Bible Study for Amateurs #69 – Elizabeth Shively’s “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,” part 3

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben – the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode sixty-nine 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 3.”¹

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“As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder,” wrote the late anthropologist Mary Douglas in her seminal work Purity and Danger.² Douglas was not interested in dirt for the sake of dirt.³ Rather, she was interested in what dirt represented and to what it pointed. First, the idea of dirt and dirtiness implies the existence of its opposite, namely cleanness. Dirtiness and cleanness, in turn, imply a system. Indeed, Douglas wrote, “Where there is dirt there is system.”⁴ Second, in this system things have their proper place.⁵“Shoes are not dirty in themselves,” she wrote, “but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table.”⁶ Thus, something is “dirty” when it is out of place.⁷

In the previous episode, we began looking at Elizabeth Shively’s “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark” that appeared in The Journal of Theological Studies in 2020.⁸ We ended that episode with her consideration of New Testament scholar Jerome Neyrey who, drawing on the work of Mary Douglas,⁹ understood the Jewish ritual purity system as “a map of a social system”¹⁰ and had argued that Jesus frequently violated purity “maps” in his ministry. As evidence for this, Neyrey offered up examples of Jesus treating the purity system as irrelevant: he regularly came into contact with people who should have otherwise been avoided (e.g., the λεπρός [lepros] of Mark 1:40-45); he “seems not to have guarded his bodily orifices or their emissions in ways that befit purity-minded people” (e.g., his declaration, per Mark 7:19, that all foods were clean);¹¹ he did not “observe the maps of time which structured Jewish life” (e.g., performing miracles on the sabbath); and he did not respect sacred spaces (e.g., disrupting temple business in Mark 11:15-17).¹² Writes Neyrey, “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.”¹³ Neyrey also viewed the ritual purity system of Jesus’s day as delineating “a hierarchy of holiness”¹⁴ wherein “[p]ersons of lesser purity rank should not intrude on the space of those of higher purity status.”¹⁵ Jews, therefore, were concerned with setting proper boundaries and maintaining them in a bid to “know where they stand in the system.”¹⁶

Shively, though in agreement with Neyrey that there is a symbolic element to the purity system, nevertheless finds fault with some of his interpretation. For example, by reducing it to mere maps by which boundaries are set and through which social order is maintained, Neyrey “fails to acknowledge the extent to which Israel’s purity system, including the idea of pollution, has its origin in and receives its value from God’s covenant with his people” (p. 65).¹⁷ In addition to this, Shively also takes Neyrey to task concerning his contention that the purity system was intended “to delineate a hierarchy of that which or who was impure/pure” (p. 65). The purity system, she observes, gave all Israelites – priest or non-priest, rich or poor¹⁸ – a way to put right ritual impurity.¹⁹

But what Shively objects to most as concerns the project of her article is how Neyrey’s view “leads to flawed conclusions about the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection” (p. 65). In his piece, Neyrey wrote that “God is ultimately the final reference point and arbiter of purity” and he had “declared Jesus uniquely holy and pure.”²⁰ He marshals evidence from the Markan narrative to demonstrate this: at his baptism, Jesus is declared to be the divine son and imbued by holy pneuma from God (Mark 1:9-11);²¹ at his transfiguration, Jesus appears with “the holiest figures of Israel’s past” and is reaffirmed as God’s son (Mark 9:2-8);²² and so on. “Through Jesus’ resurrection and enthronement, then,” writes Neyrey, “God makes clear his verdict of Jesus’ purity ranking, viz., that Jesus was and is ‘the Holy One of God.’”²³

What, then, do we make of Jesus’ death? As Shively notes, Jesus was upon his death a corpse, and corpses, per the Torah, were significant sources of impurity.²⁴ “Command the Israelites to put out of the camp everyone who has a defiling skin disease or a discharge, and everyone who is unclean through contact with a corpse,” Yahweh tells Moses in Numbers 5:1-2 (NRSVue).²⁵ When a group of people who had handled a corpse on the eve of Passover ask Moses whether they can celebrate the festival, Moses tells them he will inquire from Yahweh what they should do. They could still keep the Passover, declares the deity, but not until the following month.²⁶

Additionally, the process for rectifying the impure status requires a waiting period of seven days²⁷ and two ritual washings. Should anyone fail to follow protocol and enter into a sacred space in an impure state, “such persons shall be cut off from Israel” (Numbers 19:13).²⁸ Moreover, so potent were corpses that were a person to die in their home, everyone who was there when he died and anyone who entered the edifice while the corpse lay in state were deemed unclean. Any open vessels in the building would be contaminated too!²⁹ If a person was outside and encountered someone who had been killed by natural or not-so-natural causes, or if they touched a human bone or a grave, then they were unclean for seven days as well.³⁰

Like other forms of ritual impurity, corpse contamination was not sinful. Indeed, in some cases it was entirely unavoidable.³¹ After all, someone has to bury the dead.³² But these texts show that corpse pollution was a serious concern and that corpses emanated impurity to their surroundings. And Jesus of Nazareth, upon his death, became a corpse: “When [Pilate] learned from the centurion that [Jesus] was dead, he granted the body to Joseph” (Mark 15:45). The word rendered “body” here in the NRSVue is in Greek πτῶμα(ptōma), a term that frequently refers to dead bodies, whether human or animal.³³ Thus, one could render the final clause of the passage “he granted the corpse to Joseph.”³⁴ Given what we learned about corpse impurity, it stands to reason that Jesus would have been no exception. When Joseph took Jesus’s body down from the cross to lay it in a tomb, he surely would have become ritually impure. 

Not so, says Neyrey. Because Jesus dies a willing death, in obedience to God, and not due to sin, death does not pollute him such that his corpse, like every other corpse, defiles.³⁵ His reasoning for this, as well as Shively’s disagreement with Neyrey’s view, will be taken up in the next episode.

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.”³⁶ 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. Mary, Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, electronic edition (Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003 [originally published 1966]), “Introduction.” ↩︎
3. This should not be taken to mean that Douglas somehow thought of “dirt” as entirely metaphorical or symbolic. As Pádraig Belton (An Analysis of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, The Macat Library [Routledge, 2017], 38) observes, “Our perceptions about what is dirty are partly material and partly metaphorical, and they are strongly conditioned by linked physical states and social codes.”  ↩︎
4. Douglas, Purity and Danger, electronic edition, “Secular Defilement.” ↩︎
5. Bruce Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology, third edition (revised and expanded) (Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 165: “Purity rules are much concerned with dirt. Garden dirt in the backyard is in its proper place. When the same dirt \ into the house, the house is considered ‘dirty, defiled, unclean, impure.’” ↩︎
6. Douglas, Purity and Danger, electronic edition, “Secular Defilement.” ↩︎
7. Douglas, Purity and Danger, electronic edition, “Secular Defilement.” This definition was not new to Douglas by any means. It can be traced to the British philosopher William James. See his The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 133. ↩︎
8. 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. ↩︎
9. As Shively notes (p. 65n14), Douglas’s own views on the relationship of “dirt” to Levitical purity laws did not remain static. Douglas candidly writes in Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation ([Oxford University Press, 2004], 124), “I now recognize some problems with the way I tried to fit Leviticus into a theory of dirt and pollution in Purity and Danger. At first it seemed to work. Over time, and thanks to criticism, the analogy between biblical uncleanness and other systems of pollution began to break down. The main weakness of my attempt to naturalize and generalize purity concepts is that local definitions of pollution are the negative aspect of specific normative schemes of the world. I knew that the negative side cannot be compared across the board without also comparing the positive side.” See also Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford University Press, 1999), viii: “But the more that pollution theory developed, and the more that pollution was seen as the vehicle of accusations and downgradings, the more I was bound to acknowledge that it does not apply to the most famous instance of the Western tradition, the Pentateuch. All of this volume [i.e., Leviticus as Literature] is an attempt to explain why. General pollution theory still stands, but its application to the Bible is limited.” ↩︎
10.  Jerome Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” Semeia 35 (1986), 94. ↩︎
11. This understanding of Mark 7:19, common as it is, should not be assumed correct. Matthew Thiessen (Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism [Baker Academic, 2020], 187-195) discusses at length this passage, contending that the story isn’t about whether one should eat prohibited foods but rather whether one must ritually wash their hands before eating: “Any reading that ignores this specific context and takes Mark 7:19 to refer to all foods (kosher and nonkosher) will likely result in a serious misinterpretation of the passage” (p. 194). An alternative view of the text can be found in a recent piece by Logan Williams entitled “The Stomach Purifies All Foods: Jesus’ Anatomical Argument in Mark 7.18-19” (NTS 70 no. 3 [2024] 371-391). Williams argues that the seemingly parenthetical comment of v. 19, often attributed to the Evangelist, is actually Jesus speaking. Additionally, the rendering of the verse that appears in so many English translations (i.e., “Thus he declared all foods clean”) is erroneous. Jesus is not declaring by fiat that all foods are clean but is instead arguing in context that the stomach acts as a purifying agent such that ritually contaminated food (i.e., kosher food that has become impure) is made clean by the digestive process since excrement is not ritually impure. Williams writes, “The point of the argument in 7.18-19 is that, even if food is ritually defiled by unwashed hands, the person will in any event purify the food entering the body through their stomach, and therefore, one need not be concerned about handwashing before eating” (p. 390, emphasis author’s). Cf. Yair Furstenberg, “Defilement Penetrating the Body: A New Understanding of Contamination in Mark 7.15, NTS 54 no. 2 (2008), 176-200. ↩︎
12. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 108-109. ↩︎
13. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 107. Emphasis author’s. ↩︎
14. To quote Shively (p. 65). ↩︎
15. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 102. See also Malina, The New Testament World, 174. ↩︎
16. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 102. Neyrey opines that this helps to explain why the Pharisees put a “fence” around the Torah.  ↩︎
17. “In other words, although Israel’s purity system is indeed symbolic, it is also fundamentally, deeply theological” (p. 65). ↩︎
18. For example, in Leviticus 12:6-8 a woman who has given birth and has completed the days of her purification is to go the tent of meeting and present a lamb for a burnt offering along with a pigeon or a turtledove for a purification offering. However, if she cannot afford a lamb, she can bring two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for the burnt offering and one for the purification offering. Such accommodations for those who are impoverished can be found throughout the Torah.  ↩︎
19. 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), 1998-1999: “One error introduced under the influence of some anthropologists is the assumption that the ancient Israelite purity system was put in place in order for priests to subordinate Israelites and for Israelite men to subordinate their wives and daughters. Yet it is increasingly recognized that the ancient Israelite purity system affects men and women, priests and Israelites. While Israelite society was hierarchical and patriarchal, the ritual purity system did little to enforce these social demarcations; in any case, this certainly was not the system’s primary purpose.” ↩︎
20. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 114. ↩︎
21. Neyrey (“The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 114) refers to the holy pneuma (“the Holy Spirit”) as God’s “own purity.” ↩︎
22. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 114. The description of Jesus’s clothing as becoming “dazzling bright” is in keeping with the idea of Jesus’s own purity.  ↩︎
23. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 114. ↩︎
24. Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 99: “Simply put, corpses were the most powerful source of impurity in the priestly ritual purity system.” ↩︎
25. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
26. See Numbers 9:1-14. Lloyd Baily (Leviticus-Numbers, SHBC [Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc., 2005], 438-439) writes, “So important is the Passover celebration for reaffirming the community’s identity that everyone…must observe it. If circumstances prevent observance (such as ritual impurity caused by touching a corpse, or if anyone is away on a trip, v. 10), then a ‘make-up’ celebration is to be observed one month later (v. 11).” ↩︎
27. Pekka Pitkänen (A Commentary on Numbers: Narrative, Ritual, and Colonialism, Routledge Studies in the Biblical World [Routledge, 2018], 138) observes that seven days “is a fairly long time to be unclean; on many other occasions in the Pentateuch a person will be unclean ‘only’ till the evening from the moment of becoming unclean (e.g. Lev 11:24-40; 15:1-18).” Cf. Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 1-20: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 4 (Doubleday, 1993), 465: “The seven-day duration of impurity is common in priestly law, especially for the more severe forms of impurity. Compare the provisions of Leviticus 13-15 on illnesses and their effects.” ↩︎
28. The language of being “cut off” suggests permanency. Baruch Levine (Numbers 1-20: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 4 [Doubleday, 1993], 465) notes that while the language of cutting off originally denoted banishment, it eventually came to mean something closer to dying prematurely, often by divine agency. Levine also contends that latent in these regulations regarding corpses is an implicit critique of the so-called cult of the dead. See his extended discussion in Numbers 1-20, 468-479. See also Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 1:544-545. Cf. Kerry M. Sonia, Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel, ABS 27 (SBL Press, 2020), 171-174. ↩︎
29. Numbers 19:14-15. ↩︎
30. Numbers 19:16. ↩︎
31. See Ilana Be’er, “Blood Discharge: On Female Im/Purity in the Priestly Code and in Biblical Literature,” in A Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy, FCB 6 (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 156. Be’er lists five characteristics common to “curable” impurities, the first of which is that they are typically beyond a person’s control.  ↩︎
32. The Lukan Jesus’s words notwithstanding (Luke 9:60). ↩︎
33. BDAG, s.v. “πτῶμα.” Some manuscripts of Mark have here τὸ σῶμα (to sōma = “the body”) instead of τὸ πτῶμα (to ptōma = “the corpse”). This is the reading found in the 𝔐/Byz. Text (including the TR) and can also be found in a number of other ancient mss (e.g., A, C, W, etc.). Joel Marcus (Mark 8-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 27a [Yale University Press, 2009], 1071) notes that πτῶμα is to be preferred to σῶμα because the former is a much more “harsh term” than the latter and scribes would be less likely to change the reference to Jesus’s body from something “more dignified” to a term that often referred to one violently killed. Eugene Boring (Mark: A Commentary, NTL [Westminster John Knox Press, 2006], 436) opines that Mark’s usage of πτῶμα is the Evangelist’s “emphasis on the reality of Jesus’ death.” Cf. Mark 6:29: “And hearing this, his [i.e., John the Baptist’s] disciples came and took his corpse [πτῶμα] and placed it in a tomb” (my translation).  ↩︎
34. As does the ESV, HCSB, and others. ↩︎
35. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 114-115. ↩︎
36. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎