[betterunix2]

Except that Jesus taught his disciples not to wash their hands before eating -- a basic hygenic practice that people of his time certainly understood. However valuable his moral teachings may have been, Jesus is not exactly an authority on preventing disease spread...

(Also, the story of Jesus and the leper may have been nothing more than an attempt to talk about Jesus' miraculous powers.)

[ekianjo]

> not to wash their hands before eating

if you dont have soap rinsing your hands with water that could be contaminated by a myriad of bacteria may not be the best course of action. Even in the modern world of less-developed countries, most gastrointestinal infections come from (unclean) water, not food.

[JetAlone]

You can wash your hands if you think it is wise to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness that you place trust in the performance of above God as the pharisees did. As you say, God can make the water a worse poison to you.

Honour your father and mother. Be just to your neighbor. Trust God above man and cultivate a loving relationship with both. The modern day godless neo-pharisees will of course, as always, ask questions and make remarks that are trite, intended to discredit people's faith, or trip heartfelt believers into contradiction. They want to maintain the social order they're scared of having overturned by a just man willing to make a real sacrifice going against its grain in a sorely needed fashion. They don't understand, so be it.

[cainxinth]

Soap was invented in 2800 BC

[hajile]

He was rejecting ritual purification saying that your actions are more important. He agreed with all the requirements in the Torah, but not all the additional rituals gradually stacked on top (where the excessive ritual purification of his day fit).

Leprosy was viewed as a symbol of sin. This story was about Him touching a sinner and purifying them from that sin.

[betterunix2]

If that is true, why would Jesus have taught his disciples the spiritual value of ritual bathing and ritual foot washing?

[alexvoda]

Since we are discussing religion, lets invoke the problem of evil and see what theodicy GP comes up with.

What kind of god, with the ability to completely cure a horrible disease with a simple gesture, instead goes arround and publicly heals a handful of people. How do you classify someone with the ability to eradicate a source of suffering, only making use of it for a few public appearances surrounded by those who will tell the tale.

And if you respond that it is not him that healed them, it is their faith, that faith has spread far and wide on all continents since then, yet the only progress humanity has made against Mycobacterium leprae, has been since sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccination (BCG vaccine) entered the stage.

Here is a chart about leprosy epidemiology in 2016: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy#/media/File%3ALepros...

It must be really nice living in a country where the threat of leprosy is closer to a myth than to an everyday topic. One in which you are not praying to a god each day to be shielded of the threat of leprosy or to be cured of it because you have better things to pray for.

I find it amazing how some human traits are so deep that people do not realise just how human, every single description of a god is. It is a monumental failure of imagination of what a god might be. And no wonder it is so. People before the enlightenment had far fewer sources to feed that imagination. And people after, found better uses of that imagination.

[alehander42]

God gives eternal life. In this case, the biggest problem we have isn't really sickness, or even physical death: it's separation from the Him: the Source of all that's actually good, and being enslaved to everything opposing Him.

Christ himself wasn't spared a brutal death in this life: many apostles and martyrs in a similar way, and this wasn't by accident. Earthly comfort or even health isn't the goal of christianity. Being re-united to God and stop being slaves to sin is more important: but this is a question of free will imho.

(as apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians: 1 For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2 Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling,..)

The faith doesn't make sense, if one believes only in the material world. It's central point is the Resurrection: "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." (1 Cor 15:19)

[1] 1 Corinthians https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians...

[alehander42]

It is about the actual purpose of the Law and it references ritual purification. It's about human traditions vs God's Law. We don't need to wash our hands as a spiritual ritual before eating, we absolutely can wash them if it makes sense to wash them, e.g. hygiene.

Read Mark 7:

1 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus 2 and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.[a]) 5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”

larger second EDIT:

The focus is of course, spiritual, and it is on the actual things that defile people, for example:

20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

[JetAlone]

I tried to explain this too, but these airwaves are sadly dominated by people vehemently motivated to buttress the narrative that Christians are or should be against any form of hand washing if they were consistent. I think this case (among others) would be a pretty good litmus test to root out people who don't want to understand and, however intelligent or civil, are just not emotionally ready to discuss it.

I can understand to some degree why they act as they do; they honestly think lots of people will tragically die and have their rights trampled on if they don't generate enough apostasy or prevent enough conversions to deter the Christian worldview from regaining enormous appeal. Being an anti-christian culture warrior feels rewarding. I should know, I used to be one. The simple matter I eventually discovered as I got older is, there is no life, no justice, no joy, no freedom, no rights, no good, nothing worth having without a sincere relationship with the Creator of all these things. I can't just generate these virtues and hoard them for myself, they ultimately came from something greater than me.

[betterunix2]

Well, did Jesus tell his follows that they should not be hypocrites who wash their hands because they blindly follow traditions and that they should instead wash their hands because it is good for their health? No, he simply taught them not to bother washing hands before eating.

Moreover, Jesus is recorded elsewhere as having taught his disciples a practice of ritual foot washing (involving washing another person's feet), which remains a practice among some Christians to this very day. He even went on to explicitly indicate that foot washing is spiritually important. Jesus also taught his followers to practice a form of ritual bathing, clearly given spiritual significance and clearly a variation of Jewish ritual bathing, that remains widely practiced by Christians today: baptism. So, if we accept the account of the gospels, it would seem that Jesus was not really opposed to washing rituals in general, nor to treating ritualized washing as a matter of spiritual significance, he just had a different concept than the mainstream Rabbinic tradition.