Board index ‹ Specific Bible verses, texts, and passages ‹ Luke

[Kata Plasma]

Why did the Pharisees refuse to eat with sinners and tax collectors?

1 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Luke 15

[jimwalton]

They were known as purists, both from the culture around them, and from the majority of the supposed religious Jews who were really hypocrites. Through the ages their task had evolved into being a group who kept to a strict observance of the Law, and tried their best to hold others' feet to the flame also. In that role, the avoided all physical contact with the heathen, as did many Jews, in order to avoid being defiled. . They also, however, avoided physical contact with any non-Pharisees, even among other Jews. (Jesus’s contact with tax collectors, sinners, and lepers gave them great latitude to find fault with him.)

In those days, eating with someone was a sign of friendship, fellowship, and association. Much like traditional Hinduism and their identification of the class of "untouchables," the Pharisees considered eating with known sinners (according to the Jewish law, those who rejected the rituals and cult of Judaism) a breach of purity. In their efforts to be "God's kind of people," Jesus accused them instead of being hypocrites of the highest class.

[Kata Plasma]

> They also, however, avoided physical contact with any non-Pharisees, even among other Jews.

In order to not be defiled? How did non-Pharisees become defiled and how might one transmit that defilement to another? Through physical touch? Was this purely a "ceremonial" issue or did the Pharisees believe sins like murder made someone unclean and contagious?

[jimwalton]

> In order to not be defiled?

Correct. They were concerned about ritual defilement.

> How did non-Pharisees become defiled and how might one transmit that defilement to another? Through physical touch?

As far as the meal of this passage is concerned, the Pharisees considered it improper and defiling to eat with those who were not part of the Jewish religious community (breaking bread with someone implied an affinity for that person; it connoted acceptance. Table fellowship was the closest fellowship known in this cultural context).

Here defilement would not happen by physical contact, but instead by the gesture and event. To eat with someone indicated associative fellowship, and even to be at the same table to make someone of this religious persuasion (Pharisaic theology) unclean.

James Brownson writes, "Keeping Israel separate from the surrounding nations begins to dominate Jewish thinking after Israel’s return from exile. During the Second Temple period, the primary practical function of purity codes, particularly dietary restrictions, was to keep Jews separate from other people in their ordinary lives, whether or not they were living in Canaan. Indeed, the literal meaning of the Aramaic word *perushim*, from which the word *Pharisee* is derived, is "distinct and separate ones." The Pharisees wanted to keep Israel pure and separate from her neighbors, and they sought to deepen the sense of Israel’s holiness and distinctness in all of life, not merely in worship at the Temple in Jerusalem.

"Yet it is precisely this sense of holiness as separateness, and the dominant concern to avoid defilement, that distinguished the Pharisees from Jesus. The Pharisees derisively called Jesus a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Jesus is accused of failing to keep himself appropriately separate, both from the dominating Roman occupiers and from those who defile themselves by scorning the law. He failed, in their view, to honor the boundaries of wholeness and distinctness that underlay the holiness code of Leviticus."

If I can read between the lines, they thought that a truly religious person—one who wanted to be close to God—needed to separate themselves from the contamination of sin. It’s a worthy thought, but in living that out they ended up separating themselves from people who were sinners, as if the sin of those people was contagious. In a sense, it is, but in another sense, as Jesus is about to tell us, there is a difference between the sin and the people who are sinners.

> Was this purely a "ceremonial" issue or did the Pharisees believe sins like murder made someone unclean and contagious?

This was purely a ceremonial issue. The Mosaic Law nowhere forbids Jews from eating with Gentiles (though there are a lot of food laws in Judaism. If a particular food were being served at that meal, such as pork, the Jew would not eat that).

Murder was never a matter of uncleanness or ritual contagion, but rather of wrong: a violation of the inherent dignity and worth of human beings, and a taking of life that is contrary to God's nature (life) and His purposes (to give and to bring life).