This essay interacts with E.P. Sanders’s work on purity, building on some of his insights, while disagreeing on other points. Sanders’s appeal to historical imagination and common sense is discussed and problematized. The essay deals at length with issues such as the expulsion, isolation, and integration of various impurity bearers, and the emergence of additional water rites to mitigate impurities and prevent unnecessary contamination. The evidence under discussion includes Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea texts, Philo, Josephus, New Testament, and rabbinic literature.
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E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 205.
Ibid., pp. 30–31, 40, 90–91; cf. pp. 131–254.
Ibid., pp. 41, 91.
Cf. Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (London: Macmillan, 2000); Friedrich Avemarie, ‘Jesus and Halakhic Purity’, in Bieringer et al. (eds.), The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, pp. 255–79; Wassén, ‘Jesus and the Hemorrhaging Woman’.
Ibid., p. 149.
Ibid., p. 145.
Ibid., p. 160, with a reference to Josephus, Ant. 3.261–62.
Ibid., p. 233.
Cf. Sanders, Jewish Law, p. 150. Sanders rhetorically asks whether the men had one week a month off.
For references, see Kazen, Jesus and Purity, p. 72 n. 187. Here, too, Sanders does mention contemporary societies separating menstruants, but argues that such practices would have left signs in legal texts (Jewish Law, pp. 350–51 n. 17). This supposition may, however, be questioned. The use of stone vessels is not much elaborated on in rabbinic texts, yet their abundance during the first century, evidenced by archaeological remains, suggests a significance that cannot be deduced merely from texts.
Kazen, ‘Purity and Persia’, p. 441; cf. Reinhard Achenbach, Die Vollendung der Tora: Studien zur Redaktionsgeschichte des Numeribuches im Kontext von Hexateuch und Pentateuch (bzabr, 3; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003), pp. 499–528, 598–628; Christophe Nihan, From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch: A Study of the Composition of the Book of Leviticus (fat, 2.25; Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2007), pp. 554–55, 570–72; Christian Frevel, ‘Purity Conceptions in the Book of Numbers in Context’, in C. Frevel and C. Nihan (eds.), Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism (Dynamics in the History of Religion, 3; Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 369–411.
See Kazen, Jesus and Purity, pp. 54, 155–56; Poirier, ‘Purity Beyond the Temple’, especially pp. 259–65. Whether purity was observed mainly for the sake of the temple or for its own sake, as part of ‘household religion’, is a contested issue, but the evidence increasingly points to the latter. See for example Adler, ‘Between Priestly Cult’; Thomas Kazen, ‘A Perhaps Less Halakic Jesus and Purity: On Prophetic Criticism, Halakic Innovation, and Rabbinic Anachronism’, jshj 13 (2016), forthcoming.
Kazen, Jesus and Purity, pp. 185–89; idem, Issues, pp. 81–89, 98–101, cf. 101–104; idem, Scripture, pp. 146–48, cf. 157–61.
Josephus, J.W. 6.290; Jn 11.55. Sanders (Judaism, pp. 132–35 and notes) explains how Josephus’s counting is evidence for the same waiting period.
Ibid., p. 160.
Ibid., p. 157; Maccoby, Ritual and Morality, p. 36; cf. Kazen, Jesus and Purity, pp. 113–14, 156.
Kazen, Jesus and Purity, p. 160, see especially n. 371. Cf. Sanders, Jewish Law, pp. 155–56.
Hannah K. Harrington, The Purity Texts (Companion to the Qumran Scrolls, 5; London and New York: T & T Clark International, 2004), pp. 21, 76–77; cf. Hanan Eshel, ‘cd 12:15–17 and the Stone Vessels Found at Qumran’, in J.M. Baumgarten et al. (eds.), The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 45–52.
See Kazen, Jesus and Purity, pp. 269–73, for further discussion.
Ibid., pp. 44–48.
See further Kazen, Issues, pp. 119–23; idem, Scripture, pp. 171–72.
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This essay interacts with E.P. Sanders’s work on purity, building on some of his insights, while disagreeing on other points. Sanders’s appeal to historical imagination and common sense is discussed and problematized. The essay deals at length with issues such as the expulsion, isolation, and integration of various impurity bearers, and the emergence of additional water rites to mitigate impurities and prevent unnecessary contamination. The evidence under discussion includes Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea texts, Philo, Josephus, New Testament, and rabbinic literature.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 253 | 70 | 6 |
Full Text Views | 213 | 0 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 48 | 4 | 0 |