Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

But there is a text that sharpens the question of Jesus’ relationship to the Torah still further. In Mark 7:15 we find a saying of Jesus that really does give the impression that here an important part of the Torah, namely, the whole of the laws regarding what is clean and what is unclean, is being declared invalid. It reads, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” The Lutheran theologian Ernst Käsemann (1906–1998) commented on this passage: “The man who denies that impurity from external sources can penetrate into man’s essential being is striking at the presuppositions and the plain verbal sense of the Torah and at the authority of Moses himself. Over and above that, he is striking at the presuppositions of the whole classical conception of cultus with its sacrificial and expiatory system.”³⁴ He concludes from this that a Jew who speaks this way “has cut himself off from the community of Judaism”—or else he is the Messiah and brings “the Messianic Torah.”³⁵ Against this, of course, one must point out that there is no such thing as a separate “Messianic Torah” in Judaism. The Messiah is the model of fulfilling the Torah of Moses. He serves it. He interprets it. He sees to it that it is obeyed everywhere, but he does not promulgate a Torah of his own.³⁶ Of the alternatives Käsemann proposes, then, only one is possible: Jesus had “cut himself off from the community of Judaism.” But did he really? Does what Jesus says in Mark 7:15 permit that conclusion? Let us look more closely!

Mark (or the tradition Mark used) locates the logion in this context: some Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem observe that Jesus’ disciples do not ritually wash their hands before eating and thus also make the food they eat unclean. The disciples do not obey the prescriptions regarding ritual cleanness established by the community of the Pharisees. The purpose of those prescriptions was to impose the priestly Torah of clean and unclean on the whole nation. All Israel is to be a “priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exod 19:6). It is possible that in such a situation Jesus defended his disciples with the saying found in Mark 7:15.

But we can imagine other situations in which Jesus might have spoken these words. He often ate with people who most certainly did not keep the Pharisaic rules of cleanness. Consider, for example, his eating with “toll collectors and sinners” (Mark 2:15). Probably there was little regard for ritual questions of cleanness and uncleanness in such circles. In the eyes of the Pharisees, or of people who lived according to the Pharisaic interpretation of the Law, Jesus made himself unclean by entering into such a table community and thus exposed himself to hostile attacks. The saying could come out of a context like that as well. In that case it is not a fundamental rejection of the Torah of cleanness and uncleanness but subordinates that aspect of Torah to the love commandment and the proclamation of the reign of God.

But there is a third possibility that seems to me by far the most probable.³⁷ We have already seen, again and again, that particular texts in the gospels are best explained in terms of the unstable itinerant lives of Jesus and his disciples. If the disciples had been traveling all day and in the evening could be happy to be received into a house and given something to eat, they would scarcely have inquired whether the food corresponded to the Pharisaic laws for cleanness. Jesus could have legitimated such an attitude on their part with the saying in Mark 7:15. In favor of that, in any case, is his saying, “eat what is set before you” in the mission discourse (Luke 10:8). We might add: “eat what is set before you without asking if it is clean or unclean.” In any case, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas connected Jesus’ saying about “clean and unclean” with the mission discourse (GThom 14). If Mark 7:15 originated in the itinerant existence of Jesus and his disciples, it is not meant to reject the Torah of clean and unclean but rather, as we have seen in the cases of the third and fourth commandments, to set the proclamation of the reign of God ahead of every other law.

Certainly we must admit that Mark 7:15, seen by itself, gives no hint of a concrete situation; it is formulated in basic terms and absolutely: what comes from without cannot make one unclean. Only what comes out of a person makes her or him unclean—the evil in the heart. But was Jesus, in fact, not abrogating the whole Torah of cleanness and uncleanness in Scripture when he said that?