Jesus the Jew

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Geza Vermes. Jesus the Jew

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These pages are dedicated to the memory of a friend, the leading Jewish New Testament scholar of his generation, whose outstanding achievement in the field of Gospel research is justly celebrated, and whose death on 9 October 1969 created a large gap in the world of learning and left a perceptible emptiness in the lives of the few who loved him.

PAUL WINTER

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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

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