Mark 7.19.
Mark 7.17-19 NIV - 17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? 19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)
Jesus has an actual point to make with this passage, but a number of Christians skip it altogether because of how they choose to interpret it. Namely they take the clause
This spin isn’t just found in the
- ASV. “This he said, making all meats clean.”
- AMPLIFIED. “(By this, He declared all foods ceremonially clean.)”
- CSB. “…(thus he declared all foods clean).”
- ESV/NRSV. “(Thus he declared all foods clean.)”
- GNT. “(In saying this, Jesus declared that all foods are fit to be eaten.)”
- MESSAGE. “(That took care of dietary quibbling; Jesus was saying that all foods are fit to eat.)”
- NASB. “(Thus He declared all foods clean.)”
- NET. “(This means all foods are clean.)”
- NLT. “(By saying this, he declared that every kind of food is acceptable in God’s eyes.)”
It’s not found in every bible. A number of ’em take Wycliffe and the
Mark 7.19 KWL - “Because it doesn’t enter their heart, but into the bowels, and comes out into the toilet.
- All the food gets cleaned out.”
I did it because that’s the literary context. Katharídzon pánta ta vrómata isn’t a sentence fragment Mark inserted to interpret Jesus’s teaching; it’s a clause that’s part of the teaching. Jesus is explaining how food goes in the face, goes out the butt, goes down the toilet, and doesn’t
Kinda like we miss the point when we insist this passage is all about how there are no longer any kosher rules… so now we can eat fistfuls of pork.
Do Christians have to eat kosher?
Short answer: No.
The L
There’s the list in the bible, of course. The Pharisees and medieval rabbis added their rulings on how those commands are to be interpreted, which now affect the way today’s Jews keep kosher. Fr’instance the bible forbids cooking a goat in its mothers milk.
Clearly things have gone overboard when a Jewish deli refuses to make a turkey and Swiss sandwich ’cause it’s treyf. (Turkeys don’t even produce milk!) But if we’re only sticking to the Law—and Jesus and the apostles’ interpretations of the Law—the issue of kosher versus treyf only really comes up when it came to eating with gentiles. Y’see, gentiles didn’t know the Law, so they ate whatever they pleased. (In fact Romans were notorious for trying anything, no matter how bizarre or weird, just so they could say they had the experience. And if they didn’t care for it, they’d just douse it in garum, the fish sauce they basically put all over everything, just like Americans do with ketchup.) If you ate with gentiles, you were almost guaranteed to eat treyf. Which is why it was such a big deal when the Christians did it anyway.
But is eating treyf sin? Actually no.
As I said
But if you’re a real live human being, you can’t help but be ritually unclean sometimes. Because all bodily fluids (except saliva) are ritually unclean! Bleeding is unclean. Having your period is unclean. Semen is unclean—every time you have sex, even to obey God’s command to be fruitful and multiply,
Yep, even Jesus. Who never sinned.
So if you eat bacon, calamari, catfish, clams, crab, pork chops—or even snakes, alligator, ostriches, horses, or dogs—are you sinning? Nope. All you are, is ritually unclean. Same as if you got a paper cut.
The rabbis don’t necessarily agree uncleanliness isn’t sin. They claim the kosher rules have the same weight, count the same, as every other command. But if they truly have the same weight, they’d have the same consequences—and they don’t. Not even close. When the ancient Hebrews violated one of
Theoretically you could have bacon for breakfast, a ham sandwich for lunch, hot links for dinner… then ritually bathe yourself right after dinner, and go to temple that very evening. True, such a lifestyle violates the spirit of the Law like crazy. But like I said: Uncleanliness isn’t sin.
Now here’s the other wrinkle involved in the Christian lifestyle: We Christians are the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Since Jesus’s sacrifice has basically made every Old Testament ritual redundant
So does that mean it’s now okay for Christians to eat bacon? It’s always been okay. But if you’re honestly trying to follow God, I think you oughta ask yourself: If God says, “Don’t,”
Pandering to the almighty stomach.
Problem is, many Christians do blow it off. We want a free pass to eat whatever we please, as much as we please. Hence the obesity problem in the United States—and in our churches especially. Have you seen how many fat Christians there are? And have y’noticed how we never preach against gluttony? I’m pretty sure the reason
In order to justify our bad behavior, we want
But there’s no verb in this clause which means, or even suggests, “declared.” There’s no subject-noun in this clause; it’s not its own sentence. It’s not a legitimate interpretation. It’s wholly fabricated by Christians who don’t wanna
When I first studied Greek, and learned “Jesus declared all foods clean” isn’t what katharídzon pánta ta vrómata means, I wondered whether the
The Textus Receptus (the Greek NT used as the basis of the
Mark 7.19 (from TR)KWL - “Because it doesn’t enter their heart, but into the bowels, and comes out into the toilet.
- All the food cleans out.”
Still doesn’t turn it into “Jesus declared all foods clean.”
So why do so many translators adopt that interpretation? Simple: Gentile Christians don’t eat kosher. Don’t wanna. We like pork, lobster, shrimp, clams; Korean and Chinese Christians also like dog. And at some point in the past, some Christian claimed Jesus’s teaching right here meant we didn’t have to eat kosher, because what the text really means is Jesus declared all foods clean. This spin made it into the Revised Version in 1881:
- Mark 7.19
RV - …because it goeth not into his heart, but into his belly, and goeth out into the draught? This he said, making all meats clean.
The
If it’s not what we eat that makes us ritually clean or unclean, but what comes out of our hearts, does that make food irrelevant? Does it mean all food is kosher? No.
He said “Don’t eat this” for a reason. We can speculate what it is, as many people do. Many Christians guess, “God banned pork because of trichinosis or tapeworms”—real problems in ancient times, and curable problems in ours. But God never said those were his reasons; he never gave us his reasons. He only said, “Don’t.” All we know is “Don’t.” And when we ignore God’s “Don’t,” expect consequences.
I don’t say this to be legalistic at all. I say it because it’s profoundly stupid of Christians to assume that, thanks to clever reasoning and modern technology, we’ve voided God’s commands. There’s no basis in the scriptures to claim Jesus set aside the kosher rules. (Nope, not even with Simon Peter’s vision of the sheet full of critters.
And Mark didn’t write any such thing. It’s not there. You have to rape the text to cram this idea into it. Just because other translators did it, doesn’t mean I get to—and I don’t see how other translators, in good conscience, translate it that way either. In any case I don’t follow the crowd. I follow Jesus.
I remind you uncleanliness isn’t sin. Ritual cleanliness is kinda moot when the Holy Spirit indwells you. You’re not going to hell if you eat bacon! But what’s more important: Trying to follow God with all our hearts, or creating exceptions to accommodate our palates?
I like clam chowder as much as the next gentile. But God said “Don’t.” I have no good reason to tell him, “Your instruction doesn’t count anymore, because I live under grace.”