The Blood of Christ as a Ritual Detergent

📖 The Scoop

"Depending on the situation and context, and biology notwithstanding, blood plays several roles in the Hebrew Bible. This project investigates how the purity laws of the Hebrew Bible/Septuagint (LXX) understood blood and how that understanding evolved in the New Testament in terms of the blood of Jesus, namely in Rom 3:24–26a. As a first-century Jew immersed in the writings of the Pentateuch, Paul would have drawn on the blood rituals of Leviticus to give meaning to the nature and function of Jesus's blood. Connecting such traditional language about blood to Jesus's death was essential to Paul as a first-century Jewish thinker, given that both Jesus's sacrifice and the ancient Hebrew Scriptures were of utmost importance to him and many of his contemporaries. This regard for the scriptures included Leviticus and its purity sacrifices. Indeed, Lev 16:14 depicts blood as a detergent or cleanser used to remove "sin" from various cultic objects. However, the designation of "sin" in Leviticus—and the ancient world overall—is more complicated than many suppose. More problematic still is the "translation" of Leviticus's depiction of sin and the rite used for its purification. Both the idea of sin and the function of blood as its detergent, as understood linguistically and culturally in Leviticus, shifted from the fifth-century ancient Near Eastern to the third-century Hellenistic context with the translation of the Torah into Greek (LXX). This transition, both culturally and linguistically, later allowed Paul to sieve the blood event of Jesus through Levitical blood sacrifice from a Greek perspective, thus establishing his ablutionary theory regarding Jesus's blood as cleansing for his Greek audience. As a framework for this study, and rooted in the foundational biblical methods of historical and textual criticism, I use social-scientific methodology regarding two cultural models: First, and most importantly, using cultural anthropology, I discuss how issues of purity and avoidance are believed to occur through blood sacrifice. Second, using translation theory, I demonstrate how the words of a language may remain stable, but their meaning and conceptualization may shift when translated from one culture to another. By embracing these methods to examine the cultural nuances of Leviticus's purity sacrifices and the translation of the cultic concepts to Greek, I shed light on how Paul received and interpreted the purificatory blood of Leviticus to determine that Jesus's sacrifice was the ultimate purification offering."

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