Daniel Boyarin on Mark 7:1-19
Jan. 2nd, 2012 12:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI went with Liv to talk by Daniel Boyarin at Cambridge Limmud, which was an advance preview on his new book.
As I understand it, the "conventional" view of the gospel of Mark is that it's the earliest of the gospels, probably written by a non-Jew for a non-Jewish audience, and several passages are seen as supporting cases where Jesus rejected Jewish law, and as such are sometimes used as a basis for the idea that Christianity doesn't need to follow various bits of Jewish law.
However, Boyarin proposes an alternative view, that Mark probably was Jewish, but writing for a non-Jewish audience. And if Mark was someone who knew and followed usual Jewish laws in the first century CE, it suddenly a very important source about what those practices were, which is what Boyarin is really interested in. (As opposed to the current view, that if Mark were originally non-Jewish, and reporting Jewish customers second-hand mainly to say "they don't apply any more", it wouldn't tell you much about it at all.)
By contrast, he emphasises that he's only interested in how the author of Mark choses to represent Jesus. He says he's deliberately not saying whether this says anything about Jesus himself, or what current Christian or Jewish practices should be.
Hand washing before eating
In Mark 7, Jesus and the disciples have just started dinner after a hard day working and preaching, when a bunch of pharisees show up and start criticising.
"Why do you not wash your hands before you eat, like tradition says?" they say.
"If you don't even know THAT, why do you feel entitled to lecture people on ANYTHING?" they imply.
"Go on, admit you break tradition in front of everyone," they implicitly dare him.
All the way through the gospels, bunches of (partly apocryphal) pharisees jump out at Jesus and try to trick him into saying something blasphemous in public.
Jesus responds:
(1) You hypocrites, you say I'm breaking tradition? But the bible says you should honor your parents (and implicity, specifically to provide for them when they're old), but you allow people to invoke some legal mumbo-jumbo ("declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God)") claim that means they can't support their parents after all.
(2) It's not what you put INTO your body that makes it impure, it's what comes OUT of it.
Interpretation
I'd never studied it, but apparently the conventional interpretation is that the pharisees are accurately reporting current Jewish tradition, but that Jesus says "get your head out of your arse, doing the right thing is more important than following tradition".
However, Boyarin (if I understand correctly), thinks it makes a lot, lot more sense with an understanding that the pharisees are intellectuals from the capital, Jerusalem, whereas Jesus and the disciples were labourers and fishermen, hicks from the countryside near the sea of Galilee.
In his interpreation, everyone in both places thought it was important to follow the Torah as handed down to Moses on Sinai, and to follow the traditions of how to interpret it, including such things as detailed dietary laws, and not chucking your parents out of the house to starve in the desert when they got too old to work.
However, they their traditions differed in important ways, notably that the whole hand-washing thing originally referred to very specific circumstances [help, I don't remember this bit -- I think its the difference between non-Kosher, which you can't eat, and unclean, which despite the name is perfectly fine as long as you don't do it in the temple, which mattered a lot if you were a temple preist and basically not at all if you lived out in Judah??].
So Jesus isn't saying "yes, that's the tradition, but we should ignore it", he's saying, "look, I AM following the traditions, but you made up a lot of fancy high-falutin' stuff we've never heard of and then swan down here and look down your nose at us for being rubes who don't know it, but you're giant hippocrites, because we ARE keeping tradition, and YOU'RE not."
Furthermore, Boyarin thinks (not sure if this is new or not) that at first, in public, Jesus means the "men are made unclean by what comes out of them, not what goes in" quite literally -- that that was how the laws from the Torah were understood to work (with possibly isolated exceptions), and Jesus is directly saying "this is what it says in the Torah, and you're wrong about it". And then, when he goes into the house from the square and the disciples ask him to elaborate, he uses this quite literal meaning as a jumping-off point for the fact that men are made metaphorically unclean by what they say and do, not what they hear and have done to them.
Method of washing the hands
Unfortunately I can't vouch for this as I don't speak enough greek and I don't know for sure if I remember right. (Can anyone confirm or deny?)
NIV and KJV say the Pharisees and other Jews (note, both), wash their hands "often". But supposedly the original greek includes the word "fist", and "often" was presumably a best-guess by the translators for a phrase that didn't seem to make sense.
But Boyarin suggests (not certain, just a suggestion), that "washing over their fist" describes the Jewish practice of washing hands by pouring water over a half-open hand, first one, then the other, which is still current today. Which is obviously not certain -- you can only get so much from one word -- but (a) if it makes more sense of the text than the previous conventional reading, suggests the may be something to Boyarin's interpretation and (b) if true, says the Jews have been doing this for at least two thousand years, which is the sort of historical record Boyarin thinks its cool to look for and find :)
Conclusion
I don't know enough to even represent the argument accurately (please, people who know more than me about first century Judaism and Christianity, correct me), but I hope I grasped the general point. And obviously, this is a single example out of a whole book. He picked it because it's often used to say that as Mark saw Jesus, he rejected (in some ways) Jewish practice, but he doesn't think that's the only interpretation. So it's indicative, but it's not supposed to be conclusive unless you read the whole book.
My best guess, based on wikipedia and what Liv said about him, is that his scholarship is probably right (I think he previously made controvertial historical claims that later became mainstream), although I can't speak for any philosophical conclusions.
As I understand it, the "conventional" view of the gospel of Mark is that it's the earliest of the gospels, probably written by a non-Jew for a non-Jewish audience, and several passages are seen as supporting cases where Jesus rejected Jewish law, and as such are sometimes used as a basis for the idea that Christianity doesn't need to follow various bits of Jewish law.
However, Boyarin proposes an alternative view, that Mark probably was Jewish, but writing for a non-Jewish audience. And if Mark was someone who knew and followed usual Jewish laws in the first century CE, it suddenly a very important source about what those practices were, which is what Boyarin is really interested in. (As opposed to the current view, that if Mark were originally non-Jewish, and reporting Jewish customers second-hand mainly to say "they don't apply any more", it wouldn't tell you much about it at all.)
By contrast, he emphasises that he's only interested in how the author of Mark choses to represent Jesus. He says he's deliberately not saying whether this says anything about Jesus himself, or what current Christian or Jewish practices should be.
Hand washing before eating
In Mark 7, Jesus and the disciples have just started dinner after a hard day working and preaching, when a bunch of pharisees show up and start criticising.
"Why do you not wash your hands before you eat, like tradition says?" they say.
"If you don't even know THAT, why do you feel entitled to lecture people on ANYTHING?" they imply.
"Go on, admit you break tradition in front of everyone," they implicitly dare him.
All the way through the gospels, bunches of (partly apocryphal) pharisees jump out at Jesus and try to trick him into saying something blasphemous in public.
Jesus responds:
(1) You hypocrites, you say I'm breaking tradition? But the bible says you should honor your parents (and implicity, specifically to provide for them when they're old), but you allow people to invoke some legal mumbo-jumbo ("declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God)") claim that means they can't support their parents after all.
(2) It's not what you put INTO your body that makes it impure, it's what comes OUT of it.
Interpretation
I'd never studied it, but apparently the conventional interpretation is that the pharisees are accurately reporting current Jewish tradition, but that Jesus says "get your head out of your arse, doing the right thing is more important than following tradition".
However, Boyarin (if I understand correctly), thinks it makes a lot, lot more sense with an understanding that the pharisees are intellectuals from the capital, Jerusalem, whereas Jesus and the disciples were labourers and fishermen, hicks from the countryside near the sea of Galilee.
In his interpreation, everyone in both places thought it was important to follow the Torah as handed down to Moses on Sinai, and to follow the traditions of how to interpret it, including such things as detailed dietary laws, and not chucking your parents out of the house to starve in the desert when they got too old to work.
However, they their traditions differed in important ways, notably that the whole hand-washing thing originally referred to very specific circumstances [help, I don't remember this bit -- I think its the difference between non-Kosher, which you can't eat, and unclean, which despite the name is perfectly fine as long as you don't do it in the temple, which mattered a lot if you were a temple preist and basically not at all if you lived out in Judah??].
So Jesus isn't saying "yes, that's the tradition, but we should ignore it", he's saying, "look, I AM following the traditions, but you made up a lot of fancy high-falutin' stuff we've never heard of and then swan down here and look down your nose at us for being rubes who don't know it, but you're giant hippocrites, because we ARE keeping tradition, and YOU'RE not."
Furthermore, Boyarin thinks (not sure if this is new or not) that at first, in public, Jesus means the "men are made unclean by what comes out of them, not what goes in" quite literally -- that that was how the laws from the Torah were understood to work (with possibly isolated exceptions), and Jesus is directly saying "this is what it says in the Torah, and you're wrong about it". And then, when he goes into the house from the square and the disciples ask him to elaborate, he uses this quite literal meaning as a jumping-off point for the fact that men are made metaphorically unclean by what they say and do, not what they hear and have done to them.
Method of washing the hands
Unfortunately I can't vouch for this as I don't speak enough greek and I don't know for sure if I remember right. (Can anyone confirm or deny?)
NIV and KJV say the Pharisees and other Jews (note, both), wash their hands "often". But supposedly the original greek includes the word "fist", and "often" was presumably a best-guess by the translators for a phrase that didn't seem to make sense.
But Boyarin suggests (not certain, just a suggestion), that "washing over their fist" describes the Jewish practice of washing hands by pouring water over a half-open hand, first one, then the other, which is still current today. Which is obviously not certain -- you can only get so much from one word -- but (a) if it makes more sense of the text than the previous conventional reading, suggests the may be something to Boyarin's interpretation and (b) if true, says the Jews have been doing this for at least two thousand years, which is the sort of historical record Boyarin thinks its cool to look for and find :)
Conclusion
I don't know enough to even represent the argument accurately (please, people who know more than me about first century Judaism and Christianity, correct me), but I hope I grasped the general point. And obviously, this is a single example out of a whole book. He picked it because it's often used to say that as Mark saw Jesus, he rejected (in some ways) Jewish practice, but he doesn't think that's the only interpretation. So it's indicative, but it's not supposed to be conclusive unless you read the whole book.
My best guess, based on wikipedia and what Liv said about him, is that his scholarship is probably right (I think he previously made controvertial historical claims that later became mainstream), although I can't speak for any philosophical conclusions.