Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE CLIMAX OF JESUS' MISSION §17.2
nounced sins forgiven both outside the cult and without reference (even by implication)
to the cult. Sins were (apparently) forgiven there and then; there is no suggestion
in the tradition that a sacrificial offering would be necessary. In other words, it
was not so much that Jesus usurped the exclusive prerogative of God to forgive sins
which caused offence, as that he usurped the role which God had assigned to the
priest and the cult in the established religion of the people. 133 John's baptism of repentance
for the forgiveness of sins raised similar questions (§11.3b).
There is certainly a danger of drawing too much from a single incident, and
the sparseness of the theme within the Jesus tradition forbids any attempt to make
much of the theme (Jesus and forgiveness). The point is simply that if Jesus' (occasional)
pronouncing of sins forgiven caused any upset, the upset would most
likely have been to those who valued the religious proprieties embodied and safeguarded
in the Temple system. The chief proprietors (guardians and beneficiaries)
of the system were the high priestly families. Possibly, then, news of another, like
the Baptist, seeming to bypass the cult, would have been a factor already causing
irritation to the Temple authorities well before Jesus (finally) entered Jerusalem.
c. Purity — Dispensing with the Cult?
A more likely cause of irritation to the religious authorities were reports of Jesus'
disregard for purity ritual. We have already noted how central to Second Temple
Judaism were concerns for purity, and how these concerns were heightened by
the factionalism of the period; indeed, such concerns were one of the major factors
making for that factionalism (§§9.4, 5c-d). Borg in particular has consistently
highlighted the 'politics of holiness/purity': 'the purity system was the ideology
of the ruling elites'. 134 The Temple lay at the centre of these concerns: the
purity required was to enable participation in the Temple cult; 135 the Temple
stood in effect at the centre of a sequence of concentric circles of holiness (holy
land, holy city, holy Temple, Holy of Holies). 136 Which also means, of course,
that holiness/purity was a particularly priestly concern (Leviticus 21-22). The
133. If they so chose, those who heard such a pronouncement in a critical spirit could regard
it as 'blasphemy' (Mark 2.7 pars.), as challenging God's ordering of how sins should be
forgiven. Cf. Sanders, Jewish Law 61-63; and see the discussion above, §16.4c(2).
134. Borg, Conflict passim; Jesus: A New Vision index 'politics of holiness'; Jesus in
Contemporary Scholarship ch. 5 (here 110-12).
135. Sanders, Jesus 182-83; Judaism 70-72 ('The ideas of holiness and separation,
which allowed only what was most pure to come near, informed the entire arrangement of the
temple and its rites').
136. Jeremias, Jerusalem 79. M. Kel. 1.6-9 (cited in my Partings 39) simply elaborates
the logic already implicit in Lev. 15.31 and Num. 35.34 and explained by Josephus, Ap. 102-109.
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