Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism. By Matthew Thiessen

Abstract

From the patristic period until today, one of the most discussed issues in the interpretation of Scripture is the persistent assumption that Jesus turned away from a dead and superficial Jewish legalism and founded a new, spiritualized religion based on compassion and an inner relationship with God. As Matthew Thiessen already shows in the preface to his new monograph, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospel’s Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism, this view still persists among exegetes and preachers. As such, it reveals an implicit anti-Judaism and a fundamental misinterpretation of first-century Judaism against which Thiessen presents a well-reasoned argument. Thiessen argues against these views based on Jesus’ handling of the Torah, especially in relation to the Jewish ritual purity system. Part of the argument relies on a difficult concept for contemporary readers to comprehend: for Jesus and his contemporaries (incidentally not only in Jewish Palestine,...