Mark 7_1_13 background notes

Controversy over Jesus’ treatment of uncleanness (1:40–45; 5:21–43) and other religious issues (e.g., 2:1–3:35) climaxes in a confrontation over the failure of Jesus’ disciples to wash their hands.

7:1. It is not clear why Pharisees, most of whom were centered in Jerusalem, would have come to Galilee. Some commentators have suggested that they came to evaluate Jesus’ teaching, to see if he were a false teacher leading people astray (see Deut 13:13–14). This suggestion is possible; but had their mission been so serious, Mark would probably have mentioned it. They may have simply wished to hear and evaluate this popular teacher in a general way; or perhaps these represent a small number of Pharisees who did live in Galilee. Plenty of scribes already lived in Galilee.

7:2–3. The Pharisees were scrupulous about washing their hands as part of ritual purity, though this rule was not found in the Old Testament and may have originally derived from Greek influence. Mark gives his Gentile readers only a cursory summary of a much more complex custom (which some scholars think was limited to particular days), although his readers may have been familiar with related Jewish purity practices in their own parts of the world (Diaspora Jews were known for washing their hands).

7:4. Washing the hands removed partial ceremonial impurity picked up in the marketplace; hands were apparently immersed up to the wrist or purified by having water poured over them from a pure vessel. The Pharisees also had rules about immersing vessels to remove impurity.

7:5. The Pharisees held their traditions in high regard; unwilling to innovate more than necessary, they grounded everything they could in the teachings of their predecessors. Thus they want to know where Jesus, as a popular teacher, stands on issues on which their tradition commented (such as washing hands), so they can evaluate his teaching accordingly.

7:6–8. Jesus quotes a prophecy of Isaiah decreed against the Israel of Isaiah’s day (Is 29:13), which had been religious in form but not close to God in heart (Is 1:10–20). The very thing the Pharisees prized as spiritual—traditions derived from many pious and wise teachers who had tried to interpret and apply God’s law—Jesus claims is undercutting the plain message of God.

7:9–13. Many Jewish teachers regarded the commandment to honor father and mother as the most important in the law. Jewish interpreters included in this commandment providing for one’s parents when they were old. At the same time, tradition allowed that various items could be sacrificed or dedicated to the use of God’s temple. (“Corban” appears on sacrificial vessels and means “consecrated to God”; in popular usage, it could also mean “forbidden to so-and-so.”) One school of Jewish teachers in Jesus’ day declared that a vow that something was consecrated and forbidden to others applied even to family members, even if those to whom it was forbidden included them only accidentally.

Some apparently religious people had been using this practice to withhold what should have otherwise gone to the support of their parents—against Pharisaic belief that one should support one’s parents. Jesus attacks here not the Pharisees’ religious theory but their inconsistency with that theory in practice: their love for the law had led them (like some modern Christians) to such attention to its legal details that it created loopholes for them to violate the spirit of the law.