Part Ten. Jesus Teaching continues. Breaking with traditions and defilement.

There was a blog about Walkers crisps being Haram or not. There are lots of dietary laws that Muslims share with Jewish tradition. Both traditions regard Christians who follow no such laws as being wrong, unclean, or we do not care to follow laws laid down and simply do our own thing.

Why is this? I agree some Christians read the Old Testament and simply choose to ignore them, [or indeed some Christians pick and choose which laws to follow] Some Christians follow Jesus’s example. Mark in chapter 7 gives an example of this.

Mark chapter 7 verse 1 to 23

Breaking Human Traditions

Now the Pharisees and some of the experts in the law who came from Jerusalem gathered around him. And they saw that some of Jesus’ disciples ate their bread with unclean hands, that is, unwashed. (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they perform a ritual washing, holding fast to the tradition of the elders. And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. They hold fast to many other traditions: the washing of cups, pots, kettles, and dining couches.) The Pharisees and the experts in the law asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with unwashed hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied correctly about you hypocrites, as it is written:

‘This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

They worship me in vain, teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.’

True Defilement

Then he called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What defiles a person is not what goes into the mouth; it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles a person.” Then the disciples came to him and said, “Do you know that when the Pharisees heard this they were offended?” And he replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father did not plant will be uprooted. Leave them! They are blind guides. If someone who is blind leads another who is blind, both will fall into a pit.”

But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.” Jesus said, “Even after all this, are you still so foolish? Don’t you understand that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach and then passes out into the sewer? (This means all foods are clean.) But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these things defile a person. For out of the heart come evil ideas, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are the things that defile a person; it is not eating with unwashed hands that defiles a person.”

This brings me too a thought, it is my understanding that in the Quran if there is two passages that contradict each other, then the passage that was written last is the one that takes precedent.

So the fact that Jesus’s teachings came after the Old Testament then as I see it, it is correct for Christians to follow the teachings of Jesus.