Bible Study for Amateurs #70 – Elizabeth Shively’s “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,” part 4

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben – the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy 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 4.”¹

“[I]t was fitting,” writes the author² of the so-called Letter to the Hebrews,³ “that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens” (Hebrews 7:26, NRSVue).⁴ That Hebrews has an elevated view of Jesus Christ is evident from the opening salvo of the document: Jesus is, per the writer, “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word,” we read in Hebrews 1:3. Furthermore, “he…made purification for sins,” functioning as “a great high priest who has passed through the heavens” (Hebrews 4:14). For the author of this ancient text, Jesus is a moral exemplar, free from defect.⁵ Additionally, the words “holy,” “blameless,” and “undefiled” point to his ritual purity.⁶ His death, moreover, brought purification for sins (Hebrews 1:3; 9:25-28) and the defeat of the devil, “the one who,” Hebrews 2:14 contends, “has the power of death.”⁷ Jerome Neyrey in his article “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel” agrees: “Death is the ultimate sign of the power of sin and Satan,” he writes. “But death does not affect Jesus.”⁸

In the last episode, we continued our look at Elizabeth Shively’s 2020 piece “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark” that appeared in The Journal of Theological Studies.⁹ We ended that episode by noting a disagreement Shively has with Neyrey’s view that despite the fact that Jesus became a corpse due to his death by crucifixion he nevertheless was not impure. Corpse impurity in the Torah was a serious concern,¹⁰ even if it was at times unavoidable.¹¹ That Jesus became a corpse upon death is an inference born not only from the fact that a corpse is by definition one who has ceased to be alive but also because the Markan Evangelist explicitly refers to Jesus’s body as a πτῶμα (ptōma), “a corpse” (Mark 15:45).¹² As a corpse, then, Jesus surely would have become a source of ritual impurity. Neyrey doubts it. 

It isn’t that he thought Jesus didn’t die. Of course he did. Instead, Neyrey attributes Jesus’s death to neither sin nor Satan but to, in his words, “his holiness, i.e. his obedience to God.”¹³ As evidence of this, he points to various places in the Markan Gospel wherein Jesus commits to dying an obedient death. For example, Jesus prays in Mark 14:36, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me, yet not what I want but what you want.”¹⁴ Neyrey concludes from this text and others, “Jesus’ death is not polluting for it comes from obedience to God, not from the power of sin.”¹⁵ Moreover, by raising Jesus from the dead God has not only vindicated him but he has also proved he deserved the purity ranking given to him earlier in the Gospel. “Jesus then enters the very circle of God’s presence and sits on God’s throne, a thing unthinkable for a corpse,” he writes.¹⁶

To be sure, entering God’s presence as a corpse would be unthinkable. Those few individuals in the HB who enter the deity’s presence invariably do so as living beings¹⁷ and, therefore, do not have corpse impurity.¹⁸ Additionally, in the ancient Israelite understanding of the afterlife, there was no heaven or hell.¹⁹ Instead, the dead – rich and poor alike – ended up in Sheol, a place wherein the deceased existed as shades,²⁰ akin to how the dead are depicted in the Odyssey.²¹ While the author of Psalm 139 can affirm, with poetic language, God’s presence even in Sheol (Psalm 139:8),²² in general the dead are understood to be in a place wherein they do not praise Yahweh nor feel the powerful presence of the deity. “Do you work wonders for the dead?” the psalmist inquires of his god in Psalm 88:10. “Do the shades rise up to praise you?” These are rhetorical questions; the answer to both is no.²³

Returning to Neyrey’s argument, while he is undoubtedly correct in his claim that Jesus was given divine approval at his resurrection and entered God’s presence as a living being rather than a corpse, the assertion that Jesus’s corpse was not a source of pollution because he died in obedience to God’s will rather than succumbing to the power of sin and Satan seems suspect. In fact, with that view Shively forcefully disagrees: “Quite the contrary,” she writes, “the Torah does not make any such qualifications; a corpse is still a corpse, and every corpse is defiling. Thus, the corpse of Jesus, like every other corpse, would have been an impurity bearer of the greatest kind” (p. 66). For Shively, the fact that Jesus’s corpse would have been defiling is a key part of Mark’s presentation. The resurrection functions as a veritable act of purification, turning the unclean corpse of Jesus of Nazareth into a living body. “[B]y raising Jesus from the dead,” she writes, “God not only vindicated Jesus, but also purified him” (p. 66). 

This, of course, raises the question of the relationship between the ritual purity laws that existed in Jesus’s day and the man himself. Was Jesus one who accepted these regulations, or did he reject them? As Shively notes, older Protestant scholarship viewed Jesus as one who rejected outright purity laws. For example, the late Calvinist scholar William Hendricksen, commenting on the dispute over dietary restrictions in Mark 7, wrote that in v. 19 Jesus had declared even so-called “unclean” animals undefiling and that the only interpretive question that remained was “exactly when, according to God’s will, the abolition of the ceremonial laws regarding clean and unclean went into effect.”²⁴ Similarly, John Dominic Crossan, who Shively cites as an example of this view,²⁵ wrote in his tome The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, that the description of Jesus touching the λεπρός (lepos) in Mark 1:41 and the command to him to go to the priest to show himself cleansed “as a testimony to them” is evidence that, “[f]or Mark, Jesus is precisely not a law-observant Jew.”²⁶

What do we make of this view? Does the Markan Jesus abrogate the Torah’s regulations concerning ritual purity? And what evidence do we even have that the Levitical regulations found in the Gospels were important in first-century Judea? It is to those questions we turn 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.”²⁷ 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. The identity of the author of Hebrews has been the subject of debate for as long as there have been readers of it. For an overview, see Craig R. Koester, Hebrews: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 36 (Yale University Press, 2001), 42-46. ↩︎
3. Like its authorship, the genre of Hebrews has too been the subject of debate. Though it has features common to ancient letters (e.g., an epistolary postscript; Hebrews 13:22-25), it appears more homiletic than epistolary. On the genre of Hebrews, see Koester, Hebrews, 80-82.  ↩︎
4. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
5. Luke Timothy Johnson, Hebrews: A Commentary, NTL (Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 195; Koester, Hebrews, 367. ↩︎
6. James W. Thompson, Hebrews, Paideia (Baker Academic, 2008), 162. Cf. Koester, Hebrews, 119-120. Harold Attridge (The Epistle to the Hebrews: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia [Fortress Press, 1989], 212-213) notes that the word ἀμίαντος (amiantos = “undefiled”) is “closely connected to the cult” and when coupled with ὅσιος (hosios = “holy”) and ἄκακος (akakos = “blameless”) “recall in a general way the biblical prescription for Levitical purity.”  ↩︎
7. William Loader, “Revisiting High Priesthood Christology in Hebrews,” ZNW 109, no. 2 (2018), 262: “It is all about access and assurance that this access has been achieved as a result of Christ’s sacrifice represented in his blood and in his death through which he forged the way into the heavenly temple to where Christ is now the great priest over the house of God. In this somewhat daring and enigmatic statement [i.e. Hebrews 10:19-22] the author draws together his previous expositions. He merges Atonement Day typology with what he had said earlier about the achievement of Christ’s death in disempowering the devil, expressed here as making a way through the curtain for us, and thus recalls both 2,14–15 and 2,17–3,2, which focus on Jesus as high priest over the house of God.” On the association of the devil and death, see Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 92.  ↩︎
8. Jerome Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” Semeia 35 (1986), 114. ↩︎
9. 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.  ↩︎
10. See Numbers 19:10-20. ↩︎
11. Deuteronomy 21:23 commands that even criminals who have been executed are to be buried the day of their execution to avoid defiling the land. This, naturally, would have involved handling a corpse and those who handled the corpse would have contracted ritual impurity.  ↩︎
12. BDAG, s.v. “πτῶμα.” ↩︎
13. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 114. Emphasis author’s. ↩︎
14. Neyrey also cites Mark 8:31, 14:21, 14:36, and 14:49 as support. ↩︎
15. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 114. ↩︎
16. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 114. ↩︎
17. E.g., Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11-12). ↩︎
18. Cf. Isaiah 6. There the prophet beholds the deity and laments his “unclean lips [טְמֵֽא־שְׂפָתַ֙יִם֙ (ṭǝmēʾ-śǝpātayim)]” before he is then cleansed with a live coal (vv. 5-6). No procedure is required to remedy corpse impurity because Isaiah is alive in this encounter with God. ↩︎
19. K. L. Noll, Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: A Textbook on History and Religion, second edition (Bloomsbury, T&T Clark, 2013), 336. ↩︎
20. E.g., Isaiah 14:9: “Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come; it rouses the shades to greet you, all who were leaders of the earth; it raises from their thrones all who were kings of the nations.” On shades, see Esther J. Hamori, God’s Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible (Broadleaf Books, 2023), 225-239; Philip S. Johnson, Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament (Apollos/Intervarsity Press, 2002), 128-142. The Hebrew רְפָאִ֣ים (rǝpāʾîm, from רָפָא [rāpāʾ]) appears 8x in HB (Job 26:5; Psalm 88:10; Proverbs 2:18, 9:18, 21:16; Isaiah 14:9, 26:14, 26:19) and invariably refers to the dead. As Johnson observes, their connection to the Rephaim of Ugaritic lore is a debated subject, though it appears that the stem rp’m refers in Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Phoenician to the dead.  ↩︎
21. Od. 10. 545: [T]he dead are empty, flitting shades.” Translation taken from Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin Books, 1997). Cf. Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (Simon and Schuster, 2020), 37-42.  ↩︎
22. Walter Brueggemann and William H. Bellinger, Jr., Psalms, NCBC (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 583: “The poetic images do not stand as flat, literal propositions of doctrine but as poetic figures to affirm divine presence in the farthest heights and depths.” See also Johnson, Shades of Sheol, 75-77.  ↩︎
23. Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 3:211: “This is a recurrent idea in Psalms: the dead will not rise, will never again be able to fulfill the ultimate human vocation of praising the Creator.” ↩︎
24. William Hendricksen, Exposition of the Gospel According to Mark, New Testament Commentary (Baker Academic, 1975), 282. He writes further, “Did it take place right now, at the very moment when Jesus spoke these words? Did it occur when Jesus was crucified. See Col. 2:14. On the day of Pentecost? Whatever be the answer, it remains true that in principle all foods were pronounced clean here and now.” Emphasis author’s.  ↩︎
25. Shively, “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,” 67n22. ↩︎
26. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (Harper Collins, 1991), 323. Crossan reads the phrase in v. 44, rendered in the NRSVue as “as a testimony to them [εἰς μαρτύριον αὐτοῖς (eis martyrion autois)]” to mean a testimony against them: “Do it, in other words, to show them who I am and what I can do.” Robert Guelich (Mark 1-8:26, WBC 34a [Word, Inc., 1989], 76-77) read the text similarly, rendering the underlying Greek text with the words “as evidence against them.” Cf. Rodney J. Decker, Mark 1-8: A Handbook on the Greek Text (Baylor University Press, 2014), 42. ↩︎
27. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎