The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [18]
MORE MURDER IN THE BATH
“Odious to himself and to mankind, Constans [ca. A.D. 323–50] perished by domestic, perhaps by episcopal, treason in the capital of Sicily. A servant who waited in the bath, after pouring warm water on his head, struck him violently with the vase. He fell, stunned by the blow and suffocated by the water; and his attendants, who wondered at the tedious delay, beheld with indifference the corpse of their lifeless emperor.”
—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Jesus who appears in the gospels was either rebellious or indifferent when it came to some of the most important of these impure states. In the course of his healing, he touched the dead, as well as people with leprosy-like conditions and a woman with a “bloody issue” (vaginal discharge)—all forbidden. He scandalized the Pharisees, one of the strictest groups when it came to ritual purification, by belittling one of their central practices, washing their hands before eating. Mark’s gospel describes their dismay when Jesus’ disciples eat bread with unwashed hands: “For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of their elders” (Mark 7:1–23). In Luke’s version of the story, it is Jesus who sits down to eat without washing, shocking his Pharisee host (Luke 11:37–54). Jesus’ response in both accounts is to belittle the custom and accuse the Pharisees of hypocrisy. A man is not defiled by what goes into him, he says in Mark’s gospel, only by what comes out of him. “Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter,” he retorts in Luke’s account, “but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness” (Luke 11:39). It’s the familiar Christian dichotomy between outer and inner, between flesh and spirit, between the letter of the law and its essence, applied to ritual handwashing. The handwashing stories were traditionally read by Christians as examples of the Pharisees’ badgering Jesus with the minutiae of the law, but they also point to what became a telling separation between Judaism and Christianity.
Detail from The Birth of the Virgin, by Pietro Lorenzetti. Bathing a newborn baby, whether the Virgin Mary, Jesus or a saint, was a favourite theme in medieval religious painting.
Scholars have advanced various reasons to explain Jesus’ indifference to ritual purity. His thinking may have been influenced by his origins in a rural, Galilean branch of Judaism that was relatively unconcerned with ritual purity. His teachings on morality may also have inclined him away from ritual cleansing, for he does not seem to have believed that the innocently “impure,” menstruating women or men with a discharge, for example, needed purification. Nor were the morally culpable absolved, in Jesus’ view, by immersing themselves in a ritual pool—they also had to repent. As a further complication, the speech and actions of the Jesus we meet in the gospels may well have been doctored to suit the attitudes of the early Church.
St. John baptizes Jesus. Baptism is one of Christianity’s rare ritual washings, and until the seventh century it involved a full immersion. Because pagan rituals marking the summer solstice often included water and immersion, the Church Christianized them by celebrating the feast of St. John the Baptist near the solstice, on June 24.
So the reasons behind Jesus’ attitude to ritual purification remain stubbornly opaque. And whatever they were, they do not lead in a straight line to a Christian devaluation of cleanliness. Ritual purity is not the same as cleanliness. You can be physically clean and ritually impure, just as you can be physically