there’s other kinds of, you know, categories of impurity that appear throughout Second Temple Jewish literature. We have impurity of demons, impurity of idols, right? Impurity of sexual activities, you know, certain illicit sexual activities, whatever. And so we have to—we have to—you know, the first thing we have to do is what kind of impurity are we talking about in Mark 7 ? Right? And the answer is really, really obvious, right? The passage opens with Jesus and his disciples and a bunch of Pharisees eating a meal together. And the Pharisees see that the disciples are not washing their hands, and therefore they have defiled hands.

Okay, well, we’ll talk about hand washing in a bit. But the point being, what kind of impurity are we talking about here? Right? If, presumably, if they wash their hands, the Pharisees would think it would purify their hands. So we’re talking about impurity that can be contracted and then ameliorated. So we have to be talking about ritual impurity. Right. And then they say, you know, Mark adds this comment. He says, all the Ioudaioi—whatever, I’m not sure what it means there, because obviously it’s not true that all Jews wash their hands because Jesus’ disciples are Jews and they weren’t doing it. I don’t know. So he says, all the—

All the.

All the Ioudaioi wash their hands before they eat. They immerse when they come back from the market. And they have lots of other rules concerning cups and potentially beds. There’s a textual variant there, right? They have a lot of rules about the immersion of cups and whatever. Well, this can only be one thing, right? This can only be ritual impurity. Right. So I just want to clarify something. The end parts of the end of Leviticus 11 have to do with ritual impurity, but they’re not about prohibited—they’re not listing off prohibited animals. Right?

Right.

But the first—the first, like, two, three quarters of it is all about, like, what is prohibited and permitted. So that’s—that’s what I mean when I say Leviticus 11 . It’s the—the prohibited animal part. So anyway, so back on Mark 7 , the context, we’re talking about ritual impurity. We’re talking about the ability for impurity to come onto hands and then be contracted onto food and then people to ingest it. And the Pharisees are like, well, if you washed your hands, you know, that would avoid that. We’re talking about transferable impurity here. We’re talking about ritual impurity. So the one thing that we can do is basically rule out that anyone in this passage is talking about whether or not you’re allowed to eat pork.

Because that’s just absolutely not the topic here. Right?

Right.

The Pharisees are not saying, why do your disciples eat what Moses prohibited? They don’t say that. They say, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders by not washing their hands? Okay, so there’s one. There’s one other distinction that we have to add in here. The Pharisees accepted a certain oral tradition of the tradition of the elders, which they followed alongside the Torah. Now, they would not have called this, in my opinion. They would not have called this an oral Torah. They would understand that this was a separate tradition and that it was subordinate to the law of God. Right. So it’s just. It’s a bunch of recommendations, guidelines per se, about what to do in order to make sure you’re obeying, you know, keeping yourself obeying the Torah. And one of the things that those elders passed down for some reason was the practice of washing your hands before you eat normal food. Now, apparently the reason for this was to avoid ingesting an impure entity or impure food.

Was it about transmitting from your hands impurities to the food and then ingesting the food?

Yeah. So the concern is, if you’ve touched something that’s impure, then your hands become impure. If you touch the food in certain circumstances, you have to include water. If you touch food that’s wet, it then would take on a certain level of impurity. Then if you ingest that, you’ll take on a higher degree of impurity than you would if you just had hands. Now, the concern is not, you know, oh, because it’s sinful to ingest something that’s impure. The Pharisees accept that. It’s not because they don’t say, again, why are you sinning? They say, why you not follow the tradition of the elders? It’s just recommended that, hey, if you can, like, avoid becoming impure by accidentally eating impure food, inadvertently making yourself more impure, then, like, that’s probably a smart idea, right? Like, I, it’s not sinful for me to touch a dead body, but I’m not going to, like, run through a cemetery if I don’t need to, like, because that’s just going to be annoyingly annoying and inconvenient.

So the dispute has to do with, one, ritual impurity and two, a body of regulations that’s not even contained in the Torah. So the Torah never says you can’t ingest anything that’s acquired ritual impurity. It never says that you can, you know, touch something. Or at least the Torah doesn’t talk about this, like, having your hands separately impure and then defiling food. It never says that if you eat a secondarily defiled object that it will make you impure. Never says that. There’s some exceptions to this in terms of, like, certain things that might be able to make you impure through ingestion. But those are disputed passages which we can talk about in a bit. So this is the groundwork. We’re not talking about prohibited animals, we’re talking about transmissible impurity, and we’re talking about the regulations that the elders prescribed for how to deal with ritual impurity.

That was very long winded. I hope that sufficed as an answer to your question.

Yes. So, yeah, so then. So we. We’ve. We’ve bring it home. Like, where. Where are we bring it home? We’ve gotten. We’ve gotten through sort of the. You’ve laid the groundwork very, very well. So if so, what is happening then in this passage we can skip.

I’d like to come back to the stuff about Corban in the middle of seven. But ultimately, Jesus’s response to the Pharisaic view is, your notion on which your hand washing regulation is based is totally bs, right? So the basis of the view that leads to. Or, sorry, the. The view on which the practice of hand washing is based is the notion that if you ingest something, you can acquire its impurity. Right? And Jesus says, importantly, again, this is not anywhere in the Torah where if you defile food with, you know, throw a dead body or a dead crocodile at, you know, an egg you’re about to eat, and then you eat that egg, it doesn’t say, oh, you’ll become impure by it. It’s completely silent on the matter. And Jesus says, that’s not possible. And therefore your practice of hand washing is pointless because you’re not actually preventing anything because you can’t become impure through ingestion anyways.

And his argument is pretty interesting, and it has to do with how he understands the function of the of the digestive system. So he says, hey, idiots. Well, he’s talking to the disciples here, right? He says, nothing that comes into a person can defile them because it enters not into their heart, but into the stomach and is cast out into the latrine, thus purifying all foods.

Okay, well, yeah, that does seem to. That does seem to raise questions about, for instance, defecating outside the camp.

Exactly.

Yes, I’ve heard that interpreted as an indication that that is ritually impure.

But so this. So this is another example where Jews are exegeting the blank. So in Deuteronomy 23 , it says, because Adonai walks around in your camp, you can’t just leave your poop there because he might step in it. I mean, it’s kind of implicated. It’s not really clear, right? And then it’s. But it calls it an ervat davar. It says, because it’s an unseemly thing, you have to. You have to take it outside the camp. You can’t leave it where, you know, Adonai is walking around. Now, one might think, you know, maybe in its original context, the concern was, oh, because we know that excrement is impure because it’s gross. But impurity language never comes up. Yeah, because. But impurity language doesn’t appear in that passage. So Second Temple Jews were going, ah, the omission of impurity language there must mean that actually excrement is pure, because if it was impure, it definitely would have been mentioned here. So the omission is really significant.

And so thus, like the tradition, Jewish tradition just assumes, like, excrement’s pure, right? We have evidence from Josephus that it’s pure. We have all these texts from the. From the Essene sect, from Qumran about regulating poop everywhere. Like, they’re really concerned about where poop is. Impurity language never appears in those texts. And then we get explicitly in the early Jewish halachic literature from the Mishnah, where it says human excrement is always pure. And so I think this must have been a really widespread view. We have lots of, you know, implied in the Second Temple period, pretty clear from Josephus and really explicit in the Mishnah. Okay, so then what does that mean? Right? If. If Jesus assumes that what goes in is defiled, but then what comes out is pure, then what must happen in the meantime? Well, it must be the case that the human body is transforming the quality of this food so that it nullifies its impurity. And then the question becomes, if it’s, to quote Shlomo Nae, if it’s in the body’s power to purify food, how would it be possible for food to defile the body?

And so Jesus just says it’s not possible. Okay, so the person purifies all food. So therefore nothing that goes in can defile because the body is nullifying impurity, not taking it on. And therefore the reason why you hand wash before eating is dumb, okay. Or is baseless. Right? Is his. Is his argument.

You’ve built an illegitimate fence around the law with.

Yeah. And so actually Jesus is arguing from Torah. Right. He’s arguing from the view of excrement that he thinks is derived or that would have been derived from Deuteronomy 23 because he thinks implicitly the law rules that excrement is pure. This tells us something. We can deduce from that, this whole kind of cascading series of conclusions from that. And we also see the same, a similar conclusion in the Mishnah which says, hey, if you, you know, eat something, if you eat a part of a dead body, Right. And if it comes out below, then it’s pure.

Now they don’t, they don’t conclude, therefore that it can’t defile for various reasons which we get into later. But in principle they say, like, if it comes out to the downward lemata, then tahor, it’s pure. And that’s Jesus’s very similar language. If it goes into eis ton aphedrona, if it goes into the sewer, the person purifies all foods.

Wow. I think that, that. So we’ve, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve come all the way full circle from, from Jesus sort of going against the Torah to now Jesus is confirming the Torah go by going against the traditions that theoretically probably cropped up from the Torah.

Yeah. So you, you can, I mean, there’s all this argument about what, where did the, or what’s the origin of the hand washing ritual? Right. And there are all these disagreements about what the basis is of it is. Yair Furstenberg argues that it’s a kind of appropriated Hellenistic practice. I don’t know what I think about that. I kind of like give up in my article and I just say it’s shrouded in mystery. But at least we know.

Jesus thinks is, is fine. And, you know, as long as it doesn’t undermine principles from the Torah. And he just thinks it does undermine here.

Well, they’re, they both seem to me to be different negotiations with the Torah. They’re both chasing down the implications of these unanswered questions. And Jesus is basically saying, no, my version is better than your version because of this. And, and so it is. It is still a bit of a battle of traditions, neither of which has an exclusive claim to Torah legitimacy. But, you know, that’s part of the rhetoric of this time period.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, this is key, is that, you know, what I show in the article is that if we assume that Jesus isn’t overturning the Torah, his view would require a relatively idiosyncratic and as unpro. Kind of not intuitive reading of Leviticus 17:15 and Leviticus 22:8 . But we can see that it’s not without precedent in Judaism. But it would, it would require a pretty, a pretty convoluted reading of those texts. And at the same time, though, the rabbinic view that the Pharisees anticipate, their view also requires certain weird readings of those same texts. So I can get into it if you guys want.

No, you know, unfortunately, we are running out of time here. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to, I’m going to ask you to wrap this up by getting to what we really need to know, which is, are Christians allowed to eat pork or not?

Yeah, so this is, this is always the question I get. And I didn’t, annoyingly, I didn’t really have space to explore it in the article. But let me. This requires some hypothesizing, but I think there are, there are good reasons for it. In the Torah, only Israelites are. Native Israelites are required to obey Leviticus 11 . And this is actually pretty explicit. So not only does Leviticus 11 say, this is unclean to you, it then also permits sojourners, right? Non-Israelites, non-Israelites who are dwelling in the land to eat certain things that Israelites are not allowed to eat. So you can see this in Deuteronomy 14:21 , where God says, you know, Moses says, hey, like, if something dies of itself, you can’t eat it, but a sojourner can eat it. Okay, so already we see this distinction that the way that non-Israelites obey the Torah is different from how Israelites obey the Torah, but they can both obey Torah in their own way.

So I generally think that what we see in the New Testament is, even though I don’t think there’s anywhere in the New Testament—this would be a controversial claim—I don’t think there’s anywhere in the New Testament where they just chuck out all the food laws. There’s just a general consensus across early Christianity generally that Jews would just proceed obeying the law as they did and, you know, among doing other things as well, like engaging in Christ-believing communities and whatever. But they wouldn’t just throw out Leviticus 11 . The real question though is, well, if we’re accepting Gentiles as members of the people of God, do they need to obey the laws of Leviticus 11 ? And for whatever reason, the majority, you know, not everyone agreed. But at least the text we have in the New Testament attests to a view where people go, no, no, no, they don’t need to do that. Right. We see disagreement over this in Acts 15 . Certain Christian Pharisees say, hey, they need to. And the ruling is, no, they don’t.

At least things sacrificed, avoid those. At least.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you have to avoid the things that are prohibited to sojourners in Leviticus 17 to 18.

Is how I take that. Yeah. All right.

Well, none of this sounds definitive. I, I’m still confused about what we’re allowed to eat and what we’re not. I’m glad I’m not a Christian now because I, or a Jew, because that would be really confusing for me. But I am going to, I am going to let the conversation end here.

But yeah, if you just look up the stomach purifies all foods or if you just look up the journal New Testament Studies, it’ll be on. It’ll be right now, at least it’s, It’ll be on the front page. If you’re listening to this at a later date, it will be in the backlog issues. Yeah, if you, if you just look up the stomach purifies all foods, it will come up.

Excellent. Excellent. Well, Logan Williams, thank you so much for joining us on the show. We didn’t get to any of the Christology stuff that Dan wanted to get to, so guess what? We’re gonna chuck it into the, into the patrons only section.

Let’s do it.

And yeah, all you, all you lucky patrons who are interested can join us for the smackdown that is Dan versus Logan in Christology. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I, I’m guessing friendships are going to be ruined. We’re going to see. But, but join us for that. If you want to be a part of that, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and join up as a patron at the $10 a month or more level. And there and then you’ll, you’ll be able to to check all of that out as well as getting early and ad-free versions of all of our episodes. If you would like to write to us, please feel free to do so at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Logan, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciated you coming on.

Yeah, it’s been great. Thanks for having me.

Hi everybody.

Purify This!

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology