Pharisees and teachers of the law criticise Jesus' disciples for not performing ritual handwashing; Jesus counters that human tradition has been elevated above God's actual commands, and that moral defilement comes from within a person, not from external ritual failure.
Further context
3 min readA delegation from Jerusalem arrives in Galilee and asks why Jesus' disciples eat with defiled hands.
The complaint is not about hygiene, and an explanation is supplied for readers who would not have known: the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders, and there are further customs about washing cups, pitchers and kettles.
Ritual handwashing before ordinary food was not commanded in the law, where washing requirements attached to priests handling holy things. Extending priestly purity to every table in every household was a Pharisaic development, and it came from a serious conviction: that the whole nation was called to be a kingdom of priests, and ought to eat as priests ate. Understood in its own terms it was an attempt at devotion, not fussiness.
The counter-question does not defend the disciples; it changes the charge. Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?
The example given is precise and cutting. The law commands honouring father and mother, and prescribes death for cursing them. But you say that if anyone declares what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban, that is, devoted to God, then they are no longer permitted to do anything for them.
Corban was a real legal mechanism. A man could declare property dedicated, which put it out of ordinary use, and it appears in the rabbinic literature with its own rules about whether such vows could be released. What is being described is a man using a religious vow to place his assets beyond the reach of an obligation to support his ageing parents, while continuing to enjoy them himself. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.
Then the crowd is called over, and the principle is stated in public: nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them; rather it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.
In private the disciples ask what it meant, and get an anatomical explanation: food does not go into the heart but into the stomach, and then out of the body. Mark adds a clause in his own voice, that in saying this he declared all foods clean, and it is one of the most consequential five words in the New Testament. Whether Jesus intended that scope at that moment, or whether the implication only became clear later when Gentiles began joining the church, was argued about within a generation.
What comes out, he says, comes from the heart, and he lists it: evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. Six of those are in the plural in Greek, describing acts, and six are singular, describing dispositions.
The delegation had come from Jerusalem, which is worth noticing on its own. Galilee was a hundred and thirty kilometres away by road, four or five days' travel, and men of that standing did not make the journey to raise a point of etiquette. This was an inspection.
The word Corban itself has turned up on a first-century ossuary found near Jerusalem, inscribed to say that anything inside is an offering, which shows the formula in ordinary use in exactly the period described.