What’s Wrong with Contagious Purity? Debunking the Myth that Jesus Never Became Ritually Impure

How to cite this article: JP Staff Writer, “What’s Wrong with Contagious Purity? Debunking the Myth that Jesus Never Became Ritually Impure,” Jerusalem Perspective (2024) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/29371/].

Somewhere along the line it became popular among the Bible commentary writing crowd to insist that Jesus was uniquely immune to ritual impurity. Instead of Jesus becoming impure when he touched impure persons, they claim, the impure persons became pure.^[1] But implicit in this claim is a false dichotomy. Why does Jesus have to remain pure in order for the person he touched to be healed? Anyone who understands how ritual purity actually worked would say, even though Jesus became impure when he touched impure persons, the sources of their impurity disappeared. When Jesus touched the man with scale disease, the man’s scale disease disappeared (Matt. 8:3 ∥ Mark 1:41-42 ∥ Luke 5:13).^[2] When the hemorrhaging woman touched Jesus, her blood flow ceased (Matt. 9:22 ∥ Mark 5:29 ∥ Luke 8:44). When Jesus touched the bier of a widow’s dead son, her boy came to life (Luke 7:14-15). None of these stories require us to suppose that Jesus was immune to ritual impurity. Jesus typically healed by touch,^[3] and the touching of ritually impure persons with severe impurities necessarily caused Jesus to become ritually impure.

More recently, some scholars have claimed that Jesus reversed the normal functions of ritual purity. Jesus supposedly neutralized the contagiousness of ritual impurity and activated his personal purity in such a way that he could spread it to others. In essence, Jesus allegedly concocted a never-before-imagined concept of “contagious purity,” which for some reason many of Jesus’ contemporaries were supposedly willing to take seriously, even though it contradicted everything the Torah teaches about ritual purity.

To understand why the notions of Jesus’ immunity from ritual impurity and his contagious purity are so preposterous, one needs to have a basic understanding of how ritual purity functioned in ancient Jewish society.^[4]

Conclusion

The view that Jesus could not be affected by impurity and that Jesus was able to spread his purity to others is based on faulty assumptions and invalid inferences. Theologians wrongly assumed that if Jesus could have experienced impurity, this would in some way diminish his divinity or undermine his sinlessness. New Testament scholars wrongly confused purity with holiness and therefore draw all sorts of false conclusions about the purpose of the Temple and how purity functioned. Others repeatedly interpreted the sources’ silence with regard to purity issues as proof that Jesus was indifferent or impervious to impurity. Better awareness of what purity is and how it functioned in ancient Jewish society leads to more solid conclusions about Jesus, namely that in order to release people from conditions that kept them in a state of chronic impurity, Jesus willingly made himself impure.

While some observers may have thought it was Jesus’ attitude toward impurity that was unusual, it is more likely the case that it was Jesus’ ability to heal these individuals that his contemporaries found remarkable. Average people in Jesus’ society probably did avoid contracting ritual impurity from people with scale disease or abnormal discharges, but that may be because most people in Jesus’ society were not able to heal such persons by their touch. Therefore, it is unwise to draw conclusions on the basis of these healings regarding Jesus’ attitude toward impurity: whether he was strict or lenient or indifferent. However strict or lenient Jesus may have been with regard to purity in its own right, he placed love of neighbor over personal purity concerns. It is those cases where Jesus shows caution with regard to impurity and those instances where Jesus recommends participating in purification rites to others or participates in them himself that offer a clearer glimpse of the value Jesus placed on purity and the validity he attributed to the normal means of purification.

Although the notion that Jesus was immune to impurity and that his purity was contagious sounds theologically deep, it is spiritually shallow. It is an amoral doctrine that imparts no spiritual values. There is no ethical lesson to be drawn from the idea that Jesus possessed these anti-Torah powers. On the other hand, there are great spiritual depths to be plumbed from realizing that Jesus was willing to give up his own ritual purity for the sake of helping others in need. It is a lesson in compassion and humility that Jesus’ followers (or his admirers) can emulate. It can embolden us to not let religious scruples stand in the way of doing good to people who are different from ourselves or with whom we disagree. It can inspire us to reach out with the hand of friendship toward those whose ways we find strange or foreign. It can teach us to care less about how our religiosity affects ourselves and to care more about how our religiosity affects others.

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• ^[1] Statements such as the following are a representative sample:

  …his [i.e., Jesus’—JP] power is greater than that of the leprosy, so that he cannot himself be affected by it…. (Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to Saint Mark [Blacks New Testament Commentaries; London: A & C Black, 1991; repr. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1997], 80)

  Jesus’ touching of the dead and raising them to life should certainly have brought him uncleanness, but in fact had the effect of restoring them. (N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996], 192)

  …instead of impurity passing from the man to Jesus, the purity of Jesus’ holiness…passes from him to the man…. (Joel Marcus, Mark [2 vols.; AB 27; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2000; AB 27A; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009], 1:209)

  The touch which should have made Jesus unclean in fact worked in the opposite direction (R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text [NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002], 118)

  A reverse contagion has taken place: rather than Jesus being polluted by the leper, the leper is cleansed by Jesus’ holiness. (James R. Edwards, The Gospel Accroding to Luke [PNTG; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015], 160)

  Because God’s holiness and power is present in Jesus, he is not made unclean by touching a leper, but he changes the uncleanness of the leper into cleanness. (Michael Wolter, The Gospel According to Luke [2 vols.; trans. Wayne Coppins and Christoph Heilig; Waco, Tex.: Baylor, 2016-2017], 1:231)

  Dramatically, instead of the leprosy rendering Jesus unclean, Jesus delivers the man from his uncleanness…. (R. Alan Culpepper, Matthew: A Commentary (New Testament Library; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2022], 167)

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• ^[2] In this article we refer to the ritually defiling skin disorder(s) as “scale disease” because the term “leprosy” is entirely misleading. Whatever condition(s) the ritually defiling skin disorder(s) of Scripture may have been, it was (or they were) not Hansen’s disease (commonly referred to as “leprosy”). See E. V. Hulse, “The Nature of Biblical ‘Leprosy’ and the Use of Alternative Medical Terms in Modern Translations of the Bible,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 107.2 (1975): 87-105; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus (Anchor Bible; 3 vols.; Doubleday: New York, 1991), 1:775; The Oxford Annotated Mishnah: A New Translation of the Mishnah With Introductions and Notes (3 vols.; ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen, Robert Goldenberg, and Hayim Lapin; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 3:611. ↩
• ^[3] In addition to the numerous stories in which Jesus healed through the laying on of hands, Jesus’ surprise at the centurion’s suggestion that Jesus could heal simply by speaking the word demonstrates that healing by touch was Jesus’ usual method. Healing through speech also seems to have been a strategy for healing on the Sabbath without having to violate the commandment to rest. ↩
• ^[4] For a more in-depth introduction to the ancient Jewish concept of ritual purity, see Joshua N. Tilton, “A Goy’s Guide to Ritual Purity,” Jerusalem Perspective (2014) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/12102/]. ↩