Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

1 The current debate
‘Sinners who need no repentance’ and Did Jesus really eat with the wicked?

2 Forming friendships but evading enemies
Meals in the Old Testament

The Pentateuch
The historical books
The wisdom literature
The prophets
Conclusion

3 Contagious impurity
Intertestamental developments

Old Testament Apocrypha
The pseudepigrapha
Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Greco-Roman symposia
Conclusions

4 Jesus the consummate party animal?
Jesus’ eating with sinners in the Gospels I:
Material not distinctive to Luke

Levi’s party:Mark 2:13–17 and parallels
Feasting in the wilderness:Mark 6:30-44 and parallels
A repeat miracle:Mark 8:1–10 and parallel
How not to win friends and influence people:
- Matthew 8:11–12 and parallel
A glutton and a drunkard:Matthew 11:19 and parallel
Tax collectors and prostitutes:Matthew 21:31–32
The joy of new wine:John 2:1–11
A meal of reinstatement:John 21:1–14
Summary and conclusion

5 Pervasive purity
Jesus’ eating with sinners in the Gospels II:
Material distinctive to Luke

Introduction
A ‘sinner in the city ’:Luke 7:36–50
Hospitality versus holiness:Luke 10:38–42
A meal turned sour:Luke 11:37–54
A cagey host and a rude guest:Luke 14:1–24
A scandalous summary:Luke 15:1–32
Zacchaeus short-changed?Luke 19:1–10
Cleopas and company:Luke 24:13–35
Summary and conclusion

6 The potential of contemporary Christian meals
Conclusions and applications

Summary
Applications
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Chapter One extract

The current debate
‘Sinners who need no repentance ’
and Did Jesus really eat with the wicked?

A casual perusal of contemporary New Testament scholarship would suggest that Jesus 'practice of sharing table fellowship with the outcasts of his society is one of the most historically reliable pieces of information that can be extracted from the Gospels. J.D.Crossan (1991:344), co-chair of the famous Jesus Seminar, determines that Jesus’ ‘open commensality’ lay at the heart of his programme of ‘building or rebuilding peasant community on radically different principles from those of honor and shame, patronage and clientage’ and ‘based on an egalitarian sharing of spiritual and material power at the most grass-roots level.' Joachim Gnilka (1997:105), in a standard liberal German text on the historical Jesus, agrees that ‘those whom Jesus accepted were flagrant sinners, or were viewed as such’, so that his eating with them symbolically expressed the forgiveness of sins brought about ‘less by means of the message than by the manifest personal acceptance, the effective restitution and granting of a new beginning in the context of fellowship.’

More evangelical scholars generally concur. N.T.Wright (1996:149), bishop of Durham, explains that Jesus ate and drank with all sorts of people, often in an atmosphere of celebration.
He ate with ‘sinners’, and kept company with people normally on or beyond the borders of respectable society – which of course in his day and culture, meant not merely social respectability but religious uprightness, proper covenant behaviour, loyalty to the traditions and hence to the aspirations of Israel.

Not surprisingly, ‘this caused regular offence to the pious.’ Even as staunch a conservative as the South African David Seccombe (2002: 240) declares:

Once we see that Jesus construed his eating with sinners – his offer of friendship and their acceptance of it – as tantamount to entrance into the kingdom of God, we see how appropriate was the conviviality and celebration which got him his reputation as ‘a wine drinker and a glutton’ as well as ‘a friend of tax collectors and sinners’. Their meals together were an expression of their new relationship with Jesus, which was celebrated as though it was a new relationship with God.

This apparent consensus across the theological spectrum does not lack a good foundation. The theme of Jesus’ table fellowship with sinners permeates every layer of the Synoptic tradition. In Mark 2:13 –17 and parallels, Jesus calls the tax collector Levi to be one of his disciples and then attends a party with Levi’s associates. In Mark 6:30–44 and 8:1–10 and parallels, he feeds the five thousand and the four thousand, crowds that would have included very heterogeneous groupings of people. In the so-called Q-material, Jesus indeed acknowledges that his critics consider him a glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners (Matt.11:19 par.), and he predicts a coming eschatological banquet in which Gentiles will come from all over the world to eat at table with the Jewish patriarchs (Matt.8:11–12 par.). At the end of a passage unique to Matthew, the parable of the two sons, Jesus observes that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom ahead of the Jewish leaders (Matt.21:31 –32). In material unique to Luke ’s Gospel, Jesus commends the faith of a disreputable woman who anoints him during a meal at the home of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36–50); dines with Mary and Martha but puts spiritual priorities above culinary ones (10:38 –42); unleashes a bitter invective against the Jewish leaders at another dinner with a Pharisee (11:37–54); upends conventional standards about whom to invite to a banquet (14:1–24); justifies his scandalous behaviour by telling the parable of the prodigal son (15:1–2, 11–32); takes the initiative to eat with the chief tax collector Zacchaeus (19:1–10); and discloses himself as resurrected to the unnamed disciples in Emmaus during their breaking of bread together (24:30–32). Distinctively Johannine passages include Jesus’ turning water into wine in the context of a wedding feast (John 2:1–12) and appearing to his followers in order to eat breakfast with them by the Sea of Galilee (21:1–14).

The theme of Jesus’ table fellowship with a broad cross-section of people thus clearly satisfies the criterion of authenticity known as multiple attestation. It similarly appears to pass the dissimilarity criterion with flying colours: it is not quite like anything else in Jesus’ Jewish world or in early Christian practice. ...

... Several important recent challenges to this consensus, however, clamour for attention. Pride of place among these must go to Dennis Smith’s Harvard dissertation (1980) and numerous articles (see esp. 1987;1989;1991), now conveniently summarized in his 2003 volume From Symposium to Eucharist. Smith argues that the Greco-Roman form of banqueting known as the symposium had become a model so pervasive throughout the empire that Jewish and early Christian meals would have adopted at least parts of this structure as well: a formal meal during which participants reclined on couches, followed by a time for drinking wine, discussion of controversial topics and entertainment of various kinds, usually musical and often sexual. Smith thinks he can detect elements of this format in the Corinthians’ practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper. On the basis of pre-Christian hints from the Wisdom of Sirach and post-Christian details of the prescriptions for Passover in the rabbinic literature, he believes that Jewish feasts had adopted this format as well. Thus both Jesus’ Last Supper and his festive meals more generally must be understood as forms of symposia. For our purposes, only the second of these two claims requires analysis, but it is precisely here that Smith argues that the Gospel portraits are primarily nhistorical. Employing both an older form-critical dissection of the pericopae and a more recent literary-critical analysis of the theme of table fellowship in the Gospels in general and in Luke in particular, Smith concludes that the theme is largely the construct of the Evangelists themselves.

In both instances, Smith is fairly quickly rebutted. The form-critical analyses assume a fallacious and now outmoded kind of historical research. ...