Did Jesus eliminate the Jewish food laws, known as kashrut? Did he announce that they no longer mattered and that what did matter was an ethical lifestyle? This is the belief of many Christians who take as their evidence the words of Jesus (or rather an editorial aside written by the author of the Gospel of Mark):

[Jesus said:] “Don’t you understand that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him? For it does not enter his heart but his stomach, and then goes out into the sewer.” (This means all foods are clean.) He said, “What comes out of a person defiles him. For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and folly. All these evils come from within and defile a person.” (Mark 7:18–23 NET; italics added)

Seems clear: all foods are clean. But these are not the words of Jesus. Even so, if the author of the Gospel of Mark was a Jew, which seems likely, wasn’t he closest to the source? Wouldn’t he know? But what did he mean by clean? And in what sense is food clean?

To understand this editorial remark we cannot ignore the context in which it was made (Mark 7:1-14). According to the story, some Pharisees had criticized Jesus (Luke) or his disciples (Mark, Matthew) for not washing their hands before they touched their food. Today we would encourage all people to wash before eating due to hygienic concerns. But that was not the purpose of the Pharisees’ remarks. The ancients did not understand about germs. They were not interested in hygienic purity but ritual purity.

Ritual purity was a concern for all Jews. Torah declared that God’s people must be made ritually pure whenever they intended to step on holy ground. In Jesus’ day, the only holy ground in Judaism was the Temple in Jerusalem. People became ritually impure in a limited number of ways: bodily emissions (semen or menstrual blood) or contact with a corpse (Lev. 12-15; Num. 19). It is safe to say that most Jews were ritually impure most of the time. Priests, however, had more stringent ritual purity requirements, including hand washing (Ex. 30:18-20), due to their frequent presence in the Temple.

Pharisees generally tried to encourage their members and others to follow the more stringent priestly requirements regarding purity including hand washing, whether or not they were on their way to the Temple. That was how Pharisees interpreted Exodus 19:6, “You will be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This is the basis for the argument in Mark 7. The Pharisees were criticizing Jesus’ followers for not accepting their teaching on the matter. There is no Torah law that requires washing one’s hands before eating.

It is important to understand that nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus abrogate Torah. There is no room here to counter all the claims to the contrary, claims that usually result from a poor understanding of first-century Judaism and Jesus’ place within it. Jesus did react strongly to additions made to Torah by others, mostly Pharisees and their legal experts. The gospels call these additional, non-Torah rules the “traditions of the elders” (Mark 7:3), that is, rulings made by former Pharisaic sages. According to Mark and Luke, the Pharisees taught that cups, pots, plates, kettles, and even dining couches needed to be ritually purified, again not required by Torah.

The Gospel of Matthew has Jesus reject the Pharisees “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:9). The commandments of men were the traditions of the elders, otherwise known as the “oral” traditions for that is how they were handed down from generation to generation. Jesus accused Pharisees of rejecting God’s actual Torah commandments “in order to set up your tradition” (Mark 7:9). A specific case he referred to was what he considered a violation of God’s commandment to honor one’s father and mother by the Pharisaic restriction of their estate to the Temple rather than to their parents.

Jesus rejected these traditions. But he did not reject Jewish concerns for purity. In fact, in this instance he enhanced them. Jesus flatly denied that food could become ritually impure by being touched with unwashed hands; nothing that goes into a body makes the body impure. According to Torah, it is what comes out of the body that does so: semen, menstrual blood, and the perceived “death emission” from a corpse (an ancient superstition).   But if Jesus denounced the Pharisees for circumventing God’s commandments, why would he then proceed to do the same thing and reject God’s commandments regarding kashrut? The answer is that he did not.

In this passage, Jesus actually extended the notion purity to encompass not only ritual but moral or ethical purity as well. These things, too, come out of a person: “evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and folly. All these evils come out from within and defile a person” (Mark 7:20-23). This approach to Torah is characteristic of Jesus’ other teachings. In Matthew 5 Jesus extended a number of Torah commandments to make it harder for his followers to violate the actual command. To avoid committing adultery, he said, avoid even looking at a woman with lust. To avoid committing murder, do not even get angry with anyone. And so forth. In this way, Jesus sought, like a number of Pharisaic teachers, to build a fence around the Torah. That is, to keep from violating God’s commandments, keep as far away from infringing on them as possible.

Mark’s editorial comment, in a Jewish setting which is patently what this was, meant that foods themselves do not render someone ritually impure. Yes, Jews following Jesus must still eat kosher; God had set aside (Lev. 11) certain foods as forbidden (not ritually impure). There is no evidence that Jesus’ followers gave up kashrut in imitation of Jesus. But according to Jesus the kosher foods they ate could not make them ritually impure, washed hands or not.

Because of the growing Gentile church’s increasing frustration with Torah (though none of the early church fathers used Mark 7 to support their willingness to eat non-kosher), the entire point of Jesus’ teaching in this section is often missed. The focus is not Jesus rejecting Torah. It is Jesus extending the concept of impurity to include not only bodily emissions and corpse contamination but moral and ethical misbehavior. Both can defile a person.

Next time, I will discuss the story of Peter’s vision of the tablecloth full of non-kosher animals he is commanded to eat (Acts 10:9-16). (Interesting that Peter would require such a vision if Jesus had already taught that all foods were now edible for Jews!)