Jesus and Purity: An Ongoing Debate

Abstract

The importance of purity legislation and the ‘separateness’ that it implied within Second Temple Judaism confirms the significance of the renewed interest in purity issues in ‘historical Jesus’ research. The relevance of John the Baptist's ‘baptism’ is less clear than at first appears. But that Jesus himself shared at least some purity priorities is implied by Mark 1.44 and by his ‘cleansing of the Temple’. Yet he also sat loose to the purity halakhoth regarding clean and unclean and table-fellowship, which suggests that Jesus did not regard such concerns as central to the definition of Israel and its practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.