[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.

[alehander42]

I mean, it's simply very strange to read this through the lens of some kind of "rules of hygiene" outlook. Nobody took it that way: jews weren't some kind of naive children, traditions and rituals were deeply embedded in their culture. The gospel account gives the actual context and explicitly shows it has nothing to do with hygiene. He never tells them not to wash their hands: I've had OCD so at least to me it's painfully obvious it's more like "don't do X hoping this will clean your soul", they explicitly talk of defiling which is a spiritual concept.

Christ was not against the concept of God's ceremonial rules/law: after all, He was the one instituting it in the beginning, my understanding is that He was against hypocrisy and burdening people with custom rabbinic rules instead of focusing on the spirit of the Law.

You can just take a look at the excess of some modern rabbinical judaism ceremonial rules for proof.

Again: it's very hard for me to understand how you can read those passages with such a strange mindset: material things were often just shortcuts to spiritual conversations, they already had thousands of years of Scripture in that direction

[alexvoda]

The point of the hygiene optic is just that. The all knowing, all powerful, all loving God incarnate by definition should know all about hygiene and germs and quantum gravity and Pokemon and Covid and everything, by definition.

Yet, instead of teaching people about hygiene, God chooses to condemn the world to 1500+ years of easily preventable infantile death and all other kinds of suffering. Because, don't worry, afterlife is awesome, unless you go to hell like most people.

[alexvoda]

As I said elsewhere, he just replaced one superstition with another superstition.

You are correct that the meaning of that passage is to critique hypocrisy, but in doing so, the nugget of actually valid advice that was accidentally embedded inside a superstition, was extirpated.

Jews 2000 ago, did not have notions of sanitation. They did not have germ theory. They happened to stumble upon a healthy practice and superstitions were built around that practice. They never had statistics or the scientific method to determine the effect of washing hands. Someone simply did so, managed to avoid some disease, then told others that by doing so managed to stay in God's grace. And so, a healthy practice became a ritual. Time passed and the origin of the ritual was forgotten. Jesus comes, and rightfully tells everyone that said ritual is irrelevant for God. Instead here is a bunch of other different superstitions.