People with leprosy may not have been as socially excluded during the time of Jesus as many believe, and his willingness to flout the laws of Leviticus to interact with them should be reinterpreted in that context, concludes 91ĢĘ²®»¢ās in a new peer-reviewed analysis.
Shinall is an assistant professor of surgery at 91ĢĘ²®»¢ University School of Medicine who also earned a Masters of Divinity and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from 91ĢĘ²®»¢. In his paper, he closely examined stories about people with leprosy and discussions of disease and impurity throughout the New and Old Testaments, as well as other contemporaneous religious texts. He found that while there were indeed a number of rules and customs for separating people with leprosy from the rest of the community, they were not universally applied in every community or during every era. Indeed, Shinall writes, the gospels depict a number of instances where people designated leprous appear to be quite integrated with the rest of the community.
Shinall argues that the origins of this misconception may be due to an effort by early scholars to build up Jesusā holiness by overemphasizing the stigma these individuals faced in first-century Jewish society. This, Shinall says, bakes a problematic anti-Jewishness into scholarsā understanding of Jesusā society.
āIt is very tempting for Christian interpreters to make Jesus look good by making his Jewish contemporaries look bad, but itās a temptation we need to resist,ā he said. āNot only does it get history wrong, but it perpetuates images of Judaism that feed anti-Semitic attitudes today, sometimes with deadly consequences.ā
Furthermore, he says, this lack of evidence should lead biblical scholars to reevaluate how they interpret Jesusā willingness to touch and interact with lepersārefocusing their attention to the miraculousness of the healing rather attempting to shoehorn him into a modern-day paradigm of inclusion.
Shinallās paper, , appears in the most recent issue of the .