Discourses about the Halakhah in early Judaism and Christianity: Who should eat when and where in whose company?
Final Report Abstract
Christina Eschner, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Theology in the Department of New Testament at Humboldt University, Berlin, stayed in Oxford from November 2011 until April 2012. During that time she worked on the discourse about the law in Judaism of the Second Temple Period. This was part of her project, which aims to examine the halakhic processes in the synoptic tradition in the context of statements in Jewish sources, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish writings in Greek, and early rabbinic texts, about specific questions of the Halakha in relation to daily life in Judaism, in order to discuss the Early Christian practice of the law in a wider context. The debates about the law in Early Christianity correspond to Early Jewish discourses about the law as far as they both concentrate on the Sabbath, food and purity requirements, marital matters and how to deal with Gentiles. Since the questions conceming marriage as well as the Sabbath have been studied extensively before, the focus of this work will be on food. In Early Christianity the topic of food is broadly debated since there are rules concerning prohibited and permitted food (Acts 15:20, 23-29; 1 Cor 8-10; Rom 14), the permitted way of food intake (Luke 11:39/Matt 23:25-26; Mark 7:1-23) and table fellowship (Mark 2:14-17; Luke 7:33-35/Matt 11:18-19; Acts 10-11). In Second Temple Judaism the use of halakhic standards to establish difference was not only employed against Gentiles but also by one part of the Jewish community against other parts. This underlines that the Judaism of the Second Temple was not a homogenous group, but rather a variety of groups disputing amongst themselves. These conflicts were more exactly halakhic disputes, because the different Jewish groups differed especially in the practice of the law and therefore defined their identity primarily by differences in the Halakha. Thus the law serves as the distinguishing marker by which the identity of one's own group is defined against other Jewish groups. This result leads to two consequences: Firstly, due to that function of the Halakha as a means of demarcation between different Jews it is especially important to examine, how these different Jewish groups interpret the law. Secondly, this finding speaks against the complete abolition of the law as the scope of the Early Christian Texts like Mark 7:1-23. Instead it is likely that Mark adopts the idea that the Torah defines the identity of the community of Jesus. Thus in Mark 7 the Torah plays, as in Jewish sources, an important role in determining the identity of the group of disciples around Jesus. Nevertheless the Jesus of Mark differently determines the criteria of this border by interpreting the Torah in a moral sense. Legal discourses about eating are often connected with questions of purity and impurity. Therefore the meaning and the function of purity has to be clarified. Sources in ancient Jewish literature show that we have to distinguish between ritual and moral impurity, as has often been noted by previous researchers. Different Jewish groups set the priorities between these two kinds of impurity distinctly. However, this does not mean that either ritual or moral purity are not important at all. Even in groups in which the focus is on ritual purity, the necessity of moral purity is not being abandoned.
