List of Appendices
4.1 Purity System
101 CHAPTER FOUR THE LUCAN CONTEXT 4.0 Introduction
To fully understand and present the attitude of Jesus in the Yoruba cultural context, there is the need to explore the cultural background of the times of Jesus, and according to Craffert (2008:78) describe across the historical and cultural gap what it was like in the strangeness, of their world, and how things were in the life of Jesus in Galilee, and how that can be appreciated in a modern world. This chapter examines the purity systems in the Lukan context giving a general overview of the purity codes and laws of the time of Jesus. It specifically outlines the purity maps, lines and boundaries in the Jewish context.
I have taken the freedom to use the term Jewish context despite recent scholarly doubts and arguments about the precise reference of the term Jew. The intended readers of this thesis understand the term to be referring to the Hebrew group that survived until the time of Jesus, the people referred to in the Bible and, otherwise known as Israel and in order not to raise new issues in this research, I stay with the conventional understanding. The chapter also presents the body and boundaries of the time and the classifications of purity and impurity in Luke’s Gospel. It also tries to examine the attitude of Jesus to the purity codes, and ended with the context of Luke and purity issues.
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Mary Douglas explored the Old Testament issues of purity in testing her anthropological model of ritual classification systems: Analysis of Deuteronomy (1991), Leviticus as Literature (1999), Risk and Blame (1994) and In the Wilderness: the doctrine of defilement in Numbers (1993). In her exploration of the concept of purity in the chapter entitled, “The Abominations of Leviticus” in Purity and Danger (1966:41-57), she introduced the purity or holiness paradigm in which she links the idea of purity directly with physical wholeness or completeness. The idea of purity was given an external physical expression in the wholeness of the body seen as a perfect container (Olyan 2008:2). To be whole is articulation of an external physical expression of holiness and is understood as a communicator of holiness. Only the perfect body is fit to be consecrated, no animal with a blemish may be sacrificed; no priest with a blemished body shall approach the altar (Douglas 1999:46). Mary Douglas (1966: 141) writing on external boundaries has shown that the purity laws a society imposes on its members have a direct relation to the external pressures that such society receives as a whole. She relied on the principle that the human body is often used as a symbol of the wider society, which acquires form, external boundaries, margins and internal structure. She argues that the Israelites were through much of their history a hard pressed minority. In terms of her theory, this results in a concern to control the boundaries of the body, which is why in their beliefs all the bodily issues caused pollution: blood, pus, excreta, and semen. The threatened boundaries of their political body would be well mirrored in their care for the integrity, unity and purity of the physical body. The anxiety about bodily margins expresses danger to group survival (Douglas, 1966: 124).
Luke’s Jesus according to Susan Haber (1999:56) needs to be examined in his Jewish context and within the larger framework of Second Temple Jewish studies to understand his life and attitudes. This Craffert (2008:79) calls dealing with the historical Jesus material in a culturally sensitive manner (cultural brandishing). Paula Fredrikson construes the gospel traditions within the historical framework in which they were written (Fredrikson, 1995: 20-22). Hence, purity was a major preoccupation in the Judaism of Jesus time. Judaism at the time of Jesus was pre-occupied with issues of purity. This study therefore at this stage will examine the purity systems in the Jewish context of the time of Jesus, adopting purity in the form of the kind of symbolic systems postulated by Mary Douglas.
103 4.2 Purity in the Jewish Context
The laws of clean and unclean are central to Jewish identity (Leviticus 11:1-23, Deuteronomy 14: 3-21). Ancient Israel defined being pure in three ways: (1) to be free of dirt or pollution; (2) to have no contact with anything that was unfit for a religious person to touch; (3) to be free of actions that were evil or that hurt others and went against God’s command The works of Jacob Milgrom (1991), Jonathan Klawans (2001), and Christine Hayes (2002) provide a method of understanding purity issues in the Old Testament. All of these scholars explore the distinction between ritual and moral purity in Jewish thought. Meier (2005:2) in his article distinguished four types of impurity in the Jewish context as; ritual purity, moral purity, food purity and genealogical purity, but this may be an over-elaboration. Purity laws were not fixed immutably as a block, but they developed and formed opinion groups in Judaism: Pharisees, the Essenes, the Qumran sect and Jesus and his followers all interpreted the purity rules in different ways. Even the others in Diaspora Judaism tended to limit purity observance to the dictates of the Torah so as to accommodate them to the lives of ordinary people living among the gentiles.
For this study, “purity has to do with the system of ordering and classifying, the system of purity. These lines help us to classify and arrange our world according to some dominant principle, they convey through their structural arrangement the abstract values of the social world of which we are a part” (Malina 1981: 25ff drawing on Douglas).
Each culture is unambiguous in the classification systems, in the lines they draw and the boundaries they erect; yet they are often ambivalent according to Mary Douglas ,a material may be polluting in some circumstances but healing in others; and in times of breakdown and transition there is considerable ambiguity. According to Douglas (1966:
38), purity alludes to the cultural system and to the group i.e. the standard value of a community, a positive pattern in which ideas and values are tidily ordered.
In highlighting and discussing the issue of purity in the Jewish context, this study will draw inferences greatly from the work of Jerome H. Neyrey (1991). The principle and rules of purity in the Jewish culture of Jesus times had their foundations in the Old Testament quotation: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am Holy” (Leviticus 19: 2). This statement is foundational in subsequent Jewish writings, including early
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Christian writings. Mary Douglas makes reference too in chapter three of her book Purity and Danger which are well-suited to the idea of purity in the Old Testament. Creation, the ultimate act of ordering and classifying the world, was the original map, holiness in turn implies “keeping distinct the categories of creation” which involves correct definition, discrimination, and order (Soler 1976: 24ff). This creation expression was in the cultural history of the Jewish people, but interposes in their culture through specific rules surrounding Israel’s temple (Neusner 1979: 103). According to Neusner this abstract order of creation in the Old Testament fashioned purity rules for the system:
a. What animals may be offered?
b. Who may offer them – a priest?
c. Who may participate in sacrifice? – Leviticus 21:16ff.
d. Where the offerings may be made and when?
Although, many of the rules apply to priests, it is often times extended to the people of Israel at large so as to maintain the purity of the land (Neusner 1973:232 and Fenmelly 1983:277).
Purity in the Jewish context is seen in different areas of their life; purity is a map of a social system which co-ordinates and classifies things, places, persons and times. It could also mean boundaries or a line of a particular society, “the image of society”, says Douglas, has form; it has external boundaries, margins and internal structure (Douglas, 1966: 114). We shall examine each component of purity in the Jewish context.