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The Law About Liquids: a Rejoinder

Leo Baeck College, London

Jesus' saying, 'First clean the inside' (Mt. 23.25-26), is a metaphor about hypocrisy taken not from the context of ritual purity (as argued by Jacob Neusner), but from that of the ordinary washing of dirty dishes. The ritual purity law concerning the inside and outside of non-earthenware vessels probably did not exist in the time of Jesus, and is in any case unsuitable as a metaphor for hypocrisy. This was argued by me in an earlier article.

John C. Poirier has criticized my argument on the grounds that the distinction between inside and outside didexist in Jesus' time and that metaphors are more com plex than I represented. His argument, however, is characterized by incomprehen sion of rabbinic concepts of ritual purity, and by muddled ideas about metaphor.

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