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Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism is unavailable, but you can change that!

Although most people acknowledge that Jesus was a first-century Jew, interpreters of the Gospels often present him as opposed to the Jewish law and customs—especially when considering his numerous encounters with the ritually impure. Matthew Thiessen corrects this popular misconception by placing Jesus within the Judaism of his day. Thiessen demonstrates that the Gospel writers depict Jesus...

who has a sore throat should be given medicine even on the Sabbath. Later rabbinic tradition refers to this legal principle as piqquaḥ nefesh: the legal-religious duty to save life.47 Nonetheless, Qumranic legal materials suggest that others believed that the Sabbath outweighed human life—something that would be consonant with the prohibition of war on the Sabbath found in Jubilees and 4Q264. For instance, the Damascus Document states, And any living person who falls into a place of water or a place
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