a personal style of teaching, was his doctrine itself a novelty? Did he reject or contradict any of the basic beliefs of Judaism? Discounting passages which represent him as speaking lightly of certain non-scriptural customs held to be highly important by other teachers, or as interpreting a biblical verse in a sense different from that habitually ascribed to it, there still remains one crucial text apparently showing him ‘at variance with his inherited Judaism’,90 namely, that concerned with clean and unclean food.91
The argument originates in a complaint lodged by Pharisees that the disciples of Jesus fail to conform to the tradition of ritual hand-washing before meals, the implication being that dirty hands can render food unclean and so cause defilement. Judging from his reply in Matthew, Jesus thought the whole matter of external cleanness trivial compared with moral uncleanness.
‘Whatever goes in by the mouth passes into the stomach and so is discharged into the drain. But what comes out of the mouth has its origins in the heart; and that is what defiles a man. Wicked thoughts, murder, adultery . . . perjury, slander . . .’92
In Mark, however, the text is so modified that it is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that Jesus rejected the basic Jewish dietary law.
‘Do you not see that nothing that goes from outside into a man can defile him, because it does not enter into his heart but into his stomach, and so passes out into the drain?’ Thus he declared all foods clean.93
But if the disciples understood Jesus’ words in this sense, why did they, and especially Peter, who put the question to Jesus and was answered by him, react so strongly against the possibility of eating forbidden, non-kosher food? For when the chief of the apostles is ordered in a vision by a heavenly voice to eat every kind of meat, instead of exclaiming, ‘Of course, I now remember the words of the lord!’ he expresses shock and indignation.94 Paul, too, might have been expected to have appealed to his lord’s recommendation when he himself set aside Jewish ceremonial laws.95
In the circumstances it is reasonable to ask whether a phrase meaningful in Aramaic can be discerned beneath the Marcan Greek gloss, ‘Thus he declared all foods clean’ (literally, ‘purifying all foods’). It has already been suggested that the word ‘food’ is employed metaphorically for ‘excrement’,96 but to this it should be added that a possible polite term for latrine, ‘the place’ (dukha), might invite a pun on the verb ‘to be clean’ (dekha): ‘. . . it does not enter into his heart but into his stomach, and so passes out into “the place” where all excrement “is purged away” . . .’ This hypothetical exegesis is indirectly supported by the oldest available Semitic version of Mark, the so-called Sinaitic recension of the Syriac Gospel. Sensing, as it were, the play on words underlying the Greek text, the translator replaces ‘drain’ with the euphemism ‘purge’ and renders the phrase: ‘. . . it goes into his belly and is cast into the purge which purges away all food.’97
If this interpretation is accepted, the one apparent doctrinal conflict between Jesus and Judaism is due to a deliberate twist given to a probably genuine saying of Jesus by the redactor of the Greek Mark. By that time Gentile Christianity needed and welcomed a formal ratification in the teaching of the Gospel of the Church’s abandonment of the laws and customs of Israel.98
Attitudes and Reactions to Jesus
Exorcist, healer and itinerant preacher, Jesus is portrayed by the Synoptists as a person towards whom his contemporaries rarely, if ever, remained indifferent. Their reactions were by no means always favourable, but on the other hand, they were not generally hostile either.
A small group of devotees, simple Galilean folk, joined him from the beginning – ‘after John had been arrested’99 – and became his travelling companions. The Twelve, an even smaller group, were later chosen to be his disciples par excellence.100 So impressed were they by his powerful personality that they left everything to follow him – work, possessions and family.101 Yet, heroic though they may have become after Jesus’ death, consecrating themselves wholeheartedly to the continuation of his lifework, they are not depicted in the Gospels as particularly quick at understanding the mind and preaching of their master while he was alive,102 or brave at the time of his ordeal, when they all deserted him.103 They remained in hiding, in fact, for nearly two months before their first reported reappearance in public.104
Among the Galilean crowds Jesus was a great success. Large groups formed and accompanied him when the rumour went round that he was on his way to heal the sick,105 or simply when he travelled.106 He preached to multitudes in Capernaum and by the lake-side,107 and soon acquired such a renown that he ‘could no longer show himself in any town, but stayed outside in the open country’.108
Although his fame apparently also aroused curiosity outside Galilee,109 he is not described as a welcome visitor in non-Jewish areas. The inhabitants of Gerasa requested him to leave their country,110 and as a Jew travelling to Jerusalem he is represented as a persona non grata in Samaria.111 As for Judea, only two cities are said by the Synoptic Gospels – which allude to no more than one brief journey to the southern province – to have surrounded Jesus with great numbers: Jericho112 and Jerusalem. In two out of three Marcan passages, however, the Jerusalem multitude is found in the precincts of the Temple, i.e. a place where immediately before Passover large groups of people would have gathered irrespective of whether Jesus was there or not.113 Mark’s third story, that of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, tells of ‘many’ carpeting the road with their cloaks,114 and the Matthean parallel refers to ‘crowds of people’.115 Luke, on the other hand, is positive, and this time presumably correct, in attributing the entire happy and noisy welcome, not to the Jerusalem crowd, but to ‘the whole company of his disciples’.116 Whichever way this story is interpreted, the evangelists clearly convey the impression that the popularity of Jesus in Judea and Jerusalem did not match that which he enjoyed in his own country.
Jesus and John the Baptist
The true relationship between Jesus and his associates, and the company led by John the Baptist, is more difficult to determine. The aim of the Gospel writers was, no doubt, to give an impression of friendship and mutual esteem, but their attempts smack of superficiality and closer scrutiny of the admittedly fragmentary evidence suggests that, at least on the level of their respective disciples, sentiments of rivalry between the two groups were not absent.
That Jesus went to be baptized by John is enough to prove the Baptist’s initial impact on him. Mark has little further to say on the matter except to draw a distinction between the two religious circles,117 and to report the curious belief, shared by the Tetrarch Herod and others, that Jesus was a kind of reincarnation of John, a John redivivus.118 Together with the other Synoptists, he also relates a polemic between Jesus and the chief priests, lawyers and elders regarding the origin, divine or human, of John’s baptism in which neither party openly discloses its mind.119
Matthew and Luke, in contrast to Mark, put into words John’s feelings towards Jesus, as well as those of Jesus towards the Baptist. At their first encounter, according to these two evangelists, John recognizes Jesus’ superiority.120 Later, when he is imprisoned, he is depicted as having despatched two of his pupils to ask for formal admission from Jesus that he was ‘the one who is to come’, or that some other person was still to be expected.121 Jesus, busy with healing, was unwilling to give a straight reply and his return message takes the form of a free quotation from various verses of Isaiah, all announcing cure and consolation.122
Jesus, for his part, proclaims John as the greatest in the long series of Israelite prophets, the one
