Purging All Foods

What did Jesus think about the dietary laws of the Hebrew Bible? In Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 the Israelites are told not to eat any detestable thing. Then the various animals are listed that are not to be eaten.

It’s notable that nowhere in scripture is it recorded that Jesus ate any of these forbidden meats. But that could be considered an argument from silence. What did Jesus teach his disciples about these food laws?

We don’t have any examples in the gospels of Jesus addressing these laws specifically. But we do have an example in Acts of Peter, one of Jesus’ closest followers during his years of teaching, and his view of the food laws after sitting under Jesus’ teaching for years.

In Acts 10 Peter is on his roof praying, and he has a vision of a large sheet full of animals, and hears a voice telling him to kill and eat. He refuses to do so, saying that he has never eaten anything unclean. The voice then says, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

This is repeated two more times. Clearly Peter does not think that this is God telling him to eat. When he replies, “No way, lord”, the word for “lord”, as with the Spanish “Senor”, can also mean “sir”. Peter replies politely to the source of the voice, telling him that he’s not going to do it.

The next verse says that Peter was wondering about the meaning of the vision. Was it really about food, or something else. After being summoned to the house of Cornelius, Peter realizes that the vision is not about food, but about men. “God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.” But it’s clear from Peter’s response to the vision that Jesus had not taught his disciples to disregard the food laws.

There is, however, a passage in Mark 7 that looks at first glance like Jesus is abolishing the food laws. In Mark 7:19 some translations say something like, “in saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.” There are a number of reasons why this cannot possibly be the meaning of the passage.

In the broader context Jesus has been criticized by some Pharisees because his disciples did not do a ceremonial hand-washing before eating. This was not a biblical command, but an oral tradition. Jesus points out that while they are sticklers for their tradition, they are breaking the actual commands of God by using a weasel-word, “corban”, to evade their responsibility to the Law to honor their parents. Jesus’ whole theme in this context is to follow the bibical Law. He’s not going to turn around a few verses later and abrogate the food laws.

Jesus teaches the crowd that nothing outside a man can make him “unclean”. The uncleanness that he is talking about is a heart condition. Later his disciples ask him about this statement. He replies to them, “Are you so dull? Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body, purging all foods.”

It is this last phrase, “purging all foods”, that some translators take as a parenthetical comment by the author saying that Jesus was nullifying the food laws. It’s a real stretch grammatically to go back two or three verses to find an antecedent for “purging” in Jesus making a statement. It’s much more natural to consider the phrase, “purging all foods” to be part of Jesus’ statement. Besides that, forbidden meats were not considered to be foods at all.

It’s also clear that Jesus isn’t talking about forbidden foods. He’s not even talking about ceremonial uncleanness. The kind of uncleanness that Jesus is talking about comes from the heart, the uncleanness of sin, of setting aside God’s Laws, as the Pharisees were doing. Sometimes the translators come to a passage with a particular agenda of what they think a passage means, and they let their preconceptions color their translation, and it ends up misleading people about what the passage actually says.

But it should be clear to an unbiased observer that Jesus held and taught the laws of God, including the food laws. Remember that he insisted that not a jot or tittle of the Law would pass away until heaven and earth disappear.