Jesus's Character, Appearance, Status, Jewishness | Middle East And North Africa

JESUS'S CHARACTER AND IDENTITY

Jesus and the Pharisees, a Jewish sect

Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish teacher and healer who lived in the first century A.D. Although Jesus is accepted to have been an actual person, little known about him outside the stories found in the Bible. According to the Bible, he was born in a stable in Bethlehem, near Jerusalem, to a young woman named Mary and a carpenter named Joseph. Little is known of Jesus's childhood or youth. According to the Bible, at age twelve he was taken on a trip to Jerusalem and became separated from his parents for a time. He was finally found in the temple, where he was listening to and questioning Jewish scholars. [Source: Encyclopedia.com]

A cornerstone of the Christian faith is that Jesus is both God and man. Although he mentioned his relationship with God and spoke of God as his “Father,” Jesus insisted on numerous occasions that he was an ordinary man—“the Son of man” — and presented himself as medium through which God delivered his message. In John 14-9, Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the father.”

Professor Eric Meyers told PBS: ““I think Jesus was a teacher, a wise person. He was not a peasant if by peasants you mean someone unlettered and untutored. As a wise man, certainly, Jesus participated in the normal education of a good Jewish home and Jewish upbringing in Nazareth or the region [Source: Eric Meyers, Professor of Religion and Archaeology Duke University, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

Websites and Resources: Jesus and the Historical Jesus Britannica on Jesus britannica.com Jesus-Christ ; PBS Frontline From Jesus to Christ pbs.org ; Life and Ministry of Jesus Christ bible.org ; Jesus Central jesuscentral.com ; Catholic Encyclopedia: Jesus Christ newadvent.org ; Complete Works of Josephus at Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ccel.org ; Christianity BBC on Christianity bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity ; Sacred Texts website sacred-texts.com ; Candida Moss at the Daily Beast Daily Beast ; Christian Answers christiananswers.net ; Bible: Bible Gateway and the New International Version (NIV) of The Bible biblegateway.com ; King James Version of the Bible gutenberg.org/ebooks Biblical History: Bible History Online bible-history.com ; Biblical Archaeology Society biblicalarchaeology.org

Jesus’s Appearance

Jesus is usually depicted with long hair and a beard. Many men in his time wore their hair long and had beards. There are practically no hints given in the Bible as to what he looked like. Jesus was Semitic, which has led some people to conclude that he had darkish skin. Scholars think that Jesus probably did not have long hair because that hair style was typical of Nazarite Jews who had taken a vow not to touch cadavers or drink wine (Jesus did both). Based in the 2000-year-old skull of Jewish man from Israel and hair styles and skin of Jews portrayed in a A.D. 3rd century fresco, Jesus is depicted with dark skin, wiry hair, a short thin beard and thick features.

Professor Joan Taylor of King’s College London devotes a whole book to Jesus’s appearance — “What Did Jesus Look Like?”. “Overall,” she concludes that Jesus was “probably around 166 centimeters (5 feet 5 inches) tall, somewhat slim and muscular, with olive-brown skin, dark brown to black hair, and brown eyes.” Her conclusions are based on skeletal remains of men buried in Judea, where Jesus was from, and from Egypt, whose people had close ties with the residents of Judea and where there exists a lot of funerary art. She recognizes that there was contact between Judea, Europe, the Sudan and Ethiopia, but points out that that Judeans tended to marry only among themselves. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, March 10, 2018]

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: Where Taylor goes further than her predecessors is in using clues about Jesus’ life found in the Gospel stories to deduce how Jesus’ social context and profession affected his looks. None of the writings of the New Testament explicitly describe what Jesus looked like. The most detailed description of his body is found in the “doubting Thomas” scene, in which Jesus refers to the marks of his crucifixion. We occasionally get references to his clothing, but this hardly helps us distinguish him from any other first-century resident of Galilee or Judea. The earliest artistic depictions of Jesus date to at least two centuries after his death.

This is where Taylor turns detective. Using the biblical descriptions of Jesus’ lifestyle, as an itinerant craftsman who spent a great deal of time walking but did not always have a consistent source of nourishment, she concludes that he was likely thin. But we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion (with many artists) that Jesus had a slight build. From the fact that Jesus was a carpenter Taylor observes that Jesus was a manual laborer engaged in physical activity and concludes that he was probably muscular and strong. Taylor actually thinks that the silence about Jesus’ looks says something about his appearance. She points out that certain Biblical figures, like Moses and David, were described in ancient literature in terms that gestured to their good looks and attractiveness. Taylor argues that the silence on the question of Jesus’ appearance suggests that he was not handsome.

There are some difficulties with Taylor’s analysis: the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death by those who, in the majority of cases, had not met Jesus in person themselves. Even if they did describe Jesus’ appearance, how would we know if these descriptions were accurate? An interesting point made in the book is the question of whether or not Jesus was disfigured in any way. Noting that Jesus was a woodworker or craftsman, she points out that it is possible that Jesus had scars from his profession.As Christian Laes has shown in his recent edited volume Disabilities in Roman Antiquity, bodily disfigurement of one kind or another, though rarely considered in relation to Jesus, was almost the norm in the ancient world. Broken arms and legs would not have been set properly and would have caused limps and physical difficulties for the remainder of a person’s life. Those, like Jesus, who performed manual work were especially susceptible to hand and eye injuries.

How do we even know for sure that Jesus is a guy? A scientific investigations into the Turin Shroud published in 2017 revealed the outline of a scrotum on the cloth. If the Shroud is for real, this would appear to supply clear evidence that Jesus was male. Most scholars however believe that the Shroud is a medieval forgery. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, March 26, 2017]

Depiction of Jesus Through The Ages

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: Jesus was not the light-haired blue-eyed icon of European art. The problem isn’t limited to European painters: Willem Dafoe, Robert Powell, and Diogo Morgado have all brought good looks and pale skin tones to modern portraits of the role. Historically speaking, it is likely that the average first-century male from Judea would have had dark hair, brown eyes, and dark skin tone. In addition, physical anthropologists estimate that the average male from the region is likely to have been around 5’ 4” and 136 pounds. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, September 25, 2016]

The earliest Christian artwork from third and fourth century Syria and Rome shows Jesus as youthful, clean-shaven, and holding a staff. In many of these he just looks like a traditional Roman male. All of these images are stylized depictions of what certain kinds of men (e.g. philosophers) looked like so they don’t tell us much about Jesus himself. An apocryphal story tells us that Pontius Pilate painted a portrait of Jesus but this almost certainly didn’t happen and we don’t have the portrait even if it did. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, November 15, 2020]

Writing in the third century, the church father Origen seems to have thought that Jesus was ugly. He writes that Isaiah prophesied that Jesus would arrive “not in comeliness of form, nor in any surpassing beauty.” Origen, like the second century authors Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, were using Isaiah 53:2-3 which predicted that the Messiah would be unattractive so that people not “desire him.” In other words, he was a bit funny-looking because an attractive Messiah might be distracting to his followers. Other Christian writers like Clement of Alexandria gave, Walsh said, “the ancient equivalent of ‘he’s got a great personality’” argument. At best, outgoing President Trump might say, he’s a 4.

A Christian addition to the writings of the first century Jewish historian Josephus provides a much fuller description. The fragmentary insertion reads that Jesus “was a man of simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, short growth, three cubits tall (four and a half feet), hunchbacked, with a long face, a long nose, eyebrows meeting above the nose, so that the spectators could take fright, with scanty hair… and an underdeveloped beard.”

For a time it was not uncommon to depict Jesus as unattractive, perhaps in part to deter female followers from developing a crush on him or have sexual desires. Over time, however, people grew dissatisfied with the idea of an ugly Jesus. A 15th century version of an apocryphal text called the Letter of Lentulus, which was attributed to a member of the Roman senate, changes the description of Jesus quite radically. Jesus is described as having “ripe hazel-nut” hair that falls into something like a curly bob, he has clear skin “without wrinkle or spot,” and “abundant” facial hair with a perfectly shaped nose and mouth, bright eyes, and beautiful hands and arms.

Now-beautiful Jesus got ripped during the 19th and 20th century when the frail and emaciated Jesus of the crucifixion began to fall from favor. Dr. Robyn Faith Walsh, assistant professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at University of Miami links this shift to the rise of Muscular Christianity and the idea that industrialization was making life too easy on people. Muscular Christianity introduced sports and physical fitness into churches and society at large through the YMCA. This lays the groundwork for modern cinematic depictions of Jesus in which Jesus is pretty attractive. To be sure, movies have a tendency to make everyone a lot better looking, but when Portuguese actor Diogo Morgado played the Galilean preacher in 2014 #HotJesus started trending on twitter.

Jesus as a Jew

Jesus was not a Christian, He was not born a Christian, he didn't live as a Christian and he didn’t practice the faith. The term Christianity didn’t even exist in his time. Jesus was a Jew. This basic presumption gleaned in part from excavations across Galilee have led to a significant shift in scholarly opinion about who Jesus Was. Jesus' identity cannot be understood apart from his Jewishness. [Source: BBC]

Professor Shaye I.D. Cohen told PBS: “Was Jesus a Jew? Of course, Jesus was a Jew. He was born of a Jewish mother, in Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates, colleagues, disciples, all of them were Jews. He regularly worshipped in Jewish communal worship, what we call synagogues. He preached from Jewish text, from the Bible. He celebrated the Jewish festivals. He went on pilgrimage to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem where he was under the authority of priests.... He lived, was born, lived, died, taught as a Jew. This is obvious to any casual reader of the gospel text. What's striking is not so much that he was a Jew but that the gospels make no pretense that he wasn't. The gospels have no sense yet that Jesus was anything other than a Jew. [Source: Shaye I.D. Cohen, Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Frontline, PBS, April 1998]

“The gospels don't even have a sense that he came to found a new religion, an idea completely foreign to all the gospel text, and completely foreign to Paul. That is an idea which comes about only later. So, to say that he was a Jew is saying a truism, is simply stating an idea that is so obvious on the face of it, one wonders it even needs to be said. But, of course, it does need to be said because we all know what happens later in the story, where it turns out that Christianity becomes something other than Judaism and as a result, Jesus in retrospect is seen not as a Jew, but as something else, as a founder of Christianity. But, of course, he was a Jew.”

Jesus Was a Good Jew

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Jesus Exhortation to the Apostles by James Tissot
Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: Jesus of Nazareth is history’s most famous carpenter, but he is also, according to one poll history’s most famous Jew. He was born to Jewish parents, was circumcised, went to (the) Temple, attended synagogue, and read the Torah. See, he’s a first century middle eastern Jew. Nearly two thousand years of Christianity, however, have presented Jesus as something else: as a religious innovator who was not just in conflict with Jewish authorities, but was actively trying to overturn and replace Judaism. A new book seeks to challenge this misunderstanding and argues that Jesus wasn’t just ethnically Jewish, he was an active supporter of Jewish religious laws. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, August 22, 2021]

“In his recently published book “Jesus And the Forces of Death”, Dr. Matthew Thiessen, an associate professor of religious studies at McMaster University, looks at Jesus afresh. “It’s so easy for most Christians to think of Jesus as the first Christian. Which for many Christians today means not Jewish,” Thiessen told The Daily Beast, “but when Jesus is understood as Christian, the gospel narratives read as though Jesus rejects Judaism and condemns Jews. Jesus becomes anti-Jewish.” The legacy of an anti-Jewish Jesus has been felt throughout history and continues even today but that could change. “When we realize that Jesus was Jewish,” Thiessen told me “and the gospel writers wanted to stress Jesus’s Jewishness, then we read stories of Jesus’s interactions with the Pharisees or Sadducees as inner-Jewish conversations, not some sort of Christian rejection or condemnation of Judaism and the Jewish law.”

“Thiessen isn’t the first to make this point. He builds here on the important work of scholars like Geza Vermes, Paula Fredriksen, Amy-Jill Levine, and Joel Marcus all of whom picture Jesus as thoroughly embedded in ancient Judaism. What’s distinctive about Thiessen’s argument is the way that he reconsiders debates and interactions between Jesus and other Jewish religious leaders in the Gospels....That Jesus comes into conflict and disagreements with scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees does not make him not Jewish. Disagreement was incredibly common among ancient Jewish ritual experts and almost seems to be the hallmark of rabbinic literature. It is later Christians, rather than first century Jews, who seek to exclude others based on interpretive disagreements.

Erasing Jesus’s Jewishness

Ariel Sabar wrote in Smithsonian magazine: A long line of (mostly Christian) theologians had sought to reinterpret the New Testament in a way that stripped Jesus of his Judaism. Depending on the writer, Jesus was either a man who, though nominally Jewish, wandered freely among pagans; or he was a secular gadfly inspired less by the Hebrews than by the Greek Cynics, shaggy-haired loners who roamed the countryside irritating the powers that be with biting one-liners. [Source:Ariel Sabar, Smithsonian magazine, January-February 2016]

“Archaeology showed once and for all that the people and places closest to Jesus were deeply Jewish. To judge by the bone finds, Galileans didn’t eat pig. To judge by the limestone jugs, they stored liquids in vessels that complied with the strictest Jewish purity laws. Their coins lacked likenesses of humans or animals, in keeping with the Second Commandment against graven images. Craig A. Evans, an eminent New Testament scholar at Houston Baptist University, says that the “most important gain” of the last few decades of historical Jesus research is a “renewed appreciation of the Judaic character of Jesus, his mission and his world.”

“The discoveries solidified the portrait of Jesus as a Jew preaching to other Jews. He was not out to convert gentiles; the movement he launched would take that turn after his death, as it became clear that most Jews didn’t accept him as the messiah. Nor was he a loner philosopher with an affinity for the Greek Cynics. Instead, his life drew on — or at least repurposed — bedrock Jewish traditions of prophecy, messianism and social justice critique as old as the Hebrew Bible.

Jaroslav Pelikan wrote:“No one can ignore the subsequent history of the relation between the people to whom Jesus belonged and the people who belong to Jesus. That relation runs like a red line through much of the history of culture, and after the events of the twentieth century we have a unique responsibility to be aware of it as we study the history of the images of Jesus through the centuries.

“The beginnings of this de-Judaization of Christianity are visible already within the New Testament. With Paul's decision to "turn to the Gentiles" (Acts 13:46) after having begun his preaching in the synagogues, and then with the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70, the Christian movement increasingly became Gentile rather than Jewish in its constituency and outlook. In that setting the Jewish elements of the life of Jesus had to be explained to Gentile readers (for example, John 2:6). The Acts of the Apostles can be read as a tale of two cities: its first chapter, with Jesus and his disciples after the resurrection, is set in Jerusalem; but its last chapter reaches its climax with the final voyage of the apostle Paul, in the simple but pulse-quickening sentence "And so we came to Rome." [Source: Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries”, Yale University Press 1997 pp. 9-23, Frontline, PBS, April 1998]

Jesus' Social Class

Jesus lived at at time when Jewish peasants and the lower classes lived a precarious existence and the Romans and the Jewish upper class exploited the land and the people. The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was a significance economic force and the priestly class that controlled it was very powerful. [Source: Dale B. Martin, New York Times, August 5, 2013]

Professor Harold W. Attridge told PBS: “Recent discussions of Jesus' social class try to locate him within the social structures of Mediterranean society generally, or Galilean society, in the first century. And there seems to be a debate among many contemporary scholars of Jesus as to whether he was really a peasant or... somewhat higher in the socio-economic strata. We know in general he was low class, by the standards of the Roman imperial aristocracy or even of the ruling class of Palestine, the Herodian client kings. [Source: Harold W. Attridge, The Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament Yale Divinity School, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“But he may have been an artisan. He doesn't seem to have been a peasant in the strict sense, someone who was working the land for a living. He was close, however, to peasant society; all of the images in his parables and his aphorisms are firmly rooted in peasant society and call upon everyday things like a sower, or sowing seed. But they also call upon images of land owners and relationships between slave owners and slaves, masters and servants. So Jesus seems to have been aware of that level of the socio-economic mix. And he may well have stood in some relationship to it. So an artisan of some sort is probably the best way of describing him.

Holland Lee Hendrix told PBS: ““I would locate Jesus more in the middle-class than in the lower middle-class, than in the lower class of the period. Certainly he would have been multi-lingual, and that causes us to rethink the entire literary heritage and rhetorical heritage that Jesus would have brought to his ministry. So that the discoveries at Sepphoris and the ongoing excavations really force us to recast the mold, if you will, out of which Jesus grows. It's a much more sophisticated and complex mold than had been previously thought.”[Source: Holland Lee Hendrix, President of the Faculty Union Theological Seminary, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

Jesus, the Poor Village Carpenter: A Cliche

Professor John Dominic Crossan told PBS: ““Tradition has it that Jesus was a carpenter. The term is in Greek "tectone" in Mark's gospel..., "artisan" would be maybe our best translation. But in the pecking order of peasant society, a peasant artisan is lower than a peasant farmer. It probably means usually a peasant farmer who had been pushed off the land and has to make his living, if he can, by laboring. The difficulty for us in hearing a term like "carpenter" is that we immediately think of a highly skilled worker, and at least in North America, in the middle class, making a very high income. As soon as we take that into the ancient world we are totally lost. Because, first of all, there was no middle class in the ancient world. There were the haves and the have nots, to put it very simply. And in the anthropology of peasant societies, to say that somebody is an artisan or a carpenter is not to compliment them. It is to say that they are lower in the pecking order than a peasant farmer. So it's from the anthropologists that I take the idea that a peasant artisan is not a compliment. [Source: John Dominic Crossan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies DePaul University, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

Recent archaeological findings challenge the image of Jesus as a peasant preaching in a pastoral backwater. Holland Lee Hendrix told PBS: “The recent discoveries at Sepphoris are extremely controversial..., but the findings really are requiring us completely to rethink Jesus' socio-economic setting, because we really had thought of Jesus as being really out in the hinterland, utterly removed from urban life.... What the excavations at Sepphoris suggest is that Jesus was quite proximate to a thriving and sophisticated urban environment that would have brought with it all of the diversity of the Roman Empire and would have required, just to get on, as the price of doing business, a level of sophistication that one would not have thought characteristic of Jesus, the humble carpenter.... [Source: Holland Lee Hendrix, President of the Faculty Union Theological Seminary, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

Eliazear Segal of the University of Calgary wrote: “ho is not familiar with the description of Jesus as "a poor carpenter?" Taken by itself this assertion sounds perfectly obvious and harmless. Beneath the surface however lurk some troubling implications. The first problem that comes to mind is that the New Testament itself does not indicate anywhere that Jesus was regarded as poor. In the context of Galilean Jewish society at his time — a community composed largely of small olive and grape farmers and seasonal field workers — a carpenter would have been considered a very comfortable and mobile profession.” [Source: Eliazear Segal of the University of Calgary, Calgary Jewish Star /=]

“The fact that such an unfounded "aggadic" detail is added to the traditional Christian perception of their founder need not trouble us of itself. It certainly is in keeping with other documented aspects of Jesus' teaching which emphasize his appeal to the lower classes and social outcasts. But here too we must recognize that, from the perspective of Jewish society, "outcasts" were not necessarily poor. Quite the contrary, Jesus seems to have been antagonizing his contemporaries largely because of his over-familiarity with the wealthy tax farmers ("publicans"), Jewish collaborators with the Roman occupiers who became rich off the sufferings of their countrymen. /=\

“Jesus' alleged poverty takes on more disturbing overtones when used in such contexts as, "the learned Jewish scribes did not wish to listen to the preaching of this poor carpenter from Galilee." The implication is clearly that a Pharisaic scholar could not have been a carpenter, poor or otherwise. Aside from the fact that this is simply untrue — the Jewish sages at this period in history were normally craftsmen and field workers, and Jewish law then prohibited accepting payment for religious instruction — one wonders what the authors of such statements imagined that the Pharisees did do for their livings. /=\

“From my own experiences with students, I have often discovered that beneath such innocent-sounding sentences is likely to be lurking a classic medieval anti-Semitic stereotype. The Pharisees, according to the unarticulated presumptions of otherwise well-meaning Christians, must have been wealthy bankers, business executives, or (Lord preserve us!) university professors!” /=\

Jesus as a Teacher and Religious Leader

Jesus has been viewed as healer, moral teacher, reformer, apocalyptic preacher, radical, revolutionary, and, ultimately and most importantly, the Messiah. Jesus lived during a time when, historian say, wandering charismatics and faith healers were relatively common place. Kristin Romey wrote in National Geographic: “ Scholars who understand him in strictly human terms—as a religious reformer, or a social revolutionary, or an apocalyptic prophet, or even a Jewish jihadist—plumb the political, economic, and social currents of first-century Galilee to discover the forces that gave rise to the man and his mission.” [Source: Kristin Romey, National Geographic, November 28, 2017 ^|^]

After the completion of the fast Jesus took up the role of an itinerant rabbi and wandered the countryside preaching. . People began calling him the Messiah and he began drawing people to him. Jesus did the bulk of his teachings in the fishing towns and farming communities in Galilee, a region named after the Sea of Galilee, which today is on the border of Israel and Syria.

The center of Jesus's early teaching was Caprnaum, the hometown of Simon Peter, one of his first disciples. Jesus preached in the synagogue, taught by the seaside, and healed in the home, but failed to win any converts in Capernaum, which he said would be "thrust down to hell."

Jesus became a major religious figure after the death of John the Baptist. Most the Gospels refers to the three year period between Jesus' baptism around A.D. 27 and his death around A.D. 30. From what we can tell Jesus began preaching in A.D. 28, about the same time that John the Baptist was arrested and beheaded.

Jesus reportedly inspired many people and won many converts with his teaching. Some scholars have theorized that large numbers of people were attracted by his message because Judea was in such a state of chaos and social unrest. Even so Jesus had very little impact on the history his time. He was one of many orators who was critical of the materialism and the decadence of the Romans and Jerusalemites.

Recent archaeological excavations in Galilee area have indicated the towns where Jesus preached were much larger than previously thought. A modest house found in Capernaum in the late 1990s offered hints of being Peter’s residence and possibly the center of Jesus’s teachings.

Was Jesus Literate?

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Teaching the multitudes
The question of whether or not Jesus could read and write is actively debated among scholars even today. Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: For Christians it seems almost obvious that Jesus was literate. After all, an incarnate deity who can raise people from the dead, walk on water, and multiply foodstuffs could surely do something more pedestrian like read and write. But the Bible itself is not as clear on the matter and recent research suggests that things aren’t as straightforward as they seem.

The Gospels present conflicting evidence on the subject. In a story in both Mark and Matthew Jesus is rejected as a synagogue teacher in Nazareth by the people from his home town because they know that he isn’t qualified for the task. Their rejection hinges on the fact that he (or in Matthew’s version, his father Joseph) was a carpenter and, thus, wasn’t from the educated class that would have learned these skills. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, September 15, 2019

In Luke 4:16-20, which is based on the Gospel of Mark, Luke sharpens the portrait of Jesus as educated reader. A scroll is handed to Jesus; Jesus is able to locate the specific passage, reads it, and returns the scroll. In other words, Luke is making the point that Jesus can do more than simply repeat a story he knows verbatim (anyone who remembers learning to read or has taught their own child to read knows that this can be done.) He can actually read. Interestingly, Luke makes sure to omit the reference to carpenters, thereby removing evidence that would raise the question "how did he learn to read?"

Chris Keith, research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Mary’s University, London and author of several books on the subject including Jesus’ Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee told me that, “What we have in the first-century tradition is a variety of opinions on whether Jesus was the kind of teacher who could read in the synagogue.” John 7:15 offers evidence of this kind of confusion when the audience ask themselves, “How does this man know letters since he was never taught?”

Jesus’s Battle With Ritual Purity

In his book “Jesus And the Forces of Death”, Dr. Matthew Thiessen, Candida Moss writes in the Daily Beast, is focused on ritual purity regulations or what he calls the “forces of death.” In Jewish law ritual purity regulations govern certain bodily processes (childbirth, menstruation, abnormal genital discharge, skin abnormalities, and death) that both make you impure and are also contagious. To modern Christians, he writes, these seem alien and arcane, but if you want to understand Jesus you have to saddle up because we cannot understand Jesus unless we understand how “first century Jews constructed their world.” [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, August 22, 2021]

“This is of particular importance because — whatever else Jesus says about his religious rivals or Jewish laws — he encounters and interacts with people who were ritually impure in the Gospels. One of the first miracles in the Gospel of Mark, for example, involves a person who has a skin condition (it’s called lepra in Greek but it’s not leprosy). The condition makes the man ritually impure. Jesus touches him and the lepra is gone. Some scholars argue that the very fact that Jesus touched the man and risked becoming impure himself is a sign that he doesn’t care about impurity. Thiessen disagrees. The whole story, he said, is about ritual cleaning: “the man begs Jesus to purify him and Jesus tells him ‘Be pure.’ He then even tells the man to follow the laws required in Leviticus 13-–14 to remove the residual ritual impurity.”

“We see exactly the same dynamic at work in other stories, for example in Mark 5 when Jesus raises the tween daughter of a man called Jairus. Once again Jesus touches a ritually impure body — in this case a corpse — and, of course, the girl comes back to life. Thiessen argues that by raising the girl back to life Jesus is “removing the source of her ritual impurity.” In fact, in all cases when Jesus encounters someone who is ritually impure that person walks away purified. Christians usually read these stories as being about the forgiveness of sins, but Thiessen argues that Jesus’s ministry is actually a “purification mission: removing moral impurities or sins, ritual impurities, and impure spirits — an apocalyptic battle between the forces of holiness and the forces of impurity, in which holiness destroys impurity and death.” The problem is squarely located in the enemy camp rather than the conscience of the individual: impurity and holiness are fighting for supremacy.

“Given that impurity is linked to death, Thiessen told me, Jesus’s constant battle with the forces of death anticipates his own resurrection at the end of the Gospels. These “early skirmishes with death forces foretell his later encounter with death itself in the cross.” It’s like an action movie or video game in which the hero picks off the henchmen early on, only to face the villain for a final showdown at the end. And just like any modern action movie, there must be a moment when it seems like the hero isn’t going to make it.

“Thiessen’s reading is compelling and does a lot to position Jesus as an authentically Jewish interpreter of ritual purity regulations....His interpretation does raise some questions for modern Christians about the role of Jewish purity laws in their lives. If Jesus is reinforcing the idea that impurity existed and needs to be avoided, you might wonder, then do Christians need to take those practices more seriously? This would have troubling consequences for women, whose bodies are habitually associated with impurity (though, spoiler, Christianity does the same thing and associates women’s bodies with sin). Thiessen told me that he doesn’t pretend to be a theologian or ethicist but that it’s clear in the Gospel of Luke that these laws aren’t supposed to apply to non-Jews anyway. “Since almost all Christians today are non-Jews, it’s become a moot point, but it’s not because Jesus rejected these laws himself!”

Does Jesus Avoids Cities?

Professor Shaye I.D. Cohen told PBS: “According to the gospel accounts, Jesus himself comes from a very small town, a town that's virtually otherwise unknown, Nazareth in Galilee, and seems to spend his entire career, as it were, talking to Jews in these small towns or small villages in the Galilee. There are two substantial settlements in the Galilee, Sepphoris and Tiberius, we might call them cities, although that's perhaps a slight loose use of the term.... But Jesus avoids them. That's not where he goes. That's not where he has his followers and it's not where he feels welcome. He's much more comfortable dealing with the villages and the small towns, what we might call the peasants of the society. [Source: Shaye I.D. Cohen, Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Frontline, PBS, April 1998]

“And the first time he goes to the big cities of course is when he gets to Jerusalem, at the very end of his ministry or at the very end of his career, with of course, very unfortunate consequences. So primarily then he seems to be a rural phenomenon, or representative of peasant piety or peasant ways, and not the ways of the cities.

“In antiquity there often was social tension between town and country. Not quite the same tension that we have today, where the distinction between town and country is very distinct.... In antiquity, the division was not at all so clear, because people in towns also were agricultural. You walked outside the town walls, walked 15 feet, and there you were in the countryside. So the social contrasts in some respects were much less than they are for us. But in other respects they were a lot more pointed. There was a sense that the cities or the large towns is where the large landowners lived, where the tax collectors lived, where the government officials were, where the judges were, where any outpost of culture will have been found.There was a real cultural and social cleavage then between the peasant ways of the countryside and the towns. This can be seen not just in Judea, but really throughout the Roman Empire. And perhaps then, Jesus and his followers simply were not town types. This is not their culture, not their society, not their ways. They're more comfortable with living with their own kind out in the countryside.”

Professor Paula Fredriksen told PBS: “Sepphoris... was moneyed. It was the center of trade for the area. And if Jesus were growing up in Nazareth, which is just a walk for somebody healthy... I think it's something like three miles. If he were a carpenter, or some kind of craftsman, he might have done work in Sepphoris....What does this imply about Jesus' social class? It's hard to know. I think that since he's depicted as a pious Jew, and since pious Jews have a six-day work week, and since on the seventh day they have particular obligations that don't allow them to take long journeys, (on the Sabbath you really are supposed to rest. You're not supposed to hike into Sepphoris and maybe, catch a play in the afternoon, or something like that.) I don't think that culturally, Sepphoris would have made all that much difference. I think as most people in his period who are not landed gentry, Jesus would have worked for a living for six days a week and rested on the Sabbath.” [Source: Paula Fredriksen, William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture, Boston University, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

Trilingual Jesus and SepphorisProfessor

Eric Meyers told PBS: “Well, the gospels mention that Jesus and his father were craftspeople, craftsmen. It's very likely that Jesus actually worked in Sepphoris in the time of Antipas' activity there. Of that there's probably no doubt. It's four kilometers away. It's probably the place where all teenagers would have worked, and all the people from Nazareth were crowding into this city being created out of the mound of Sepphoris. So a lot of craftsmen were at work in building up the city Sepphoris. If its high point was a hundred years or 200 years later, like all good Middle Eastern oriental cities there was an agricultural component to Sepphoris. You have a huge activity in the fields beside it. [Source: Eric Meyers, Professor of Religion and Archaeology Duke University, Frontline, PBS, April 1998]

“You have satellite villages and satellite industries that attach to the area around the municipal area and territory of Sepphoris. Sepphoris was not just the center, not just a city with houses and with waterworks and with things like that, but it had satellite settlements around. Nazareth to all intents and purposes was a satellite village attached to the region or municipality of Sepphoris. So from this point of view the emerging transformation of this place Sepphoris into a city, I think, affected the entire region around it all the way over to the territory and city of Tiberius, which was built in 17, or begun to be constructed in the year 17. That leaves Jesus as stepping in both worlds, stepping in the world of the city that is being created, and as well participating in the agricultural kinds of activities that all people in Palestine in the first century would have participated in.”

Jesus “was conversant in Greek to the extent that anybody living in this open territory of greater Sepphoris or Tiberius or lower Galilee would have been. You couldn't deal and wheel, either in the workplace or in the market, without knowing a good deal of Greek. And I can hardly imagine anybody worth their salt who wouldn't know some Greek. But Jesus was trilingual. Jesus participated in both the Aramaic and Hebrew culture and its literatures as well as the kind of Hellenistic Greek that he needed to do his business in his travel and his ministry.”

Jesus a Pioneer Feminist? Another Cliche

Christ and the Woman Taken Adultery by Rembrandt

Eliazear Segal of the University of Calgary wrote: “ A similar cliché that I have been encountering quite frequently (and not only from students) has it that "The Pharisees were shocked that Jesus spent so much time in the company of women." Once again the implication is that "real" Jews were hostile to women and that Jesus thereby takes on the appearance of a pioneer feminist. [Source: Eliazear Segal of the University of Calgary, Calgary Jewish Star /=]

“Here again the least of the difficulties with this thesis is the fact that it is not supported by any New Testament sources. Christian scripture is not reticent about listing Jewish objections to Jesus, and had this been an issue it would undoubtedly have been mentioned somewhere. It is evident that what we have here is another instance of twisting the evidence in order to present Judaism in a disadvantageous light. The truth is of course that neither Jesus nor the Pharisees seem to present a very consistent picture as regards their attitudes to women. In either case one can easily produce texts or interpretations to support both sexist and egalitarian readings. /=\

“The above instances should alert us to how deep and complex are the roots of Christian anti-Semitism--and I do not wish to imply by any means that equivalent factors do not colour our own attitudes towards Christianity. Even with the most sincere of intentions, and even with the progress which has been made, it will prove very difficult to eradicate the unconscious strata of anti-Jewish feeling that have grown up over the centuries. /=\

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, Schnorr von Carolsfeld Bible in Bildern, 1860

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Christian Origins sourcebooks.fordham.edu “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File); “ Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions” edited by R.C. Zaehner (Barnes & Noble Books, 1959); King James Version of the Bible, gutenberg.org; New International Version (NIV) of The Bible, biblegateway.com; Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ccel.org , Frontline, PBS, “Encyclopedia of the World Cultures” edited by David Levinson (G.K. Hall & Company, 1994); Wikipedia, BBC, National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Live Science, Encyclopedia.com, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, Business Insider, AFP, Library of Congress, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated March 2024