The Historical Jesus Ate Pork: Convergent Evidence Destroying the Myth of the 'Torah-Observant Jew'
The question of whether Yeshu abolished the dietary laws of the Torah constitutes one of the most contentious points in the history of mediaeval Judaeo-Christian polemic. Three independent sources from distinct textual traditions—Byzantine, Franco-Italian, and Arabic-Oriental—preserve convergent evidence that communities studying the Gospels in their original languages interpreted that Yeshu had explicitly permitted the consumption of pork, thereby violating Leviticus 11:7 and Deuteronomy 14:8. The Sefer Nestor HaKomer (12th-13th centuries), a polemical treatise probably originating in Romaniote Jewish communities of the Byzantine Empire or southern Italy, preserves extraordinary testimony in three languages: a version in Byzantine Judaeo-Greek (Yevanic) transcribed into the Hebrew alphabet, a version in Galilean Aramaic, and the narrative framework in Rabbinic Hebrew. The Hebrew text introduces the Gospel evidence by declaring:
ויבטל המילה ויצו אתכם להטביל במי הצחנה ולהכות עץ דיקוב״ו ולעשות דבק שאין בו הנאה ולאכול בשר חזיר וכל שרץ ולהקריב לחם תחת הקרבנות אשר תכניסו בגופיכם... ועוד אמר מארקו
("And he abolished circumcision, and commanded you to immerse in putrid waters, and to strike the wood, and to make adhesion without benefit, and to eat pork and every reptile, and to offer bread instead of the sacrifices which you place in your bodies... And furthermore Mark said").
The text then quotes an expanded version of Mark 7:1-5 in Yevanic:
פיריטש קיטניאש קשנאגיגי פירוש אפטק אפרשי קטונש טון גרמאטיק אלסנדון אפי ירושלם קיאידונדש טינאש טומתיאון אפטו נינש פיושין איטימונדש ארטוש אונד פשיק םאנדיש אאידיאי איאן פיגומני פשונא טין פירש אוקשטיאו שין קרא שוריש גד טן פרדואשין, טון גוניאון,
a transcription representing Byzantine Greek:
περὶ τῆς νιπτῆρος καὶ τῆς συναγωγῆς φέρουσιν ὅτι ἅπαξ ἔφρασεν κατὰ τῶν γραμματέων τῶν ἐλθόντων ἀπὸ Ἱεροσολύμων καὶ ἰδόντων τινὰς τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ ὅτι κοιναῖς χερσὶν ἐσθίουσιν ἄρτους, οὐ νιψάμενοι τὰς χεῖρας ἀεί, ἔφαγον οὐδὲν τηρήσαντες, σὺν κρέας χοίρου, [καταλύοντες] τὴν παράδοσιν τῶν πρεσβυτέρων
("Concerning the washing and the synagogue, they bring testimony that once Yeshu spoke against the scribes who came from Jerusalem and who saw some of his disciples eating bread with common hands, without having washed their hands always, they ate without keeping anything, with pork, the disciples violating the tradition of the elders").
The crucial element is the phrase σὺν κρέας χοίρου ("with pork"), transcribed in Yevanic as שין קרא שוריש (probably through manuscript corruption from שין קריאש שוריש), an addition that does not appear in any preserved Greek manuscript of the New Testament but reflects early exegetical liturgical or homiletical tradition, possibly derived from Byzantine lectionaries with incorporated glosses, patristic catenae, or Judaeo-Christian Syriac-Byzantine textual tradition where polemic with Rabbinic Judaism required making explicit the consequences of the Gospel argument. The Galilean Aramaic version accompanying the Greek text preserves this interpretation with even more explicit terminology:
על שטיפת ידיא וכנושתא מסהדין דחדא זבנא אמר על סופריא דאתו מן ירושלם דחזו לתלמידיו דאכלין לחמא בידיא לא משיגן, ולא שטפו ידיהון תדיר, וכד אכלו לא נטרו מידעם אפילו בסרא דחזירא, ובטלו משלמנותא דסבי
("Concerning the washing of hands and the synagogue they testify that once he spoke against the scribes who came from Jerusalem, who saw his disciples eating bread with unwashed hands, and they did not wash their hands continuously, and when they ate they kept nothing, even pork, and they abolished the tradition of the elders"),
where the term אפילו בסרא דחזירא ("even pork") introduces through the particle אפילו (afilu, "even") the extreme paradigmatic case following qal va-chomer (a fortiori) argumentation: if Yeshu's hermeneutical principle encompasses even the pig (חֲזִיר, chazir), the archetypal image of dietary impurity explicitly declared טָמֵא (tamei, impure) in Leviticus 11:7, then a fortiori it encompasses all prohibited foods in the laws of kashrut.
This interpretation was not exclusive to the Sefer Nestor HaKomer. A second independent Jewish source, the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew of Du Tillet (manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS héb. 132, 14th-15th century), a mediaeval Jewish translation of Matthew into Hebrew with polemical glosses added by Jewish copyists or readers for preparation of disputations (vikuach), preserves convergent evidence. The Hebrew text of Matthew 15:4-6 in Du Tillet corresponds to the Synoptic parallel of Mark 7 and reads:
ויזעק לעצמו הכיתות ויאמר אליהם שמעו ודעו מה שיבא לפה לא יטמא את האדם אבל מה שיצא מן הפה הוא יטמא את האדם... כל מה שיבא לפה הוא יבא לבטן וישלח באחור ואשר יצאו מן הפה הם יצאו מלבב והם הם אשר יטמאו את האדם
("And he called to the multitudes and said to them: Hear and understand: what enters through the mouth does not defile the man, but what comes out of the mouth, that defiles the man... Everything that enters through the mouth goes to the belly and is expelled, but what comes out of the mouth comes out from the heart, and that is what defiles the man").
Significantly, the manuscript includes a polemical marginal gloss precisely on this passage (Matthew 15:11) that assumes as an established premise the abolition of the dietary laws by Yeshu. The gloss, written in Rabbinic Hebrew, constitutes an objection prepared for theological disputation and declares:
שאל כתוב בישעיה אוכלי בשר החזיר השקץ והעכבר יחדיו יסופו אמר ייי משמע שבשר החזיר אינה מותרת לעולם
("Question: It is written in Isaiah: 'Those who eat pork, the abomination and the mouse, together shall be consumed, says the Eternal' (Isaiah 66:17). Therefore, when [Yeshu] permitted [eating] the pig, it is not permitted forever").
The Hebrew construction משמע שבשר החזיר ("it is understood/deduced that [he permitted] pork") does not present this affirmation as a new polemical accusation or controversial interpretation requiring explanation, but as a shared premise and established fact upon which the prophetic objection from Isaiah 66:17 is constructed. The glossator assumes that both he and his Jewish audience know that, according to Christian texts, Yeshu abolished the prohibition of pork, and therefore can proceed directly to refute this teaching through reference to the Isaianic prophecy announcing divine judgement upon those who eat pork.
A third independent source, proceeding from a completely different textual tradition, confirms that this interpretation also circulated in Oriental Arabic-Islamic contexts. The Tathbīt dalā'il al-nubuwwa (تثبيت دلائل النبوة, "Confirmation of the Proofs of Prophecy") by the Mu'tazilite theologian Qāḍī 'Abd al-Jabbār al-Hamadānī (935-1025 CE), an Islamic apologetic work refuting Christianity through critique of the Gospels, preserves notable testimony concerning the abolition of dietary laws attributed to Yeshu. In the context of a discussion about Christian innovations contrary to the Torah of Moses, 'Abd al-Jabbār reports a tradition explicitly connecting Yeshu's teaching on ritual purity with Christian consumption of pork. The Arabic text declares:
وَالرُّومُ تَأْكُلُ الْخِنْزِيرَ . فَقَالَ : « مَا هُوَ حَرَامٌ ، وَمَا يُحَرَّمُ عَلَى الْإِنْسَانِ شَيْءٌ يَدْخُلُ جَوْفَهُ ، وَإِنَّمَا يُحَرَّمُ عَلَيْهِ الْكِذَّبُ الَّذِي يَخْرُجُ مِنْهُ »
("The Romans [Byzantine Christians] eat pork. Then he [Yeshu] said: 'It is not forbidden [pork], and nothing that enters into his interior is forbidden for man, but rather the falsehood that comes out of him is what is forbidden for him'").
The Hebrew version of the passage, preserved in modern scholarly translations from the Arabic, reads:
וְהָרוֹמִיים אוֹכְלִים חֲזִיר. אָז אָמַר: "אֵין זֶה אָסוּר [חזיר], וְלֹא נֶאֱסָר עַל הָאָדָם דָּבָר שֶׁנִּכְנָס לְתוֹכוֹ, אֶלָּא הַשֶּׁקֶר הַיּוֹצֵא מִמֶּנּוּ הוּא שֶׁנֶּאֱסָר עָלָיו"
("And the Romans eat pork. Then he said: 'It is not forbidden [pork], and nothing that enters into his interior is forbidden for man, but the falsehood that comes out of him is what is forbidden for him'").
This passage is extraordinarily significant because it explicitly connects three elements: first, the empirical observation that Byzantine Christians (الرُّومُ, al-Rūm, the Arabic term for the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire) eat pork (الْخِنْزِيرَ, al-khinzīr); second, a halakhic declaration attributed directly to Yeshu (فَقَالَ, fa-qāla, "then he said") declaring pork not forbidden (مَا هُوَ حَرَامٌ, mā huwa ḥarām, literally "it is not ḥarām"); and third, the general hermeneutical principle that nothing entering the human body is forbidden (مَا يُحَرَّمُ عَلَى الْإِنْسَانِ شَيْءٌ يَدْخُلُ جَوْفَهُ, mā yuḥarramu 'alā al-insāni shay'un yadkhulu jawfahu), which is clearly a paraphrase of Mark 7:15 and Matthew 15:11. The scholars Shlomo Pines and Samuel Miklos Stern, in their pioneering studies on the sources of the Tathbīt, in their work "היהודים־הנוצרים במאות הראשונות של הנצרות על־פי מקור חדש", argued convincingly that 'Abd al-Jabbār utilised Judaeo-Christian or crypto-Judaeo-Christian sources for his critique of the Gospels, specifically textual traditions circulating amongst Oriental Jewish communities that had studied Christian texts in Syriac, Greek, or Christian Arabic.
The precise formulation of the passage, especially the explicit connection between Yeshu's declaration and Christian practice of eating pork, suggests that 'Abd al-Jabbār (or his Judaeo-Christian sources) had access to exegetical traditions similar to those preserved in the Sefer Nestor HaKomer and the gloss of the Du Tillet manuscript, where the abolition of dietary laws was not a polemical inference but an explicit element of Gospel testimony as it circulated in communities of interreligious disputation.
The convergence of these three independent sources—the Sefer Nestor HaKomer with its extraordinary trilingual testimony (Hebrew, Yevanic, Aramaic) from the Byzantine-Italian context, the Du Tillet manuscript with its polemical gloss from the Franco-Italian context, and the Tathbīt of 'Abd al-Jabbār with its Arabic testimony from the Oriental context based on crypto-Judaeo-Christian sources—poses a historical question of considerable importance: did Christian texts circulate in the Middle Ages, whether in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, or Arabic, that made explicit the abolition of kashrut including specific mention of pork in the context of Mark 7 or Matthew 15? The convergent evidence from three geographically and culturally distinct textual traditions (Byzantine, Franco-Italian, Arabic-Oriental) strongly suggests that they did, probably not as part of the "original text of the New Testament" in the sense of modern textual criticism, but as part of Christian liturgical, homiletical, and exegetical traditions that circulated in Byzantine lectionaries, patristic catenae with commentaries from Greek Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Theophylact of Ohrid, or Euthymius Zigabenus gradually incorporated into the Gospel text in manuscripts for homiletical-liturgical use, Judaeo-Christian Syriac-Byzantine textual traditions preserved in Oriental communities, or oral traditions of interreligious disputation where Christians explained and defended the abolition of dietary laws citing the words of Yeshu. The Romaniote Jewish communities of the Byzantine Empire, the Jewish communities of Italy and southern France, and the Oriental Judaeo-Christian communities that produced or transmitted these texts were multilingual (Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic, Latin/Hebrew/Romance, Arabic/Syriac/Hebrew), had access to Christian liturgical manuscripts for polemical study, participated in public disputations (vikuach in Jewish contexts, munazara in Islamic contexts) where they had to know and refute Christian arguments, and preserved in Yevanic (Judaeo-Greek), Hebrew translations, and Arabic sources the result of this comparative study of Gospel texts.
The grammatical structure of the Yevanic text is particularly significant for understanding the nature of the accusation. In both Byzantine Greek (σὺν κρέας χοίρου) and Galilean Aramaic (אפילו בסרא דחזירא), the reference to pork syntactically modifies Yeshu's disciples as subjects of the transgressive actions (eating with unwashed hands, keeping no prescription), not the Pharisees. The accusatory structure of the passage is precise and tripartite: the scribes/Pharisees act as correct observers who point out the halakhic violations; the disciples are the transgressors who violate both the Oral Torah (ritual washing of hands, netilat yadayim) and the Written Torah (consumption of pork prohibited in Leviticus 11:7); Yeshu is the one who defends the transgressors by speaking "against" (κατά) the guardians of the Torah. This polemical addition dramatically inverts the Gospel narrative: what in Mark 7:15-19 is presented by the evangelist as Yeshu's critique of supposed Pharisaic legalism ("Nothing from outside defiles a man... καθαρίζων πάντα τὰ βρώματα", "cleansing all foods"), in the Sefer Nestor becomes textual evidence that Yeshu implicitly approved the violation of explicit and irrevocable divine commandments by defending his disciples who were eating pork against the scribes who correctly pointed out this fundamental transgression. The testimony of the Tathbīt reinforces this inversion by presenting Yeshu's declaration not as prophetic criticism of empty ritualism but as a direct halakhic pronouncement: مَا هُوَ حَرَامٌ ("it is not ḥarām"), an explicit negation of the prohibited status of pork established in Leviticus 11:7. The rhetorical irony of the Sefer Nestor is deliberate and sophisticated: the verb ובטלו (Aramaic, "they abolished") and its Greek equivalent καταλύοντες ("violating, destroying, abolishing") are technical halakhic terms designating the invalidation of a commandment or legal status; Nestor thus creates a masterful polemical inversion by recalling that Yeshu himself accused the Pharisees of "abolishing" (καταλύειν, Mark 7:13) the word of God through their human traditions, but according to Nestor's reading, by rejecting the Oral Torah (the Rabbinic traditions that functioned as סייג לתורה, "fence around the Torah"), Yeshu's disciples ended up abolishing the Written Torah itself, as was historically demonstrated by the universal Christian practice of consuming pork documented both in the testimony of the Sefer Nestor for the 12th-13th centuries and in 'Abd al-Jabbār's observation about Byzantine Christians (الرُّومُ تَأْكُلُ الْخِنْزِيرَ) in the 11th century, retrospectively validating this anachronistically projected argument: Yeshu's initial rejection of some specific Rabbinic traditions had led, as these testimonies "predict" through expanded or interpreted Gospel texts, to the total rejection of kashrut in Gentile Christianity.
Although the Hebrew text of Matthew 15 in Du Tillet does not contain explicit mention of pork within the body of the Gospel (following more faithfully the standard Greek text of the New Testament), it is possible to hypothetically reconstruct what an expanded version comparable to that of the Sefer Nestor or the testimony of the Tathbīt would have been like had it circulated in Hebrew liturgical or exegetical tradition. Based on the parallel structure between Mark 7 and Matthew 15, considering that the Du Tillet text in Matthew 15:14 presents:
כל מה שיבא לפה הוא יבא לבטן וישלח באחור ואשר יצאו מן הפה הם יצאו מלבב והם הם אשר יטמאו את האדם אבל כשיאבל איש ולא ירחץ ידיו זה לא יטמא את האדם
("Everything that enters through the mouth goes to the belly and is expelled, but what comes out of the mouth comes out from the heart, and that is what defiles the man; but when a man eats without washing his hands, this does not defile the man"),
and taking as a model both the Yevanic of the Sefer Nestor and the Arabic formulation of the Tathbīt, an expanded version with the polemical addition might have read:
כל מה שיבא לפה הוא יבא לבטן וישלח באחור [בטהרה המטהר את כל המאכל] ואשר יצאו מן הפה הם יצאו מלבב והם הם אשר יטמאו את האדם אבל כשיאבל איש ולא ירחץ ידיו [אפילו אם יאכל בשר חזיר או כל שרץ אין זה אסור ואין נאסר על האדם דבר הנכנס לתוכו] אלא מחשבות הלב הרעות [אשר יצאו ממנו] הם [האסורים]
("Everything that enters through the mouth goes to the belly and is expelled [in purity, cleansing all food], but what comes out of the mouth comes out from the heart, and that is what defiles the man; but when a man eats without washing his hands, [even if he eats pork or any reptile, it is not forbidden, and nothing that enters into his interior is forbidden for man], but rather the evil thoughts of the heart [that come out of him] are [what is forbidden]").
This hypothetical reconstruction would incorporate the key elements present in the three sources: from the Sefer Nestor, the emphatic particle [אפילו] ("even") introducing the extreme case and the explicit mention of [בשר חזיר] ("pork") as a paradigmatic example; from the Tathbīt, the direct formulation [אין זה אסור] ("it is not forbidden") and the general principle [אין נאסר על האדם דבר הנכנס לתוכו] ("nothing that enters into his interior is forbidden for man"), which is a literal translation of the Arabic مَا يُحَرَّمُ عَلَى الْإِنْسَانِ شَيْءٌ يَدْخُلُ جَوْفَهُ; and from the canonical text of Matthew 15, the technical Levitical terminology [בטהרה] and [המטהר] (using the root ט-ה-ר, "to ritually purify") which directly connects with the vocabulary of Leviticus 11 concerning ritual purity and impurity, making it impossible to interpret the passage as merely about physical cleanliness or interior morality instead of objective halakhic categories of kashrut. The fact that such an expanded version does not appear in the body of the Du Tillet text but is presupposed in the marginal gloss, whilst analogous formulations appear explicitly in the Sefer Nestor (Yevanic/Aramaic) and the Tathbīt (Arabic), suggests that there existed widely distributed knowledge in multiple communities of textual or exegetical traditions (possibly oral, possibly preserved in liturgical lectionaries or patristic catenae now lost, possibly transmitted in contexts of interreligious disputation) where the abolition of dietary laws, including specifically pork, was made explicit in the context of Mark 7 and Matthew 15.
The convergent testimony of the Sefer Nestor HaKomer, the Du Tillet gloss, and the Tathbīt of 'Abd al-Jabbār cannot be dismissed as mere polemical invention or tendentious misinterpretation, but must be recognised as valid historical documentation of how educated communities studying Christian texts in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, or Arabic, observing the Christian practice of their time, and participating in interreligious controversies understood the Gospel teachings on dietary laws: Yeshu had established a hermeneutical principle that, by rejecting the Pharisaic oral traditions that functioned as protection of the Written Torah, inevitably led his followers to violate even the most fundamental and explicit biblical commandments, including the archetypal prohibition of pork declared eternally impure by God himself through legislation לְדֹרֹתֵיכֶם ("for your generations") in Leviticus 11:7 and Deuteronomy 14:8, reinforced prophetically in Isaiah 65:4 and 66:17 as an act of rebellion resulting in divine judgement, thereby undermining the divine immutability affirmed in Malachi 3:6 ("For I the Eternal do not change") and Numbers 23:19 ("God is not a man, that he should lie"). The geographical and cultural convergence of these three independent textual lines—Byzantine (Yevanic/Aramaic of the Sefer Nestor), Franco-Italian (Hebrew of Du Tillet), and Arabic-Oriental (Arabic of the Tathbīt based on crypto-Judaeo-Christian sources identified by Pines and Stern)—demonstrates that this is not the isolated testimony of a single polemicist but a widely established and geographically distributed interpretation in the mediaeval Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world, where Jewish, Judaeo-Christian, and Muslim communities critically studying Christian texts unanimously recognised that Yeshu's teaching on ritual purity had abolished the Levitical distinctions between pure and impure foods, permitting the consumption of pork and thereby validating the observable Christian practice of eating what the Torah explicitly prohibited.
