Matthew Thiessen, “Ritual Impurity,” in The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus, edited by James Crossley and Chris Keith (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2024), 455-456.
What all four gospels give their readers is a portrayal of Jesus who believes that ritual impurity exists, that the laws dealing with this ritual impurity matter, and that he has the power to remove ritual impurity from people, thereby restoring them to a condition where they can access the realm of the holy. If the historical Jesus did not in fact care about a theme so consistently depicted in the gospels, then we are left holding ancient texts in our hands that have so thoroughly and consistently misrepresented Jesus in relation to ritual impurity and the Jewish law, whether intentionally or accidentally, that we are left with very little we can confidently say about the historical Jesus and Judaism. As Helen Bond has put it, “Whether we like it or not, the story of Jesus is Mark’s [and with some major and minor variations Matthew’s and Luke’s] story of Jesus.” Will we trust this story of a halakically minded Jesus who cared about ritual impurity, even if this story problematizes so many of the narratives of later Christians, which for reasons of theological anti-Judaism depict Jesus as breaking with Judaism, the Jewish law, and Jewish ritual purity and cultic concerns?
The Amateur Exegete 