I recently attended a church meeting in which a biblical professor and Christian believer gave a lecture intending to address several issues that we (and many other churches) are currently struggling with. One of the main arguments that this professor presented was that there really is no such thing as outer defilement. Defilement only comes from within. This was based primarily on a pericope concerning hand washing in Mark, especially chapter 7, verse 15, where Yeshua says there is nothing outside a person that defiles, but what comes out of them. I have two objections to this, which follow below.
First, Yeshua does not seem to me to be a Greek Stoic or Hellenistic philosopher elucidating moral verities or stating absolute truths. I think Yeshua was a Jew from an Israelite community. As a Jew and not a Hellenistic philosopher, his words should not be taken as an absolute truism meaning literally nothing outside a person defiles because defilement only comes from within. Rather, Yeshua is probably speaking within and according to the ancient Judaic concept of water purification. This concept is, roughly, that when you have purifying water, which is flowing or running (sometimes called living
) and a defiled person or object, the defiled person or object does not contaminate the pure water by coming in contact with it. Rather, the defiled person or object is cleansed when it comes in contact with purifying water. The thing that makes water purifying, and thus not susceptible to outside defilement, is the fact that it is running or connected to a some great source beyond it. So, for instance, if you have a bucket of pure water and something defiled falls into it, the water becomes defiled (Lev 11:33). But if you pour the pure water out of the bucket onto something defiled, the defilement does not travel up the stream of water into the bucket and defile the source from whence it came. Instead, the defiled thing is cleansed. I believe this is the particular conception and idea that Yeshua had in mind when he said nothing outside defiles. Instead of meaning that there is literally nothing outside a person that can defile them, Yeshua was saying that he and his disciples were conduits of living
water. As such, when defilement touched them, they cleansed it instead of becoming defiled by it. If, however, they were to corrupt themselves and cease to be conduits of living water, they could certainly be contaminated by outside defilement. So it wasn’t as if outer defilement suddenly ceased to exist, and it wasn’t that outer, physical defilement was an outdated or silly religious belief replaced by the higher or better inner, spiritual focus of Yeshua and Christianity. It was that Yeshua had drunk of a Source, offered that Source to his disciples, and they became springs of living water that cleansed others instead of being defiled by them.
Second, when a Jew wanted to cleanse or purify themselves of defilement, whether inwardly or outwardly, they would enter a place where there was running water and submerge themselves within it. This is exactly what Yeshua did when he was baptised in the Jordan river and his actions would communicate to every Jew who saw him that he was purifying himself from defilement. If Yeshua was not purifying himself from defilement, then what was he doing performing a ritual that meant that to everyone around him and in the culture in which he existed? Unless we are willing to say Yeshua was deceiving both us and them or participated in the baptism ritual for no reason, we must say that he was cleansing himself from defilement. And if so, where was that defilement? If Yeshua was sinless, he had no inner defilement to be cleansed of. If Yeshua was without sin, he was inwardly pure. He could not, therefore, be repenting and cleansing himself of inner defilement. That only leaves outer defilement. But if Yeshua is pure inwardly and is cleansing himself of outward defilement, it proves that his words in Mark cannot mean, literally or Hellenistically, that nothing outside a person defiles. How then could it be that Yeshua, who is a conduit of living water in Mark 7, would be outwardly defiled at his baptism? Simple enough. He hadn’t yet been connected to the Source of the living water. This happened after he was baptised and the Spirit descended upon him. Only after Yeshua was cleansed of his outer defilement could he be fully joined to YHWH and offer those who were defiled a drink from his cleansing cup.