Other Miracles
The accounts of the raising from the dead of Jairus’s daughter, and of the son of the widow from Nain, scarcely differ from any ordinary healing. Jesus holds the hand of the girl who, in his opinion, was in any case not dead, and tells her in Aramaic to rise.71 Similarly, he touches the young man’s bier and orders him to stand.72 It is worth remarking, even before the matter is discussed more thoroughly,73 that Jesus is never depicted as a person concerned with defiling himself ritually through contact with a dead body. No one can be a healer and preserve himself from sickness and death, or an exorcist and be afraid of the devil.
Compared with the massive insistence of the Synoptists on the healing of mental and physical disease, other miracles assigned to Jesus are numerically insignificant. The calming of the storm on the Sea of Galilee,74 and the feeding of a large crowd with a few loaves and fishes,75 must be set beside other Jewish miracle tales of a similar kind.76 Others appear to be secondary accretions: for example, the story of Jesus walking on the water by night,77 the unexpectedly large catch of fish by Peter and his colleagues,78 and that most convenient landing by the penniless Peter of a fish with a coin in its mouth of just the right value to allow him to pay the Temple-tax for himself and Jesus.79
Jesus the Teacher
From the outset the Gospels portray Jesus as a popular preacher and preserve various types of sayings ascribed to him. Some of these may have been handed down intact, but others are reformulations of the originals made by the early Church, and still others are actual interpolations devised to secure the authority deriving from the ‘words of the lord’ for beliefs in vogue at a subsequent stage of doctrinal development. It is not proposed at this moment even to try to extricate the authentic from the inauthentic, but simply to determine what kind of teacher Jesus was according to the evangelists. The enquiry will be concerned not so much with the contents as with the mode of his preaching, and the impression it left on sympathetic listeners.
Contrary to the Essene practice reserving instruction to initiates only,80 but imitating John the Baptist, Jesus addressed his preaching in Galilee to all who had ears to hear – or rather, to all Jews with ears to hear, for he never envisaged a systematic mission to Gentiles.
‘I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and to them alone.’81
But even within Israel he preferred the uneducated, the poor, the sinners and the social outcasts.82 All were called to repentance and told that God’s rule over the world was imminent.
‘The time has come; the kingdom of God is upon you; repent, and believe the Gospel.’83
His ethical message was also aimed at all and sundry, as were also his parables, a form of homiletic teaching commonly used by rabbinic preachers. That he employed them to conceal the meaning of his message84 is a contorted and tendentious explanation. Non-Jews unaccustomed to Palestinian teaching methods must have found some of them difficult to comprehend, but it would have been they, and not Jesus’ direct disciples, who would have needed every detail of a similitude to be spelled out.
The equally traditional Jewish method of preaching in the form of Bible interpretation is less frequently attested in the Gospels, though this may be accidental. Nevertheless, if Jesus was primarily a teacher of morals, he might be expected to have shown a liking for short, pithy, colourful utterances, the kind of rabbinic logia with which the pages of the Sayings of the Fathers in the Mishnah are filled. He several times taught in synagogues85 and once delivered the liturgical sermon after reading the prophetic lesson of the day in Nazareth.86
Did the preaching of Jesus differ from that of his contemporaries? Yes, the evangelists assert, in so far as, unlike the doctors of the Law, he spoke with authority.87 New Testament commentators usually see in this a contrast between Jesus’ method of teaching and the rabbis’ habit of handing down a legally binding doctrine in the name of the master from whom they learned it, which was held to derive from a chain of tradition traceable (ideally) back to Moses. Jesus, however, was no expert in Jewish law, and it is therefore misleading to compare his style of instruction to that of later rabbinic academies. It is more probable that people saw the exorcisms and cures as confirmation of Jesus’ teaching. For instance, it was when moved by amazement at his expulsion of a demon that his listeners cried out:
‘What is this? A new kind of teaching! He speaks with authority.
When he gives orders, even the unclean spirits submit.’88
This interpretation appears clearly preferable to that opposing the ‘scribal’ authority of the rabbis to the ‘prophetic’ authority of Jesus.89
If he adopted a personal style of teaching, was his doctrine itself a novelty? Did he reject or contradict any of the basic beliefs of Judaism? Discounting passages which represent him as speaking lightly of certain non-scriptural customs held to be highly important by other teachers, or as interpreting a biblical verse in a sense different from that habitually ascribed to it, there still remains one crucial text apparently showing him ‘at variance with his inherited Judaism’,90 namely, that concerned with clean and unclean food.91
The argument originates in a complaint lodged by Pharisees that the disciples of Jesus fail to conform to the tradition of ritual hand-washing before meals, the implication being that dirty hands can render food unclean and so cause defilement. Judging from his reply in Matthew, Jesus thought the whole matter of external cleanness trivial compared with moral uncleanness.
‘Whatever goes in by the mouth passes into the stomach and so is discharged into the drain. But what comes out of the mouth has its origins in the heart; and that is what defiles a man. Wicked thoughts, murder, adultery . . . perjury, slander . . .’92
In Mark, however, the text is so modified that it is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that Jesus rejected the basic Jewish dietary law.
‘Do you not see that nothing that goes from outside into a man can defile him, because it does not enter into his heart but into his stomach, and so passes out into the drain?’ Thus he declared all foods clean.93
But if the disciples understood Jesus’ words in this sense, why did they, and especially Peter, who put the question to Jesus and was answered by him, react so strongly against the possibility of eating forbidden, non-kosher food? For when the chief of the apostles is ordered in a vision by a heavenly voice to eat every kind of meat, instead of exclaiming, ‘Of course, I now remember the words of the lord!’ he expresses shock and indignation.94 Paul, too, might have been expected to have appealed to his lord’s recommendation when he himself set aside Jewish ceremonial laws.95
In the circumstances it is reasonable to ask whether a phrase meaningful in Aramaic can be discerned beneath the Marcan Greek gloss, ‘Thus he declared all foods clean’ (literally, ‘purifying all foods’). It has already been suggested that the word ‘food’ is employed metaphorically for ‘excrement’,96 but to this it should be added that a possible polite term for latrine, ‘the place’ (dukha), might invite a pun on the verb ‘to be clean’ (dekha): ‘. . . it does not enter into his heart but into his stomach, and so passes out into “the place” where all excrement “is purged away” . . .’ This hypothetical exegesis is indirectly supported by the oldest available Semitic version of Mark, the so-called Sinaitic recension of the Syriac Gospel. Sensing, as it were, the play on words underlying the Greek text, the translator replaces ‘drain’ with the euphemism ‘purge’ and renders the phrase: ‘. . . it goes into his belly and is cast into the purge which purges away all food.’97
If this interpretation is accepted, the one apparent doctrinal conflict