Bible Study for Amateurs #73 – Elizabeth Shively’s “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,” part 7

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben – the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-three 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 7.”¹

Last time we looked at two pieces of archaeological evidence which Yonatan Adler, in his book The Origins of Judaism, asserts point to the importance of purity regulations among Jews in first century Judea.² Coupled with literary evidence that we covered in episode seventy-one,³ we have fairly solid ground upon which to continue our discussion of Elizabeth Shively’s 2020 piece “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark.”⁴ Remember, Shively’s thesis is that the Markan Evangelist portrays Jesus’s healings and exorcisms in such a way that they evoke resurrection from the dead. Specifically, skin diseases like λέπρα (lepra) and possession by unclean spirits indicate a defiling presence that causes a person to become impure. Reversing these conditions via healing and exorcism restore the sufferer to a state of purity. Additionally, as corpses were a source of defilement, resurrection represented restoration to purity.⁵

But why think purity was a concern of the Markan Jesus at all? Some readers of Mark’s Gospel find within its pages a Jesus who rejects the Levitical purity system altogether. Jerome Neyrey, who we have discussed in previous episodes, contends that Jesus in Mark treated purity regulations as irrelevant.⁶ He writes, “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.”⁷ Other scholars opine similarly. For example, commenting on Jesus’s debate with the Pharisees over food consumption, purity, and handwashing in Mark 7:1-23, David Garland writes, “He does more than challenge the validity of the traditions of the elders; he seems to challenge the very legitimacy of the food laws.”⁸ Shively, aware of these takes, notes that “a more nuanced approach” (p. 67) has been taken up in recent times, led by such scholars as James Dunn and Thomas Kazen. Both men, she observes, painted a Jesus who was “indifferent to ritual purity” (p. 68), portraying the Galilean as a man either more interested in purity of the heart (as Dunn contended)⁹ or uninterested because he was God’s authoritative agent (as Kazen argued).¹⁰

What is Shively’s position? While she agrees with the idea that purity of the heart was certainly a concern of the Markan Jesus, she maintains, nevertheless, that “purity of the body is central to Mark’s Christology, the nature of the reign of God, and the activity of Mark’s Jesus” (p. 68). For her, the Markan Jesus is depicted by the Evangelist “as the agent of God’s reign and the mediator of its accompanying eschatological benefits, particularly exorcisms and healings” (p. 68),¹¹ actions found preeminently between Mark 1:14 and 10:52. Mark’s readers, part of “an interpretive community with a cultural encyclopedia,” are informed enough “to fill in gaps in the text, that is, to make connections between what is in the text…and what the text infers” (pp. 68-69).¹²

Given those assumptions, it is somewhat surprising that Shively does not discuss Jesus’s baptism in Mark 1:9-11. In his book Jesus and the Forces of Death, Matthew Thiessen argues that readers of this early scene in Mark wherein Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist “would naturally situate Jesus within the context of Jewish ritual purifications and would assume that he was sympathetic to the priestly vocation of distinguishing pure from impure and keeping the holy realm distinct from the profane.”¹³ While John the Baptist is somewhat of an enigmatic figure, playing second-fiddle to Jesus in the Gospels,¹⁴ he was a historical person significant enough to be given space in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities. There he is described as “a good man, and had exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives, to practise justice towards their fellows and piety towards God, and so doing to join in baptism.”¹⁵ That baptism, Thiessen contends, would have reminded Jews of John’s day of ritual bathing practices.¹⁶

As noted in episode seventy-two, hundreds of ancient miqva’ot (i.e., ritual baths or immersion pools) can be found across modern Palestine, including many that date to the time of Jesus.¹⁷ Such installations were indicative of purity concerns that were widespread in the region. Immersive bathing was the means by which impurities could be washed away. John, however, was not using a miqveh; his ritual bath, Mark 1:5 tells us, was the Jordan River. Thiessen thinks this is instructive.¹⁸ For starters, it evokes imagery found in 2 Kings wherein the prophet Elisha commands the foreigner Naaman to immerse himself in the Jordan to cleanse himself from his skin disease.¹⁹ Additionally, it is reminiscent of Joshua leading the Israelites through the Jordan River miraculously as they made their way into the Promised Land.²⁰ Finally, just as bathing rituals related to purity concerns often required the use of “living water,”²¹ the choice of the “perennial stream”²²  of the Jordan River, writes Thiessen, “suggests that John was concerned with using the strongest form of water purificant available to humans.”²³

The baptism of Jesus by John in Mark 1:9-11 is, therefore, not incidental to the plot of Mark’s Gospel. By beginning the narrative where it does, with Jesus’s baptism, the Evangelist is signaling to his audience that purity was a central concern of Jesus. Additionally, that he is declared God’s son and given God’s πνεῦμα(pneuma) only after he comes up from the water suggest strongly that the prerequisite to his veritable anointing was a kind of rite of purification that included both repentance and washing.²⁴ As L. Michael White notes, “The heavenly voice has affirmed Jesus as Messiah; the baptism and descent of the Spirit constitute his anointing following the messianic symbolism of the Davidic dynasty.”²⁵

While Shively fails to discuss Jesus’s baptism and how it speaks to the subject of purity concerns in the Gospel of Mark, it detracts nothing from her overall thesis. Continuing in her article, she writes that she wants “to establish that rectification of impurity is a crucial lens that informs an understanding of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms in Mark” (p. 69, emphasis author’s). She then contends that there are “two phenomena whereby the Jewish scriptures make provision for the rectifying purification of the body” (p. 69). The first are the provisions made in the Torah to repair three major sources of impurity. The second is an eschatological expectation wherein the god of Israel will fix natural disabilities. We will turn to the first phenomenon 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.”²⁶ 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. Yonatan Adler, The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal, AYBRL (Yale University Press, 2022), 61-72. ↩︎
3. E.g., the writings of Philo and Josephus as well as material within the New Testament. See Adler, The Origins of Judaism, 53-61. ↩︎
4. 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. ↩︎
5. Shively, “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,” 63. ↩︎
6. See Jerome Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” Semeia 35 (1986), 108-109. ↩︎
7. Neyrey, “The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel,” 107. Emphasis author’s. ↩︎
8. David E. Garland, A Theology of Mark’s Gospel, Biblical Theology of the New Testament (Zondervan, 2015), 133. See also William Hendriksen, Exposition of the Gospel according to Mark, New Testament Commentary (Baker Academic, 1975), 282; Donald W. Burdick, “Mark,” in The Wycliffe Bible Commentary: A Phrase by Phrase Commentary of the Bible, edited by Charles F. Pfeiffer and Everett F. Harrison (Moody Press, 1990), 1003. ↩︎
9. James D.G. Dunn, “Jesus and Purity: An Ongoing Debate,” NTS 48, no. 4 (October 2022), 464: “We can conclude, then, that Jesus was recalled as speaking on the subject of purity, and as insisting that purity of heart is more important than ritual purity (cf. Matt 5.8; Matt 23.25/Luke 11.39). ↩︎
10. Thomas Kazen, Jesus and Purity Halakhah, ConBNT 38 (Eisenbrauns, 2010), 339: “Jesus’ attitude to bodily impurity could be explained in part by this understanding of the coming kingdom, with its ensuing authority, the ‘finger of God,’ a power which he considered to be residing somehow within himself.” ↩︎
11. Cf. J.R. Daniel Kirk, A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2016), 217-28. ↩︎
12. On Mark’s audience, see Helen K. Bond, The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2020), 90-98. ↩︎
13. Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism (Baker Academic, 2020), 23. ↩︎
14. Joan Taylor (The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism [William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997], 2) writes, “The Gospel writers wish us to believe that John really had no importance whatsoever in his own right and that his importance was entirely the result of his witnessing to the arrival of the Messiah.” See, e.g., John 1:19-34. Cf. James F. McGrath, Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2024), 3: “If we do not understand John correctly, we will misunderstand Jesus as well. On the other hand, we have missed an opportunity to allow what we know about Jesus to fill in our portrait of his mentor and thereby understand both better.” ↩︎
15. Josephus, A.J. 18.117. Translation taken from Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Books XVIII-XIX, translated by Louis H. Feldman, LCL 433 (Harvard University Press, 1965). ↩︎
16. Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 22. ↩︎
17. See the discussion in Adler, The Origins of Judaism, 61-66. ↩︎
18. Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 22-23. ↩︎
19. See 2 Kings 5:8-14. Naaman, per 2 Kings 5:1, is described with the participle  מְצֹרָֽע (mǝṣōrāʿ) a term related to the substantive צָרַעַת (ṣāraʿat). The LXX renders מְצֹרָֽע with the participial λελεπρωμένος (leleprōmenos), itself related to λἐπρα. Thus, Naaman can be described as a λεπρός, one with a skin disease of some kind. In v. 14, after reluctantly obeying the prophet’s command to wash in the Jordan (cf. vv. 10-12), Naaman is, in the MT, said to have יִּטְבֹּ֤ל בַּיַּרְדֵּן֙ שֶׁ֣בַע פְּעָמִ֔ים (yiṭbōl bayyardēn šebaʿ pǝʿāmîm ).The verb יִּטְבֹּ֤ל is rendered in the LXX as ἐβαπτίσατο (ebaptisato) an aorist form of the verb βαπτίζω (baptizō).  ↩︎
20. See Joshua 3. Per that account, as the priests take the ark of the covenant into the waters of the Jordan, a miracle like that of the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus happens. Adela Yarbro Collins (Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia [Fortress Press, 2007], 142) notes that the event “apparently gave rise to eschatological expectations in the late Second Temple period.”  ↩︎
21. I.e., מַ֥יִם חַיִּ֖ים (mayim ḥayyîm). See, e.g., Numbers 19:17: “For the unclean they shall take some ashes of the burnt purification offering, and running water [מַ֥יִם חַיִּ֖ים] shall be added in a vessel.” ↩︎
22. Collins, Mark, 142. ↩︎
23. Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 23. ↩︎
24. Using later theological developments as the lens through which they read the Gospel of Mark, many readers miss that when Jesus undergoes baptism he does so just as those from Judea and Jerusalem did. Theirs was a baptism of repentance that coincided with confession of sins (Mark 1:5). That Jesus undergoes this baptism implies he too confessed his sins and repented. As it is only after he undergoes this rite that he is declared to be God’s son, this suggests that his messianic status did not exist prior to this moment but only after. Cf. Kirk, A Man Attested by God, 183-184. ↩︎
25. L. Michael White, Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite (HarperCollins, 2010), 24. Cf. Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AYB 27 (Yale University Press, 2000), 166-167.  ↩︎
26. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎