184 A History of Judaism
Jesus restricted his diet to kosher food. The declaration by the author
of the Gospel of Mark, after a comparison between ‘what goes into the
mouth’ and ‘what comes out of the mouth’, that Jesus ‘declared all foods
clean’ is omitted from the parallel passage in the Gospel of Matthew. It
must be a later gloss, since it makes no sense of Luke’s account, in Acts,
of Peter’s vision, in which he is portrayed as astonished to be instructed
to eat unclean things:
About noon the next day, as they were on their journey and approaching
the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted
something to eat; and while it was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He
saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down,
being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of
four- footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a
voice saying, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘By no means,
Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.’ The voice
said to him again, a second time, ‘What God has made clean, you must not
call profane.’The objections recorded in the Gospels are not to what Jesus ate but to
the company in which he had his meals. In a society in which excep-
tional piety was marked for some, such as Essenes, members of the
Qumran Yahad and haverim, by table fellowship with like- minded
enthusiasts, it was remarkable that Jesus was believed deliberately to
have sought prostitutes, tax- gatherers and other sinners as his dining
companions.^38
What was it about Jesus that attracted followers? Crowds could be
accounted for by the public miracles and exorcisms, but crowds could
(and did) melt away under pressure. For his close devotees, his evident
charisma and the eschatological language of an imminent kingdom of
heaven aroused enthusiasm and loyalty, reinforced by such symbolic
actions as the ‘cleansing of the Temple’:
And he entered the Temple and began to drive out those who were selling
and those who were buying in the Temple, and he overturned the tables of
the money- changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would
not allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple. He was teaching
and saying ‘Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer
for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of robbers.’A minor disturbance of this kind on the edges of the Temple site will
have had little impact on the smooth running of this huge institution,