Coordinating Ritual and Moral Purity in the New Testament

How to cite this article: Joshua N. Tilton, “Coordinating Ritual and Moral Purity in the New Testament,” Jerusalem Perspective (2025) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/30047/].

Updated: 4 April 2025

In his book, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism,^[1] Jonathan Klawans argued that it was disagreements over moral purity that played as great a role in distinguishing the Second Temple Jewish sects (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, etc.) from one another as disagreements over ritual purity.^[2] Although disagreements regarding ritual purity were undeniably divisive, the issue of moral purity and how it should (or should not) be coordinated with ritual purity determined how each sect related to its members and to the Jewish people as a whole. An extreme view that merged ritual and moral purity required separation from broader “sinful” Jewish society, while a more moderate view that separated ritual and moral purity allowed for full participation in broader Jewish society. At the end of his book Klawans analyzed three New Testament figures—John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul—with respect to how they coordinated the concepts of ritual and moral purity, with a view to better understanding how these figures fit in with or stood apart from the other ancient Jewish sects.

In this essay we will attempt to refine Klawans’ analysis of these New Testament figures by introducing a small but consequential distinction regarding the communicability of moral impurity, which he seems to have left out of the discussion. We will also take each figure’s audience into the equation, because the audience each figure addressed determines what they said about the issues of ritual and moral purity every bit as much as their opinions regarding how the two concepts should be correlated. By taking these factors into account we may be better equipped to understand how John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul coordinated the concepts of ritual and moral purity.

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Notes

1. Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). ↩
2. Ibid., viii. ↩