[alehander42]

It is about the actual purpose of the Law and it references ritual purification. It's about human traditions vs God's Law. We don't need to wash our hands as a spiritual ritual before eating, we absolutely can wash them if it makes sense to wash them, e.g. hygiene.

Read Mark 7:

1 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus 2 and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.[a]) 5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”

larger second EDIT:

The focus is of course, spiritual, and it is on the actual things that defile people, for example:

20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

[JetAlone]

I tried to explain this too, but these airwaves are sadly dominated by people vehemently motivated to buttress the narrative that Christians are or should be against any form of hand washing if they were consistent. I think this case (among others) would be a pretty good litmus test to root out people who don't want to understand and, however intelligent or civil, are just not emotionally ready to discuss it.

I can understand to some degree why they act as they do; they honestly think lots of people will tragically die and have their rights trampled on if they don't generate enough apostasy or prevent enough conversions to deter the Christian worldview from regaining enormous appeal. Being an anti-christian culture warrior feels rewarding. I should know, I used to be one. The simple matter I eventually discovered as I got older is, there is no life, no justice, no joy, no freedom, no rights, no good, nothing worth having without a sincere relationship with the Creator of all these things. I can't just generate these virtues and hoard them for myself, they ultimately came from something greater than me.

[alexvoda]

For your first paragraph, the airwaves are not filled with anything. There is no narrative that Christians are or should be against hand washing. Betterunix2 made a comment referencing an unrelated passage showing intentionally poor hygiene in order to reject the idea that the fearlessness of God in the presence of a human disease should be a guidline for behaviour in the current behaviour. People are not God, and are rightfully afraid of disease.

That passage is about how action is more important than ritual. That ritual was built on superstitions which were built on observations that cleanliness resulted in better life outcomes. Over time people forgot the reasons behind the (healthy) ritual. The moral of that passage is that interpersonal behaviour is more important for salvation than conformance to rituals. It is replacing one superstition.

On the other hand, in a paralel thread, you are pushing that very idea you are complaining about.

> You can wash your hands if you think it is wise to, but ...... God can make the water a worse poison to you.

[betterunix2]

Christianity already has enormous appeal, it is literally the most widely practiced religion in the world. I never said Christians are against hand washing, I said that Jesus taught his disciples, who lived before Christianity was a religion (if you asked the disciples what they practiced they would have all said "Judaism"), that they need not wash their hands before eating. This is recorded in the gospels, so if you have some kind of problem with it then your argument is not really with me.

I also take issue with the idea that there is no joy or value in life unless someone has a "sincere relationship" with the Christian deity. There are plenty of happy, healthy, and fulfilled atheists, not to mention the many polytheists and idolaters who live equally fulfilling, joyous, and righteous lives. You do not have to agree with how anyone else approaches life, but to claim that only the Christian deity can bring meaning, worth, freedom, or good to a person's life is the darkest worldview I can imagine. Christianity is the world's most popular religion but the majority of the world is not Christian. Do you actually think that non-Christians live depressing lives dominated by evil and unjust practices?

[JetAlone]

Any virtuous things non-Christians have ultimately come from God. Non-Christians' lives, like anyone else's, are dominated by whatever they choose or allow to. What they do lack (in varying degrees) is vision and faith acting like a compass to regularly re-direct their lives completely towards the source of all good. Willfully serving a passion for anything other than God is the archetype of any unjust practice, which necessarily self-inflict meaningless pain. Honesty, humility and love naturally act as pointers to better temperaments and a truer faith which in their fullness will bring one to accept Christ's sacrificial love which destroyed death for all human beings, and seek His Church. This choice begins a long, perilous struggle to be united with God.

For today, I pray that you and yours will not imagine nor try to imagine any worldview darker than the Gospel for the entire day, for there is none brighter.

[alexvoda]

JetAlone, your second paragraph is a tipical example of why nonchristians find it unpleasant to engage in discussions, especially on religious topics, with devout Christians. I do not believe there is a way to convey to you what a nonchristian feels reading that second paragraph.

[alehander42]

Today's judaism is very different from Second Temple judaism. My impression is that it is probably more different from it than some forms of Christianity, e.g. Eastern Orthodoxy. It seems that it has evolved as a reaction against Christianity and morphed into a very different religion.

Also, no, this is not the message in the Gospel. Here is an example commentary of the scene if you actually want some context: https://biblehub.com/commentaries/ellicott/matthew/15.htm

[betterunix2]

"It seems that it has evolved as a reaction against Christianity"

Citation needed.

Pretty much all secular scholarship I have ever seen on this topic has concluded that both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were reactions to the destruction of the second temple. Rabbinic Judaism is the direct intellectual and religious descendant of the pharisee sect, and has always stood on its own merits. The only rabbinic tradition that definitively developed in response to the rise of Christianity is the birkat haminim, a prayer that was used to "out" secret Jewish Christians before the final split between the religions. Beyond that, all there is are attempts to deal with / respond to persecution of Jews and Jewish institutions by Christians in later centuries (e.g. the fixing of the Jewish calendar after Christian Rome disbanded the Sanhedrin).

Don't overstate the importance of Christianity to the early rabbis. Rabbinic literature is generally dismissive of non-Jewish religions and Jewish Christians like the Ebionites were seen as heretics -- a term the rabbis used for non-rabbinic Jewish movements of the Roman era (of which there were many, none of which have survived).

As for the Gospel, it does not really matter what people thought hand washing was for -- ritual washing hands did improve their hygiene, just like ritual bathing. Jesus told his followers not to bother, and it does not matter whether or not he understood the hygiene implications, because not washing their hands was still detrimental to hygiene.

[alehander42]

He wasn't talking about the hygiene of washing hands. He is God, he understood. He was making an obvious point about human traditions a which the Gospels even clarify with context.

The Scripture is full of similar scenes. Peter sees a vision with a sheet with unclean animals ready for eating. The focus was on evangelizing the people who eat those foods tho: the gentiles.

The destruction of the Second Temple was prophesied by Christ, and apostles started serving in the Church only 50 days after His resurrection, on Pentecost. So yes, rabbinical judaism has been a reaction to the destruction of the second temple, but the Church was already active and persecuted in the center of the roman empire, many epistles were already written and there were churches through greece and rome

[alexvoda]

> It seems that it [Judaism] has evolved as a reaction against Christianity and morphed into a very different religion.

That line of thought will not lead to a good place.

[alehander42]

Why? Rabbinical judaism is not the same as the Second Temple faith. Research its history and if it preserved the same interpretation of OT

[betterunix2]

Rabbinic Jews do not claim to practice Second Temple Judaism, they claim to practice a religious tradition that followed from the pharisee sect that existed during the Second Temple period. Orthodox Jewish scholars will openly tell you exactly how common modern practices like the Passover Seder developed after the destruction of the temple. There is nothing controversial about it; Judaism as alive and dynamic as Christianity or Islam. Religions change over time because cultures, societies, and the realities of life change over time.

Really though, what makes you think any form of Second Temple Judaism could have survived the destruction of the Second Temple? Moreover, if Jews could find a way to keep Judaism alive in some form after the destruction of the First Temple, why should it be surprising that some form of Judaism was kept alive after the destruction of the Second Temple?

[betterunix2]

Well, did Jesus tell his follows that they should not be hypocrites who wash their hands because they blindly follow traditions and that they should instead wash their hands because it is good for their health? No, he simply taught them not to bother washing hands before eating.

Moreover, Jesus is recorded elsewhere as having taught his disciples a practice of ritual foot washing (involving washing another person's feet), which remains a practice among some Christians to this very day. He even went on to explicitly indicate that foot washing is spiritually important. Jesus also taught his followers to practice a form of ritual bathing, clearly given spiritual significance and clearly a variation of Jewish ritual bathing, that remains widely practiced by Christians today: baptism. So, if we accept the account of the gospels, it would seem that Jesus was not really opposed to washing rituals in general, nor to treating ritualized washing as a matter of spiritual significance, he just had a different concept than the mainstream Rabbinic tradition.

[alehander42]

I mean, it's simply very strange to read this through the lens of some kind of "rules of hygiene" outlook. Nobody took it that way: jews weren't some kind of naive children, traditions and rituals were deeply embedded in their culture. The gospel account gives the actual context and explicitly shows it has nothing to do with hygiene. He never tells them not to wash their hands: I've had OCD so at least to me it's painfully obvious it's more like "don't do X hoping this will clean your soul", they explicitly talk of defiling which is a spiritual concept.

Christ was not against the concept of God's ceremonial rules/law: after all, He was the one instituting it in the beginning, my understanding is that He was against hypocrisy and burdening people with custom rabbinic rules instead of focusing on the spirit of the Law.

You can just take a look at the excess of some modern rabbinical judaism ceremonial rules for proof.

Again: it's very hard for me to understand how you can read those passages with such a strange mindset: material things were often just shortcuts to spiritual conversations, they already had thousands of years of Scripture in that direction

[alexvoda]

The point of the hygiene optic is just that. The all knowing, all powerful, all loving God incarnate by definition should know all about hygiene and germs and quantum gravity and Pokemon and Covid and everything, by definition.

Yet, instead of teaching people about hygiene, God chooses to condemn the world to 1500+ years of easily preventable infantile death and all other kinds of suffering. Because, don't worry, afterlife is awesome, unless you go to hell like most people.

[alehander42]

A soul is infinitely more important than a temporal sickness and God is infinitely more merciful and wise than our limited capacity/knowledge can comprehend. And yes, Christ came to destroy death on the Cross: and yet, before His resurrection He lived through every joy and pain other humans do. And I am glad that He did gave His words of Life, flesh and blood, instead of a biology textbook.

John 3:16-21 "16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God."

[alexvoda]

As I said elsewhere, he just replaced one superstition with another superstition.

You are correct that the meaning of that passage is to critique hypocrisy, but in doing so, the nugget of actually valid advice that was accidentally embedded inside a superstition, was extirpated.

Jews 2000 ago, did not have notions of sanitation. They did not have germ theory. They happened to stumble upon a healthy practice and superstitions were built around that practice. They never had statistics or the scientific method to determine the effect of washing hands. Someone simply did so, managed to avoid some disease, then told others that by doing so managed to stay in God's grace. And so, a healthy practice became a ritual. Time passed and the origin of the ritual was forgotten. Jesus comes, and rightfully tells everyone that said ritual is irrelevant for God. Instead here is a bunch of other different superstitions.

[alehander42]

All of this is really not very relevant to the New Testament. Sadly I feel people back then had in some ways a better grasp of symbolism, proverbs and Scripture than us today.