Endnote 31 – Did Jesus Oppose the Purity Laws?

According to Borg, by overturning the tables, Jesus symbolically repudiated what the Temple had become: “the center of a purity system that was also a system of economic and political oppression,” (Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, p. 115). For Crossan, “The spiritual and economic egalitarianism [Jesus] preached in Galilee exploded with indignation at the Temple as the seat and symbol of everything that was nonegalitarian, patronal, and even oppressive on both the religious and the political level” (A Revolutionary Biography, p. 133).