db111 there is such a long history of interpreting

this passage that it alone would fill a book. The demons that beset the "tradition history" of this passage are legion; some scholars consider some verses original & others later additions, while others argue just the opposite as to which verses were original & which added later! We are going to cast the demons out by ignoring them & trying to read the text as it is. Our goal is to get closer to a sense of what the canonical Gospel of Mark might have meant in its original cultural, religious context, a context that has to be thoroughly known & clearly arti-culated to do its interpretative work.

The first thing that must be acknowledged is that while the READERS of Mark are clearly expected to be far away from traditional Jewish practice as well as from the Aramaic & Hebrew languages, the WRITER of Mark is anything but distant & ignorant of these matters.

He demonstrates, in fact, a fine & clear understanding of Jewish practice & the Jewish languages, as does his Jesus! This distinction has been missed in much of the earlier work on Mark & especially on this chapter.

In contrast to virtually all Christian commentators, I (DB) propose that whatever Yesh is portrayed as doing in the aforementioned text from Mark - including "& thus he purified all foods" - is not permitting the eating of all foods, even if we accept every word of the passage as it is before us in this text.

In order to make this proposition stick, it's very important that we make some distinctions between different domains of the Torah's law & especially the dietary laws, for there has been much confusion on this score. To call food kosher refers to its permissibility or impermissibility for eating by Jews as defined in the Bible & the later rabbinic literature. Among the foods forbidden are non-ruminants such as pigs & rabbits, birds of prey, & sea creatures that have no find or scales. Meat, to be kosher, has also to be slaughtered in a special way deemed painless to the animal, & milk & meat foods must be kept separate from each other. These laws are observed to the letter by pious Jews even today.