Thread by @Delafina777

Not that I really think anything said on this hellsite will matter in the end, since it’ll likely all be lost in 10 years, but I said I would talk about parables and I’m hopped up on migraine meds so let’s do this.

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1192695295714316288

I think I'm gonna do this in a structure that resembles a comb: that is, a “spine” of a main line of discussion, and “teeth” coming off it to drill down into details, because it's my Twitter and I'm feeling experimental.

Spine tweets will be numbered and have an image, while teeth tweets will have the number of the spine tweet they come off of along with an X (and no image unless it’s necessary). If I want to elaborate on a thought later, I’ll use that method.

1 First off, disclaimers/assumptions/shorthand. I don’t necessarily believe these things to be true, but I’m also not interested in getting in the weeds about them (you’re free to have a discussion about them elsewhere, but don’t derail mine):

2 WARNING: Do not proselytize in my mentions or you’re gonna catch a block. I’m Jewish for a whole host of reasons, none of which are that I just don’t understand Christianity well enough or I’d be Christian. The same is true of most of my kin.

3 I’m ambivalent about the endeavor to “reclaim” Jesus as a Jew. While it’s intended to promote greater understanding and shalom between Jews and Christians, the actual result of it seems to just be increased Christian appropriation of post-Jesus Judaism. But I’m still gonna try.

4 I think there’s a significant problem with how Christians in general understand the parables, and with how Christian clergy tend to preach them. The parables get treated as if they’re Aesop’s fables: allegories that have a single, straightforward moral.

5 The flattening/banalization of parables actually starts with the gospels themselves: Luke immediately attaches a moral to each—often BEFORE relating the story, which is a crime against narrative—and Matthew obsessively insists EVERYTHING is somehow a fulfillment of prophecy.

6 I believe that to hear them properly, they actually need to be taken out of the gospel-writers’ explanatory context, which wouldn’t have been available to their original audience. I’m not saying don’t read it ever. I’m saying start with JUST the parable.

7 So, I think there are a number of things one should do—or, more often, NOT do—while hearing/reading these stories in order to hear them as their original audience would have heard them.

8 In summary, treat them FIRST as:
-STORIES
-Not allegories (esp retroactive ones)
-Not answer-providers but question-raisers
-challenging
-arising out of, not against, their Jewish context

9 First: The parables are, first and foremost, stories a Jewish teacher was telling to a Jewish audience. They had to work on their own, as self-contained STORIES, to be comprehensible to the audience. That’s how I’m approaching them.

10 Second: As an extension of this, listeners and preachers should resist an immediate move to allegory, in which each element in a story must stand for something specific outside the story, and the story requires a key to understand. Allegory is fine, but don’t *start* there.

11 Third: We should look at them as stories intended to raise questions, because, again, that’s how the form works in its cultural context. Jewish parables don’t exist to be comforting and simple. They exist to challenge and often, to indict.

12 If it’s *difficult* to hear, one is probably on the right track.

13 Finally, on that difficulty: there’s a trend among Christian clergy/writers who know enough about Jewish parables to get they're challenging but want to hold on to the familiar, traditional meaning of the parable to make a certain homiletic move, which is A Problem.

14 That move is: if the Hallmark meaning is the one they want to stick with, but they know that the parables were supposed to challenge the audience, then the Hallmark meaning must have been the one that was challenging to the original audience.

15 Thus, if The Prodigal Son is a parable about how God is compassionate toward the repentant sinner, then Jesus’s Jewish audience must have found the idea that God is compassionate toward people who’ve screwed up challenging.

16 This ties into a broader trend in which Jesus is defined over and above his Jewish context. By this line of thinking, if Jesus was preaching good news to the poor, the rabbis must have had contempt for the poor and been preaching good news to the rich.

17 So, what IS a parable? In English, it’s a story that parallels or compares things—a story that is somehow connected to a real-world situation in a way designed to make a point about that situation.

18 In Hebrew, it’s a mashal, which actually comes from the root for “rulership.” It can mean a comparison, and is often used in the sense of “cautionary tale” (e.g. 1Ki 9:7 and Ps 69:12).

19 Neither a secret tale with a hidden meaning nor a transparent story with a clear-cut moral, the mashal is a narrative that actively elicits from its audience the application of its message—or what we would call its interpretation.” academia.edu/37427742/David…

20 What actually counts as a parable in the NT doesn’t seem subject to any sort of consistent agreement. Are there 38? 46? 22? Most biblical scholars seem to agree that there aren’t any parables in John, but beyond that? Nothing.

21 I’m going to use this since it seems pretty comprehensive and clear. slideshare.net/heartnoi2k/par…

22 For each parable I talk about, I’m going to talk about a handful of traditional interpretations, then how I think a first-century Jewish audience would have heard it.

So, I'm going to go get some more tea, add some notes to some of these tweets, and then talk about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

1x I don’t know whether a dude named Yehoshua was wandering around the Galilee during the 1st century CE telling these stories, or whether Jesus is a composite figure like King Arthur. For the sake of this discussion, I’m attributing these stories to him.

1x The gospels were likely created over time by multiple authors and editors working from multiple earlier sources. They’re in Greek. Jesus and his followers probably spoke Aramaic.

1x The Gospel of Luke as it exists today likely wasn’t written by a dude named Luke. For the sake of efficiency, I’m going to talk about “Luke” as the author, and I’m going to sometimes talk about Greek words.

1x I read Hebrew and Aramaic. I don’t read Greek well enough to be useful in it, so generally in terms of nuances or conventions of use, I’m going to defer to scholars who do.

1x I can, however, use a concordance and might point out where the same word is used. Doing so is not a claim to fluency in Greek.

1x I’m not Christian, so I’m not really interested in arguments about “but he had divine knowledge/a purpose human beings couldn’t understand/etc." I’m interested in how a 1st c Jewish audience would have heard the stories he told, and how people today hear and understand them.

1x I do actually think the gospels have utility for Jews in that they’re probably the best-preserved records of life in 1st c Judea that we have. But I’m primarily interested in knowledge of them as a form of self-defense against antisemitism.

1x I’m obviously not a pastor. I’m not an academic. I’m not a religious professional. I am a professional storyteller with a degree in literary criticism and two decades of enthusiastic study of Jewish narrative and life for Jews in the 1st century CE.

1x My use of “Judea” here reflects Roman and Jewish use at the time (it was renamed Syria Palestina in 135 CE) and is not an endorsement of modern uber-Zionist use of the name.

4x That’s not how Jewish parables work, and whatever Jesus may have been, he was a master of the form. To flatten his work into banal Hallmark-card maxims is to do both him and his cultural context/tradition an injustice, and to rob yourself of narrative and ethical riches.

4x I mean, if you believe that Jesus WAS a god, or divinely inspired, and that he wasted all that supernatural juice on repeating kindergarten level teachings like, “be nice to people” with no depth beyond that, I don’t know what to tell you.

4x Worse, that very banality is often tied to harmful anti-Jewish and historically inaccurate readings. I am not necessarily trying to *replace* traditional Christian readings, but I am trying to open the stories to a richer constellation of meaning.

4x I believe that his style of storytelling was actually both edgy/challenging and generous/compassionate. That style deserves to be heard.

6x This doesn’t mean I’m never going to talk about their context, since sometimes the events a parable is paired with are illustrative. I just think having the gospel writer TELL you what a story means prevents you from hearing the story for itself.

9x That means resisting retroactive readings as the parables being primarily about Jesus’s death and resurrection, the gentile church, etc. Those readings weren’t available to his original audience.

9x If that was ALL the stories were about, he wouldn’t have HAD an audience because what he was saying would have sounded like complete gibberish to the listeners.

9x More to the point, the quality of the parables as self-contained narrative is self-evident. They work as stories. They should be heard as stories. Attaching additional levels of meaning is fine, but listeners should START with hearing them as they are.

10x I’ll distinguish here between what I see as actual parables—that is, narratives—and similes credited to Jesus (like the “parable” of the mustard seed) that are one- or two-sentence direct comparisons that lack any sort of narrative features.

11x This means looking for the sharp reading, being comfortable with questions, not assuming that the parable universally—rather than listeners individually—needs to answer the questions it raises.

11x The example par excellence of the form is, of course, the parable Nathan tells to David about the poor man and his she-lamb. He simply tells the story, then asks a question—what should be done to the rich man who slaughtered the poor man’s lamb, rather than one of his own?

11x David, appalled, declares the rich man deserves death. It’s only then, *after* the story, *after* the questions, *after* the target listener had a chance to form his own conclusions, that Nathan draws parallels to the real-life situation that triggered it. “You are that man.”

11x This example is also illustrative in that it’s *not* a clear allegory. The rich man may clearly represent David, but who’s the poor man and who’s the she-lamb? The genders suggest Uriah as the man and Bathsheba as the lamb, and that’s how it’s often read.

11x Yet it’s Uriah that David has had slaughtered, not Bathsheba. Did he take the wife from the husband or the husband from the wife? And *why* was the rich man able to do what he did with no apparent consequences?

11x I could obviously go on at length about this but that’s not this thread. The point is that the parable is intended to be challenging, not cozily reassuring.

16x If Jesus told stories about women, then Jews at the time must have been scandalized to hear stories featuring women (this would come as a great surprise to Rivka, Dvorah, Tamar, Yael, and other female Jewish protagonists).

Ok, notes added. NOW I'm getting tea, and then I'll get back to it.

A1 Okay, so, here's the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. It only appears in Luke (18:9-14), so you can use this version from the Jewish Annotated New Testament or check your translation of choice.

A2 I think Luke is doing glossing both at the beginning (overtly) and the end (crediting it to Jesus), here. So here's the *story* without commentary.

A3 So, we all know the common interpretation of this one, right? If your prayer is all about how great you are in comparison to everyone else, God isn't gonna like it? (And also, self-evidently, you're kind of a dick.)

A4 That's fine, I suppose. I mean, it's pretty shallow and pretty obvious and I'm sort of surprised anyone thought you needed to be God Himself Walking The Earth to come up with it, but sure.

If only preachers had stopped there.

A5 Unfortunately, Augustine had to jump right in there and be gross about the whole thing, practically as soon as Christianity got off the ground.

A6 This is what I mean when I say that immediate moves to allegory are a problem. Suddenly the story of two individuals that's probably supposed to prompt individual self-examination is about *groups.* Jews vs. Gentiles.

A7 The inability to hear the story in the way its original audience would have, again, is there already in Luke. Some pastors will acknowledge that Jews at the time would have assumed the Pharisee was a good dude and hated the tax collector, and that's where the pop comes in...

A8 ...but the ability to hear it that way is already eroded by Luke, who never met a tax collector who wasn't trying to be a decent guy (3:12, 7:29, 15:1, 5:29-30, 19:2) and never met a Pharisee who wasn't an asshole.

A9 So Christians are already primed to prefer tax collectors to Pharisees. And so, in exegesis and homiletics, the tax collector becomes a representative for the *powerless* and marginalized.

Of course, I'll note that this comes from a book that's used as a textbook in many seminaries, and--as far as I can tell--is seen as a progressive textbook rather than a conservative one. He's still gonna take a swipe at the gays tho.

A10 And this provides a comfortable reading for progressive Christians--the Pharisee is conservative Christians, who look down on "tax collectors" like gay people, who aren't actually particularly sinful and aren't hurting anyone else.

A11 Then, we have some historical... theorizing. One couldn't pay both Temple tithes and Roman taxes--and, oh yes, "associating with Gentiles" was a sin. No sources for this statement are cited--I guess the Holy Spirit gives you detailed historical knowledge or something.

A12 Additional history includes the "fact" that the Pharisees participated in collecting tithes for the Temple, and that they'd changed the laws of ritual purity so that being in debt made one ritually impure. No sources are cited.

A13 And then we've got that the Pharisees were intensely nationalistic and encouraged their fellow Jews in an intense hatred of Gentiles. Yet again, no sources are cited. We just have... magical Christian knowledge of Second Temple Judaism.

A14 And ultimately, we have original purpose of this parable being to bring down the Temple itself, and by extension, Judaism. Again, this is coming from what seems to be accepted as a relatively progressive teaching text.

A15 Got a few notes to add to some of those, but broadly:
-not sure why Christian clergy feels comfortable making "factual" statements in textbooks about how 2nd Temple Judaism worked without citing sources
-whenever Christians start talking about ritual purity, it's bad
-sigh

A16 I dunno, probably all these examples should have been a subthread, but too late. Anyway, let's sweep away centuries of widely accepted Christian hot takes, and go back to the story itself, and how original listeners would likely have heard it.

A17 First off, all on its own, this parable is a bear-trap. It's a Catch-22 for most interpretations:

The moment you JUDGE the Pharisee, you BECOME the Pharisee.

If the point is to *choose* one of these men as "right," the only way to win is not to play.

A18 Second, let's talk about who Pharisees and tax collectors were in a 1st century Jewish context.

Pharisees were the party of the people, decentralizing worship from the nobility- and Roman-controlled Temple into synagogues.

A19 Far from being seen as self-righteous hypocrites, they were beloved by the people. I mean, take it from their enemies: Josephus and the Gospel writers, both of whom were pissed off that the people liked the Pharisees so much.

A20 Josephus was wealthy and probably a Sadducee. Here's what he had to say:

A21 He points out that the Pharisees were beloved by the poor, while the Sadducees were able to persuade only the rich, and is pissed off because the Pharisees preach a lenient and flexible interpretation of the law.

A22 And note: he talks about how they were respected because they were virtuous in both their words and their conduct: they walked the walk in addition to talking the talk.

Far from being rigid legalists, they were engaged in trying to make the law *livable* and humane.

A23 Tax collectors, on the other hand? According to Luke himself, as much as he likes them, they were ostentatiously rich (19:2, 5:29). They collected money from their own people to serve a brutal occupying power.

A24 So instead of an elite and hypocritical religious authority and humble, marginalized outcast, we have a beloved teacher and advocate of the abused and a wealthy bootlicker of the 1%.

A25 There's a lot of Christian noise about how they're mentioned as standing apart and that's because the Pharisee won't go near the "ritually impure" tax collector.

This is, to use a very treyf metaphor, complete hogwash.

A26 Being a tax collector might make you a traitorous bully, but it doesn't make you ritually impure.

For the tax collector to be *in the Temple at all* he has to be ritually pure.

A27 Moreover, rather than being outraged that the tax collector was in the Temple at all, as some Christian commentators suggest, most listeners would likely have been expecting this story to be about him doing t'shuvah, repentance. That's what the Temple is FOR.

A28 And that's something that would have been seen as admirable, not outrageous.

A29 So, what about what they're each praying/thinking/saying?

The Pharisee reflects on the good he's done (which, incidentally, goes above and beyond the requirements), and expresses gratitude for not being like less virtuous people.

A30 The tax collector declares himself a sinner and asks for mercy.

That's it.

A31 So, for the original listeners, there's an obvious piece missing here: is the tax collector doing ACTUAL t'shuvah? Is he going to stop being a tax collector?

A32 I'll come back to that in a minute, but I also want to note something about Jesus's moral of the story at the end. I'll just quote Amy-Jill Levine's "Short Stories by Jesus" here, since I don't read Greek:

A33 "Rather than" could be "alongside of" or even "because of."

And to understand that last, we have to talk about Sodom.

A34 For most Christians, the story of Sodom seems to be largely about homosexuality and divine wrath. For Jews, it's a formative story about our identity as a people: the story of Abraham arguing with God.

A35 Our founding father is a guy who will literally argue with his own creator if he thinks said creator is being unjust. That's who we are.

But the thing is, Abraham is making an incorrect assumption in that argument.

A36 He thinks he's arguing to protect the innocent from being killed along with the guilty. But we see shortly thereafter that those aren't the stakes--the innocent get shepherded out of the city by angels.

He's arguing that the merit of the innocent should protect the guilty.

A37 Worth noting that Lot isn't actually all that innocent. But while in Christianity, maybe any sin is enough to condemn you to death, in the Jewish reading here, any *merit* is enough to preserve your life. The residents of Sodom are totally corrupt. Lot & family aren't.

A38 And moreover, Abraham is arguing that that merit should protect the entire city from destruction. He's not saying, hey, get the innocent out before you destroy the city. He's saying *let the guilty survive for the sake of the innocent.*

A39 In later teachings, this becomes the merit of the ancestors Jews call on in prayers for protection, rain, and the like. It also becomes a teaching I think is super-relevant today, which is that of ethical critical mass.

A40 Up to a certain point, a bunch of good people can change a corrupt place for the better (heyo, tech companies). But if there are too few of them, they'll get corrupted or broken instead of making things better. So below that critical mass, you gotta get out.

A41 So, back to our Pharisee and tax collector. The idea that the Pharisee's merit actually saves the tax collector is a very Jewish one, given that it's a communitarian culture that says we are all responsible for each other.

A42 Also note that despite Christian commentators who want to criticize the Pharisee for believing he's done all this himself and basically "saved" himself through his works, he's actually *thanking* God for his ability to do so here.

A43 So we've got a supporter of the people against a brutal occupation looking at an agent of that occupation and saying "thank you, God, that I'm not like him."

What's that actually MEAN?

A44 So first-century Jews, hearing this story, would have come away with a lot of questions, and not likely with a clear takeaway.

-Is the tax collector going to, y'know, STOP being a tax collector?

A45 -Is it ethical to pray for mercy/absolution if you don't intend to stop the behavior?
-Is it wrong to give thanks you're not in a position where you're tempted to behave harmfully? ("there but for the grace of God" prayers?)

-Does our community have enough people devoted to doing the right thing to prevent the people doing the wrong thing from remaking it in their image, rather than vice versa?
-What's the Pharisee's responsibility to the tax collector?
-Is EITHER of these men "justified"?

A46 And those questions are actually *very* relevant, and not particularly comfortable, today.

Sub in "ICE agent" for "tax collector." Or, I dunno, who's not quite the 1% but eager to help them serf-ify the rest of us? A Wall Street bro? A pharma bro?

A47 So if we know that one of those people is praying for forgiveness for what they're doing, but isn't planning to stop doing it, are they "justified"?

A48 And if you're out here fighting day after day, giving money to the ACLU or RAICES or Planned Parenthood--heck, let's say you're sheltering an immigrant family--do you get to be grateful you're not choosing between your job and your soul? Do you get to feel good?

A49 And what's your responsibility to those ICE agents and pharma bros who might feel bad about what they're doing but aren't quitting their jobs?

A50 For that matter, what's your responsibility to anyone who supports what they're doing?

And can any of us be right with the universe alongside those people?

Anyway, it's late and I'm going to go to bed, even though I have about 900 other thoughts on this.

The point is: this story is full of questions. The answers are on us. Even on the most surface level, it's a Catch-22. Under that, it asks questions that are hard to face.

THAT's how these stories work. And if you're reducing it to "don't be smug" you've fallen into its trap, and missed the point.

Fin. For now. Have more thoughts on this one, and thoughts on a bunch more, but not tonight.

A42x Like, dude is going above and beyond. He's giving 1/10 of *all his income*, not just his agricultural produce, and fasting twice a week, which isn't required.

A42x It's interesting that commentators want to see punctilious (and, by implication, meaningless) ritual observance here. What the guy is doing is, essentially, paying extra taxes.

A42x As far as fasting, one can fast for a number of reasons in Jewish practice, but usually, it's as penance or to ask mercy from God.

A42x So we have someone who's sacrificing for the sake of his people (in giving more of his income than required), and either atoning personally, or, more likely, given the occupation, sacrificing food-wise to plead for mercy for his people.

A42x In other words, a very obvious reading of the contrast between the two men here is that the tax collector is asking for mercy through words alone, neither stopping the harm he's doing nor taking any *actions,* making any *sacrifices*, to plead for it...

A42x ...while the Pharisee is asking for mercy (and attempting to provide for his people) through actions, and thanking God that he's in a position to do so.

A42x And to be clear, being in a position--then or now--where you can give away a 10th of your income without that putting you in financial danger *is* something to be grateful for.

A42x Similarly, being in a position where you could fast twice a week without endangering your ability to make a living is *also* something to be grateful for.

A42x The Pharisees were not necessarily wealthy. Most of them, as far as we can reconstruct from the Mishnah & Talmud, had day jobs. Wandering teachers like Jesus relied on patronage.

A42x So this Pharisee, if he can both afford to give a 10th of ALL his income AND fast twice a week, is in a pretty stable financial position. Which actually is something worth giving thanks for.

A42x I'm not particularly enamored of the "thank goodness I'm not like those people who have to steal or sell out their own kin to get by" but the problem there is largely one of semantics/framing.

A42x "Thank goodness I'm not like them" vs "Thank goodness I'm not in their boat."

And this very much comes down to how the reader interprets it. You can read it as contempt. You can also read it as understanding.

A45x The big question here, which I sort of rushed past last night, the *punch* of this story, is the question of *what each man does next.*

Is the tax collector going to change? If not, if he goes right on doing what he was doing, then what was this prayer for?

And if he's going to ask for mercy with no real repentance, does he deserve it?

(I mean, from a Jewish perspective, praying for forgiveness for a sin you fully intend to keep committing is... kind of absurd.)

A45x But what the Pharisee is going to do next is actually just as pressing of a question. Here he is, thanking God for the abundance that lets him go above and beyond in his tithing and his fasting, while standing beside a man who basically robs his kindred for a living.

A45x From a Jewish perspective, even when we don't particularly like or approve of other Jews, we're still sorta responsible for them. They're family. And part of that is the obligation to engage in tochechah, rebuke. reformjudaism.org/mastering-art-…

A45x Basically, if you see another Jew committing wrongdoing, you're obligated to tell them to stop it. If you keep silent, you share in their guilt.

A45x As the Talmud puts it, "If he can stop the people of his city from sinning, but does not, he is held responsible for the sins of the people of his city." (Shabbat 54b)

We ARE our brothers' keepers.

A45x And the parable is very careful to let us know that the Pharisee *knows* that the guy standing next to him is a tax collector. He thanks God for not being like other wrongdoers in the abstract--"thieves, rogues, adulterers"--but notes "THIS tax collector."

A45x When I talk about the way that common Christian interpretations leap to anti-Jewish readings, the idea that that language is there to show that the Pharisee is a snobby, contemptuous asshole is a prime example.

A45x It's there to let us know that the Pharisee knows what this guy does for a living.

So here they both are in the Temple, the place one comes to formalize one's repentance, and this isn't a case where it's two strangers praying quietly and privately.

A45x So as much as the question about the tax collector is what does he do next? Does he actually change what he's doing?

The question about the Pharisee is what does HE do next in regard to the tax collector? Does he say nothing?

A45x What he SHOULD do, given that he knows that this guy's very profession is wrongdoing, is talk to him about it. And probably, given that he's in a good position himself, try to find a way to help him *stop* doing it. newsweek.com/ice-immigratio…

A45x So part of the punch of this parable is, essentially, that it ends on a cliffhanger.

What does each man do next?

What would WE do next in each of their positions? What SHOULD each do?

A45x We can't fully sympathize with either, probably--we're neither the best of the best nor the worst of the worst--so, since neither is a clear audience insert, we can put ourselves in the position of each.

What would we do?

A12x Strangely, I combed the Mishnah and couldn't find a SINGLE SECTION that added "being in debt" to the things that make one ritually impure.

But I guess when you're a pastor you get to just... make up things about Judaism?

A19x Let's talk a little bit more about who the Pharisees were. The etymology of the name "Pharisee" gets uncritically, almost universally, reported as meaning "separated."

A19x And from there you get the idea that the Pharisees held themselves apart from the common people, were contemptuous of Gentiles, etc.

The problem is, this etymology is anything but certain.

A19x See, for example, this talk given at the Pontifical Biblical Institute's conference on Jesus and the Pharisees last May.

A19x But in any case, regardless of the origin of the term, we know from what contemporary historical documentation exists about them, and the writings of their successors, that they were anything but "separated" from the people.

A19x That was the Essenes and/or the community at Qumran responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls (they may have been the same group). They were off in the desert living apart from everyone else. The Pharisees were in the larger community.

A19x The Sadducees were the Temple functionaries (with significant overlap with the nobility) and, often, Roman collaborators. The Pharisees were trying to preserve Jewish identity under the occupation, interpret Torah in livable and meaningful ways, and decentralize worship.

A19x That's not to say they were trying to get rid of the Temple--they still worshipped there, after all. And their attitudes toward the Roman occupation seem to have varied. They hated it, but were most likely divided on what to do about that.

A19x They would eventually throw their support (as much as Jews ever agree about anything) behind rebellion but at Jesus's time it looks like they were more focused on keeping people alive.

The Zealots were the party of GET THEM OUT *NOW*.

A19x So their attitude toward non-Jews was likely varied and complex. On one hand, they're living under occupation and that's going to make you pissed off at outsiders. On the other hand, we know that Gentile "god-fearers" worshiped at synagogues alongside Jews.

A19x And let's get a few things out of the way about ritual purity/impurity, while we're at it. A different parable (like the Good Samaritan) probably is a better place to discuss it, but since some Christians want to read it even into this one, a few notes.

A19x First off, stop assuming you know what those terms even MEAN. It's a translation, and they don't actually mean pure/impure or clean/unclean in the way we use those words in English.

A19x They're a ritual system revolving around states allowing one to worship in the Temple. Christians usually seem to want to put a moral valence on it--"impure"="evil" or "corrupt."

That's not how this works.

A19x Touching a Torah scroll, one of the holiest objects in Judaism, makes your hands impure. Having a baby, one of the greatest joys in a profoundly family-oriented culture, makes you ritually impure.

A19x Touching a corpse makes you impure, but preparing a body for burial is one of the holiest acts in which you can engage.

Holiness, goodness, and purity are all *separate spectrums*, *separate systems* here.

A19x For example, take this bit of the Mishnah:

A19x The Pharisaic argument here is that *the closer something is to the realm of holiness, or the more beloved it is,* the greater its impurity.

Impurity isn't about evil. It's about *intensity.* Things touching on moving into life or out of it, that partake of the numinous.

A19x So my advice to Christians would be accept that this is a system foreign to you, that you don't understand, and don't import it in regards to the parables, since *they don't talk about it.* You will inevitably get it wrong.

A19x Moreover, quit with the whole "Jews saw Gentiles as unclean" readings.

Ritual impurity wasn't a moral failing. Most Jews were ritually impure most of the time. You *have* to be to do important things like have kids and care for people. It's not a bad thing.

A19x No one--Jew or Gentile--was seen as *inherently* ritually impure.

The only difference was that Jews sometimes made themselves ritually pure, which Gentiles didn't.

A19x It's like having hair. (Almost) Everyone has it, some people remove it, it's going to come back, this is natural.

By definition, someone who never shaves is going to always be in a state of hairiness, but that doesn't mean they're inherently hairier than someone who shaves

A19x But again, most Jews were ritually impure most of the time--it didn't matter unless you were going to the Temple.

So reading horror at ritual impurity, or the idea that Jews saw Gentiles as inherently unclean, into the parables is... um, a lot of projection.

A19x Incidentally, if you want to go down the rabbithole of what purity actually was to 1st-century Jews, I recommend Yair Furstenberg: academia.edu/18434104/_Cont…

A22x So yeah, it's really unfortunate that *caring about the law* and making it your life's work in terms of trying to ensure it's livable and humane somehow got translated into "rigid legalists" or "hypocrites."

A22x Especially since, outside of the NT, the consensus seems to be that the Pharisees absolutely practiced what they preached. But then, I forget who said it, but in Jewish rhetoric, "a 'hypocrite' is any Jew who disagrees with you."

A22x Inter-group invective, however, takes on an entirely different cast when employed by outsiders, especially when there's a significant power differential.

A22x And because of that, Christians really need to stop using "Pharisee" to mean "hypocrite." Here are some threads on why.

https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1093962230369058816

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1162979461664370688

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/919675403345600512

https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1007357746923089926

https://twitter.com/theradr/status/1188736009808351232?lang=en

Oh, and if you're clergy and going to talk about the Pharisees, it's worth watching/listening to most of the talks given at the Pontifical Biblical Institute's conference on Jesus & the Pharisees. jesusandthepharisees.org/Schedule

But especially, as I've mentioned elsewhere, this talk on the name "Pharisee" itself, how it's been deployed, and the problems of etymology.

This one on Josephus and the Pharisees (i.e. what we can know about them from non-NT sources):

This one on the historicity of their relationship with Jesus:

And of course this one by the incomparable Amy-Jill Levine on preaching about the Pharisees:

actually have a bunch more to say about this but am going to play Fallout 4 instead