Bible Study for Amateurs #68 – Elizabeth Shively’s “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,” part 2

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben – the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode sixty-eight of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Elizabeth Shively’s ‘Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,’ part 2.”¹

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“If you are willing, you can make me clean,” a man says to Jesus in Mark 1:40 (NRSVue).² Readers of translations like the ESV, KJV, NIV and a host of others will encounter a “leper,” a transliteration of the underlying Greek noun λεπρός (lepros). As a kid, I was taught in Sunday School that the so-called lepers Jesus encountered in the Gospels would have been grotesque, veritable zombies complete with limbs falling off and patches of skin missing.³ Proximity to a leper almost certainly meant catching their disease and with it a social (if not a natural) death sentence. But this understanding of both leprosy and the condition borne by those Jesus meets and heals in the New Testament was based in misinformation.⁴

For starters, it is a myth that leprosy (i.e., Hansen’s disease) causes limbs to just fall off.⁵ Additionally, it isn’t an easy disease to catch. According to the Center for Disease Control, 95% of people are immune to it.⁶ And even if you were to catch it, it is treatable and can even be cured.⁷ More pertinent is that while some translations render λεπρός as “leper” and the related noun λέπρα (lepra) as “leprosy,” in truth the condition behind these terms refers typically to skin disorders like psoriasis and eczema⁸ and not Hansen’s disease. Ancient writers preferred terms like ἐλέφας (elephas)⁹ or ἐλεφαντίασις (elephantiasis)¹⁰ to describe Hansen’s disease but not λέπρα.¹¹ Had the Markan Evangelist wanted to speak of Hansen’s disease, he had a term available. Instead, he used a term that refers to different skin diseases.¹²

Returning to Mark 1, the lepros begs Jesus to make him καθαρίσαι (katharisai), an infinitive of the verb καθαρίζω (katharizō) – “I wash, clean, cleanse, purify.”¹³ This implies, naturally, that in his current state he is the opposite of clean; he is ἀκάθαρτος (akathartos), a term we encountered in the previous episode where it is used to describe a spirit Jesus encounters in a synagogue in Capernaum. Whence this language of cleanness? It helps to remember that we are reading an ancient text and to understand it properly we need to appreciate the social and cultural context of the world it portrays. To that end, we need to consider the language of purity and impurity, cleanness and uncleanness, as it is found in the Torah.¹⁴

In Leviticus 13-14, Yahweh delivers to Moses and Aaron a series of instructions regarding what the NRSVue translates “defiling disease on the skin” (e.g., Leviticus 13:2, 3, etc.). That phrase is in Hebrew the noun צרעת(ṣāraʿat),¹⁵ a term that covers a wide range of conditions¹⁶ that, when diagnosed by a priest, can result in a pronouncement of טמא (ṭāmēʾ) – “impure” or “unclean.”¹⁷ Unhelpfully, many English translations render צרעת as “leprosy” (e.g., KJV, NASB) or “leprous disease” (e.g., ESV) or something similar. But, as Matthew Thiessen observes, leprosy as we understand it – that is, Hansen’s disease – “did not exist in the Mediterranean world prior to the third or second century BCE and thus would have been unknown to the priestly community responsible for the production of the book of Leviticus.”¹⁸

The language of uncleanness and cleanness, purity and impurity, is found throughout Leviticus and its meaning is sometimes misunderstood.¹⁹ There are, basically, two types of impurity in the Hebrew Bible: ritual and moral.²⁰ Moral impurities could include sexual taboos like those listed in Leviticus 18 or the consulting of mediums (Leviticus 19:31). The only remedies for moral impurity are atonement, punishment, or exile.²¹ Ritual impurity, on the other hand, includes things like consuming a prohibited animal (e.g., Leviticus 11), giving birth (e.g., Leviticus 12) or even performing commanded cultic acts (e.g., Leviticus 16:28; cf. Numbers 19:8).²² For these, the remedies typically include waiting, washing, and sacrifice.²³What is important here to note is that ritual impurity and moral impurity were different, and that, while moral impurity entails sinfulness, ritual impurity does not.²⁴ And insofar as the purity system of ancient Judaism was about maintaining sacred boundaries,²⁵ritual impurity could become sin only if those deemed ritually impure violated those boundaries.²⁶

Looking again at צרעת in Leviticus, those deemed impure due to the condition were more or less alienated from the community as Leviticus 13:45-46 states: “He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp,” we are told.²⁷ But their situation, dire as it may have been, was not without remedy. In the case that the disease healed up, ch. 14 lays out the method by which the one that had צרעת may become ritually pure. Three ceremonies are described that begin on the first day after the disease has gone away (14:2-8), continue on the seventh (14:9), and conclude on the eighth (14:10-32). With these rituals fulfilled, and a declaration of purity given by the priest, the person is restored to Israelite society.²⁸

Those who read Leviticus in its Greek form (e.g., LXX)²⁹ would have found that צרעת became the Greek λέπρa.³⁰ The Markan Evangelist was undoubtedly one who encountered the Torah in Greek.³¹ His account of Jesus’s meeting with a λεπρός, then, is informed by the data mined from Leviticus. This is seen not only in the man’s desire to be clean (and not simply healed)³² but also Jesus’s command that the λεπρός go straight to a priest³³ and make an offering in accordance with Mosaic law (Mark 1:44). “In this story, then,” writes Matthew Thiessen, “Mark emphasizes that Jesus’s actions both conform to the legislation of Leviticus and demonstrate his commitment to the temple cult and ritual purity system.”³⁴

But why a story about a lepros at all? In her article “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,”^35[35] Elizabeth Shively argues that many interpreters of texts like Mark 1:40-45 and others have overlooked the import of these stories. She begins with the connection of ritual purity to the Markan Jesus, examining first the work of New Testament scholar Jerome Neyrey in his article “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel” that was published in Semeia in 1986.³⁶ Neyrey was himself drawing on the influential work of the late anthropologist Mary Douglas and her book Purity and Danger.³⁷ As Shively explains, Neyrey viewed purity as a map wherein one could find things in their proper place. Impurity, then, was when things appeared out of place. But, Neyrey contends, Jesus frequently violates those maps, like he does in the story we’ve considered today. Per Mark 1:41, Jesus touches the λεπρός, an action that would have resulted in ritual impurity. Thus, for Neyrey, Jesus is depicted as one who rejects purity laws, concerned more with purity of the heart than with the ritualistic boundaries of pure and impure.³⁸ But Shively has a problem with this understanding of ritual purity and its relationship to the Markan Jesus, a subject we will continue to examine next time.

That’s all the time we’ve got this week. See you next time! And remember, in the words of Richard Elliot Friedman, “One does not need to deny what is troubling [about the Bible] in order to pay respect to what is heartening.”³⁹ Thanks for stopping by. 

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1. Throughout the endnotes readers will find various abbreviations. For a list of what abbreviations I use and the works to which they refer, please see the page “Commonly Used Abbreviations.”  ↩︎
2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
3. Matthew Thiessen (Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism [Baker Academic, 2020], 43) relates having a similar experience growing up, though he enjoyed added context, namely that leprosy could cause a lack of feeling in limbs that could lead to them being unknowingly damaged and, therefore, the need for amputation. I was told without qualification that the limbs simply fell off.  ↩︎
4. E.g., William Hendriksen, Mark, New Testament Commentary (Baker Academic, 1975), 77. Hendriksen notes the prevailing consensus that neither λεπρός nor λέπρa refer to Hansen’s disease but seems to dissent from this take, citing the work of L.S. Huizenga. Cf. John Calvin, A Harmony of the Evangelists, translated by William Pringle (Baker Books, 2009), 1:372. ↩︎
5. “Leprosy (Hansen’s disease),” betterhealth.vic.gov.au. Accessed 5 November 2024. Per the site: “Leprosy does not cause flesh to rot or fingers and toes to drop off. In the past, limbs that have been damaged because the person cannot feel pain have sometimes had to be amputated. Now that the disease can be detected early, the need to amputate is rare.” ↩︎
6. “About Hansen’s Disease,” cdc.gov. Accessed 5 November 2024.  ↩︎
7. Per the CDC, a consistent treatment done over one or two years can cure Hansen’s disease. See “Leprosy (Hansen’s disease),” betterhealth.vic.gov.au. Accessed 5 November 2024.  ↩︎
8. CGL, s.v. “λέπρa.” ↩︎
9. See MGS, s.v. “ἐλέφας.” The term often refers to elephants or their tusks but in medical contexts refers to leprosy. E.g., the ancient Greek physician Aretateus of Cappadocia describes at length the condition of elephantiasis (elephas) in his Causes and Symptoms of Chronic Diseases 2.13.  ↩︎
10. See MGS, s.v. “ἐλεφαντίασις.” E.g., Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 2.731a, 2.732a. He describes the condition as an “intense skin disease” (σφοδρότητα τῶν ψωρικῶν [sphodrotēta tōn psōrikōn]).  ↩︎
11. David P. Wright and Richard N. Jones, “Leprosy,” ABD 4:281. See also examples in Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 48. ↩︎
12. Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 48-49: “If the Gospel writers intended to refer to leprosy when they mentioned Jesus’s healings of lepra, then they were unique in the Greek-speaking world – so unique, in fact, that no one would have known that it was actually leprosy to which they referred, since the first writer to use lepra to refer to leprosy was the doctor John of Damascus in the late eighth or early ninth century CE.” ↩︎
13. CGL, s.v. “καθαρίζω.” Cf. BDAG s.v. “καθαρίζω.” ↩︎
14. Ancient Israelite religion and ancient Judaism were not unique in prescribing rituals to maintain purity and, therefore, access to the divine. With regards to Greco-Roman religions, see the overview in Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, third edition (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), 186-188. ↩︎
15. DCH 7, s.v. “צרעת.” ↩︎
16. Jacob Milgrom (Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 20 [Doubleday, 1991], 768-771) divides these conditions into shiny marks (13:2-8), discolorations (13:9-17), boils (13:18-23), burns (13:24-28), scalls (13:29-37), tetters (13:38-39), and baldness (13:40-44). ↩︎
17. DCH 3, s.v. “טמא.” E.g., Leviticus 13:3, 8, 11, etc. ↩︎
18. Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 48. See also Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 1:407. Alter renders צרעת as “skin blanch.” To my surprise (and to their credit), in their note on Leviticus 13:2 for the ESV Study Bible ([Crossway Bibles, 2008], 231), John Currid, Nobuyoshi Kiuchi, and Jay Sklar write, “The term used in Leviticus is in fact generic: it could include many skin ailments, such as psoriasis, urticaria (hives), favus (which produces honeycomb-shaped crusts), and leukoderma (which produces white patches on the skin.) What today is called leprosy (Hansen’s disease) was unknown in the Near East at the time of Leviticus. Clear references to it do not occur until the late first millennium B.C.”  ↩︎
19. Liane M. Feldman, The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source from Creation to the Promised Land (University of California Press, 2023), 145n55: “‘Pure’ means that the person is able to live and work in the Israelite camp and attend to ritual matters at the Meeting Tent…. [A]n impure person is not able to enter the sanctuary or to come into contact with sacred objects.” On the various theories about the origins of the purity system, see Philip Peter Jenson, Leviticus: The Priestly Vision of Holiness, T&T Clark Study Guides to the Old Testament (T&T Clark, 2021), 55-57.   ↩︎
20. Christine Hayes, The Emergence of Judaism: Classical Traditions in Contemporary Perspective (Fortress Press, 2011), 36; Jonathan Klawans, “Concepts of Purity in the Bible,” in The Jewish Study Bible, second edition, edited by Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford University Press, 2014), 1999. ↩︎
21.  Klawans, “Concepts of Purity in the Bible,” 2002. Cf. Leviticus 18:24-30.  ↩︎
22. Milgrom (Leviticus 1-16, 1053) writes that “one can deduce that the burnt purification offering…always contaminates the one who handles it.” Cf. Yoma 68b:5: “Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, says: The bull causes ritual impurity before it is burned, but once the flesh is burned it no longer renders garments impure.” Translation taken from The William Davidson Talmud.  ↩︎
23. E.g., Leviticus 12 states that a woman who bears a son is unclean for seven days (fourteen days if it’s a daughter) and cannot have sexual relations with her husband for the duration, Additionally, for thirty-three days she is unable to engage with sacred objects or spaces (sixty-six days if it’s a daughter). Following this period, she is to go to the tent/temple and make an offering for purification. Once she does this, she is considered clean. Interestingly, no washing ritual is associated with giving birth in Leviticus.  ↩︎
24. Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine, The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (HarperOne, 2011), 181: “To be impure means that one cannot approach the sacred; the point is ritual, not moral status. An evil high priest can be ritually pure; a saintly widow can be impure.”  ↩︎
25. Stephen L. Harris and Robert L. Platzner, The Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, second edition (McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008), 174: “The priestly worldview demands that boundaries between the pure and impure be drawn clearly, so that any Israel can know, at any given moment, which domain he or she is in.” Cf. Genesis 1:1-2:4a. Mark Smith (The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 [Fortress Press, 2010], 127) writes of Genesis 1, “This narrative is thus better seen as having emerged out of the tradition of priestly ritual literature and not from traditional folkloristic literature.” A cursory reading of Genesis is enough to see how boundaries play an important role from “the beginning”: light and dark, Day and Night, waters above and waters below, sea and land, and so on.  ↩︎
26. Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 15; Klawans, “Concepts of Purity in the Bible,” 1999. ↩︎
27. Interestingly, the Mishnah has it that the Levitical laws regarding צרעת  concern only members of Israel: “All become impure by skin afflictions, except for gentiles and the resident alien” (Neg. 3:1). Translation taken from “Tractate Neg’im,” translated by Mira Balbert, in OAM3. Leviticus 13:45 says, “The person who has the defiling disease shall wear torn clothes, and let the hair of his head be disheveled, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’” Johnson Kimuhu (Leviticus: The Priestly Laws and Prohibitions from the Perspective of Ancient Near East and Africa, SBLStBL115 [Peter Lang, 2008], 342) takes this to mean that the disease is considered a contagion, and “a leper was unquestionably dangerous.” But contagious in what way? I find myself in agreement with John Hartley (Leviticus, WBC 4 [Zondervan, 1992], 193) that even if there was some measure of “dread of catching that person’s disease,” fundamentally “[t]he law is concerned with spreading ritual uncleanness and not with whether the disease is contagious.” ↩︎
28. Nobuyoshi Kiuchi, Leviticus, ApOTC (Apollos/InterVarsity Press: 2007), 251: “The cleanness granted after each ritual is closely related to the person’s location. Thus the ritual as a whole indicates that there are three degrees of cleanness. However, though the cleanness is outer, even from this viewpoint, the principle is that the closer proximity a person has to the Lord, the more demanding the rites become for that person. Symbolically, the closer a person approaches the Lord, the more spiritually uncovered he or she must become.”  ↩︎
29. On the translation of the Hebrew Torah into the Greek Pentateuch, see Gregory R. Lanier and William A. Ross, The Septuagint: What It Is and Why It Matters (Crossway, 2021), 63-73. See also Martin Karrer, “Israel’s Greek Scriptures and Their Collection in the Septuagint,” in Israel’s Scriptures in Early Christian Writings: The Use of the Old Testament in the New, edited by Matthias Henze and David Lincicum (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023), 81-108. ↩︎
30. Mark A. Awabdy, Leviticus: A Commentary on Leueitikon in Codex Vaticanus, Septuagint Commentary Series (Brill, 2019), 275. Awabdy notes that of the 51 occurrences of the Hebrew צרעת each one is in the LXX rendered with λέπρa. ↩︎
31. Jonathan Robinson, Markan Typology: Miracle, Scripture and Christology in Mark 4:35-6:45, LNTS 678 (T&T Clark, 2023), 184: “Mark’s use of distinctive phrases and unique words from the LXX reveal an intimate acquaintance with the scriptures, quite probably in both Hebrew and Greek and with attention to unusual and distinctive wording.” See also Elizabeth Evans Shively, “Israel’s Scriptures in Mark,” in Israel’s Scriptures in Early Christian Writings, 236-262. ↩︎
32. Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2012), 20. ↩︎
33.  John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, SP 2 (The Liturgical Press, 2002), 90: “Of itself the mention of a priest does not demand a Jerusalem setting, since priests lived through Palestine (see Luke 10:31-32, where a priest and a Levite are journeying from Jerusalem.” As reasonable as this seems, Jesus’s instruction to make an offering per Mosaic command appears to imply (at least to me) that a trip to Jerusalem would have been required. ↩︎
34. Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 63. See also Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea, 20-21: “This is an uncomplicated endorsement of a very elaborate sequence of ablutions and sacrifices (a bird, two male lambs, one perfect year-old ewe), detailed in Leviticus 14, by which the leper moves from pollution to purity, from isolation back into life in the community.” ↩︎
35. Elizabeth E. Shively, “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,” JTS 71 part 1 (April 2020), 62-89.  ↩︎
36. Jerome Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” Semeia 35 (1986), 91-128. The piece is available online. ↩︎
37. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). Yitzhaq Feder (Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: From Embodied Experience to Mortal Metaphor [Cambridge University Press, 2022], 5) notes the enduring influence of Douglas’ work: “Whenever the topic of purity is mentioned in academic discourse in general, and in relation to ancient Israel in particular, discussion turns quickly to anthropologist Mary Douglas’ groundbreaking study Purity and Danger, published in 1966. As a theoretical work that maintains a pervasive influence in multiple disciplines over fifty years after its publication, it was clearly a rare scholarly achievement.” See also Charles E. Carter, “Social Scientific Approaches,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, edited by Leo G. Perdue (Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001), 45. ↩︎
38. Neyrey (“The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 107) wrote, “What would purity-minded people object to about Jesus in Mark’s gospel? Just about everything Jesus did! Jesus did not observe any of the maps so important to the Judaism of his day.” (Emphasis author’s.) ↩︎
39. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎