What Would Jesus Think?

Continuing our theme of contrary conclusions from the same data, I recently ran across an interesting online debate between a Christian and a skeptic over the meaning of a passage from the book of Mark.

In Mark 7:7-8, Jesus tells the Pharisees that the washing of hands before eating is “the tradition of men”, not “the commandment of God”. He says that a man is “defiled” not by what he puts in his mouth (dirty hands) but by what comes out of his body (godly, actions). To modern ears, this seems like a rather mixed metephor,  because in 7:18-19 he specifically says “whatever thing entereth into the man, it cannot defile him, Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats”.

The skeptic paraphrased it this way:

“Got that? Eating filth does not make you a bad person because food cannot reach your heart…and because it will only be pooped out with the rest of the filth anyway.”

The Christian had, of course, been arguing for the traditional interpretation, the spiritual lesson of admonishment to follow God’s law over the traditions of man, and therefore to follow Jesus. This was, after all, long before germ theory, when the heart was held to be the seat of reason, and when both illness and insanity were widely viewed as the work of demonic forces. So it makes sense that someone living in that age would confound spiritual and physical “defilement” in this way.

But of course, as the skeptic points out, Jesus is claiming to be or to speak for the creator who knows everything and is not limited by the ignorance of the Iron Age. Surely, having warned his people against eating pork (a carrier of parasites) he would not so blithely dismiss gastronomic hygiene. And further, while on the subject, wouldn’t he have taken a moment to admonish his followers against eating improperly stored grain (with its incumbent risk or ergo-induced-lunacy, which due to further misunderstanding of the mind, was a cause of cruel execution all the way up to the enlightenment)? No. He wouldn’t, the skeptic asserts, because he was a man living in the Iron Age and, like Moses before him, had no access to any divine wisdom that might have raised him above the ignorance of the age.

Of course, none of these passages appear in any copies of Mark older than about 390 AD anyway, so no one really knows what Jesus did or did not say. Perhaps he taught a course in pathogenic mycology at the local extension office and it’s all just gotten lost in translation.