The Disciples’ Question in the House

Yeshua has gone into a house, away from the crowd, and His disciples are asking what He meant. Here is the verse, and here is the claim built on it.

“Yeshua said that food goes into the stomach and out again, and Mark adds: thus He declared all foods clean. Whatever you eat, it cannot defile you.”

Here is what He actually said in the house.

In the House

Mark 7:17-19 When He had left the crowd and entered the house, His disciples questioned Him about the parable. And He said to them: "Are you so lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot make him koinos κοινός koy-nos'(common, worldly), because it does not go into his kardia καρδία kar-dee'-ah(heart, soul-domain) but into his stomach, and goes out into the latrine, purging all the foods?"

Yeshua is describing something every person knows. What you eat goes down, is digested, and passes out of the body; it does not reach the heart. The question that began Mark 7 was whether bread eaten with unwashed hands makes a man defiled. His answer is that the bread, and whatever the hands left on it, goes the way all food goes.

One Letter

At the end of verse 19, where many English Bibles print “Thus He declared all foods clean,” the YLV has only “purging all the foods.” That is not a careless translation.

In the Byzantine Majority Text (Robinson–Pierpont 2018), the reference text of the YLV, the word for “purging” is katharizon καθαρίζον kath-ar-id'-zo, a neuter participle. A neuter participle cannot have Yeshua, a masculine subject, as its subject. It describes the process just named: food goes into the stomach and out into the latrine, and that process purges all the foods.

The critical Greek text (Nestle–Aland), which most modern versions follow, differs by one letter. It has an omega where the Robinson–Pierpont text has an omicron καθαρίζων. On that one letter, translators read the word as pointing back to Yeshua, and they added the words “thus He declared” to make an English sentence. There is no Greek word for “declared” in the verse, in either text.

Yet this verse does not finally turn on one letter. Read it either way, and one word still decides what it means.

The Key Word

That word is foods, in Greek bromata βρώματα bro'-mah, things to eat.

The question almost never asked is this: when Yeshua and His disciples said bromata, what did they mean?

They meant what Scripture calls food. For a Jew of the first century, the line between food and not-food had been drawn by God in writing: “the living thing (chai חַי khah'-ee) that may be eaten and the living thing (chai) that may not be eaten” (Leviticus 11:47). Nothing on the other side of that line was in the word.

Picture the scene in that house: Yeshua, His disciples, and a debate that started over bread and unwashed hands. When He says that the stomach purges “all the foods,” every person in the room hears “everything we eat”: lamb, bread, fish, figs, and lentils. Nobody in the room hears pork, because nobody in the room counted pork as food. It was not in the word.

The same is true of verse 18, where the word food is not even spoken. To everyone in that room, “whatever goes into the man from outside” meant clean food.

A picture from our own day may help. Suppose someone hands you a glass of bleach and says, “All drinks are safe.” You would not argue about whether this particular drink is safe. You would say that bleach is not a drink, and that the sentence about drinks never included it.

That is how “all the foods” sounded in that house. It meant everything a Jew would have called food, not every creature that walks, swims, or crawls.

Defile Means Make Common

One more word runs through the whole passage. Each time Yeshua speaks of what can or cannot make a man koinos, in verses 15, 18, 20, and 23, the Greek verb is koinoo κοινόω koy-no'-o, to make common, which many English Bibles translate as “defile.”

It is the koinos of the unwashed hands in verse 2, not the Torah’s word for the unclean animals of Leviticus 11. Mark’s account never uses akathartos ἀκάθαρτος ak-ath'-ar-tos for food at all. From verse 2 to verse 23, the subject is whether a man is made koinos, common, by eating with hands that missed a ritual.

And Yeshua tells us what really makes a man common.

Mark 7:20-23 And He was saying: "That which proceeds out of the man — that is what makes the man koinos(common, worldly). For from within, out of the kardia(heart, soul-domain) of men, proceed the evil dialogismoi(reasoning, deliberations): adulteries, sexual immorality, murders, thefts, greed, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, an evil eye, blasphemy, arrogance, foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and make the man koinos(common, worldly)."

How Matthew Ends It

Matthew tells the same conversation, and he records how Yeshua summed it up.

Matthew 15:17-20 Do you not understand that everything that enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is cast out into the latrine? But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the kardia(heart, soul-domain), and those make the person koinos(common, worldly). For out of the kardia(heart, soul-domain) come evil dialogismoi(reasoning, deliberations) — murders, adulteries, sexual immorality, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies. These are the things that make the person koinos(common, worldly), but to eat with unwashed hands does not make the person koinos(common, worldly)."

The last sentence settles it: “These are the things that make the person koinos, but to eat with unwashed hands does not make the person koinos.”

That is how He ended it. He did not say that eating pork does not defile, or that the food laws are over. He spoke of unwashed hands. The story begins with hands in Mark 7:2 and Matthew 15:2, and it ends with hands in Matthew 15:20, so Matthew does not leave us to guess what the teaching was about.

The Man Who Asked

There is one more witness, and he was in the room. In Matthew’s account, the disciple who said, “Explain the parable to us,” was Peter (Matthew 15:15). He heard the answer with his own ears.

If Mark 7:19 had made pork into food, Peter would have known it better than anyone. Yet years later, after the resurrection and after the Spirit was poured out, he could still say that “nothing koinos(common, worldly) or akathartos(impure, unclean) has ever entered my mouth” (Acts 11:8). The man who asked for the explanation did not hear it as permission.

Mark 7, then, overturned a tradition of the elders that made washing a test of holiness. It left in place the commandment of God, which Yeshua defended in the same breath, and the line God drew in Leviticus 11 between what is food and what is not.

That line was drawn around many animals, yet one of them has become the symbol of the whole question: the pig, the animal an enemy of Israel once forced into the mouths of God’s people at the point of a sword.