Thank you to my friend Dale for sending along these quotes from this week's New Yorker (May 24) from an article called "What Did Jesus Do?: Reading and Unreading the Gospels," by Adam Gopnik. The article is a critical review of several recent works by various authors regarding the "historic" Jesus. The links to what we're up to at St. Lydia's are wonderful!
"The sharpest opposition in the Gospels...is between John the Faster and Jesus the Feaster. Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and, finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine."The table is his altar in every sense. Crossan...makes a persuasive case that Jesus' fressing* was perhaps the most radical element in his life--that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees Jesus living within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on "commensality," would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal alliances, which would have shocked most Jews. The most forceful of his sayings, still shocking to any pious Jew or Muslim, is 'What goes into a man's mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean." Jesus isn't a hedonist or an epicurean, but he clearly isn't an ascetic, either: he feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He's interested in saving people living normal lives, buying and selling what they can, rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves." pp. 74-75
*from the Yiddish, to eat a lot, and without restraint
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