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 
Thanks for this post.
I wonder what might have happened if the historical Jesus had somehow cheated death (or something like the “swoon” hypothesis occurred) and had a Rip van Winkle moment before awakening in the modern era. Would he more shocked at Christianity diverging from the Judaism familiar to him, or at the fact that, more than 2000 years after his birth, the world still continues on (notwithstanding several doomsday predictions)?
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That’s a really interesting question! I’m inclined to think it is the latter but I really don’t know. That’d be a fun thought experiment to write about.
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All I know is, the OT is so full of examples of god’s sense of justice being entirely pacified solely through finite sacrifice, that the fundamentalist argument about God “needing” an infinite sacrifice, is nothing but propaganda.
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“Will we trust this story of a halakically minded Jesus who cared about ritual impurity…”
—-R.L. Solberg would say “you are misinterpreting that”. He thinks Paul’s perspective is the lens through which literally everything else in the bible must be viewed. But he also doesn’t have the time to defend Paul from the charge of being a false apostle.
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