moses wrote: ↑Thu Apr 19, 2018 8:49 am
immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed.
[Mark 1:]43 Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning: 44 “See that you don’t tell this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.” 45 Instead he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places.
touching leper = law broken
having knowledge that you are about to touch leper = law broken
is this the reason why mark says that jesus could not enter a town openly?
If I understand purity law correctly, touching a leper, like touching a dead body or a woman during her menstruation,
simply makes one *ritually impure*. Ritual impurity makes one unable to enter the temple to offer sacrifices, not makes one a *law breaker* subject to prosecution by the religious authorities. During the festivals, large numbers of pilgrims came a week or two in advance in order to camp out in tent villages as they performed required ritual purification tasks (generally this took a week in most cases), before they brought their offerings to the temple.
There are laws (Sabbath, worshipping foreign gods, offering sacrifices in a ritually impure state, murder, etc.) that, if broken, causes one to be subject to the death penalty. Even then, I believe there were exceptions for the sake of the health and safety of specific people. There were differences of opinion about what specific circumstances justified the exceptions.
An example might be the one where a person or farm animal becomes trapped in a pit and is gravely injured or could otherwise die unless rescued. If discovered on a sabbath day, it was generally accepted that the sabbath law could be excepted to rescue a person, but not necessarily an animal. For a peasant on the edge of subsistence, though, that animal was a vital source of milk or meat or wool that in turn sustained the peasant's family, and they might make that exception, while a priest or aristocrat, who was not as dependent on a single animal, would not.
However, what you cited seems to be, as others have suggested already, related to the later Christian concept of "the messianic secret." Wrede and Schweitzer both wrote on this subject in the 19th century. Jesus, in this way of thinking, did not announce that *he* was "the" messiah because this should more appropriately be *attributed to him* by others.
To me, though, this messianic secret idea seems to have developed as a way of *explaining away* deeds and sayings of Jesus as accepted by early Christians (maybe because they were common enough knowledge among pagans and non-Christians Judeans and pagans that they could not be denied, but at the same time might support the outside charges that Jesus was merely a royal pretender without Roman sanction). It was authorized religious and civic figures who operate in public, and rebels and bandits who lurked in lonely places where they were just out of arm's length of the authorities.
To avoid even the suggestion that Jesus was an unsanctioned royal claimant, which to many Roman subjects made Christians seem like subversives who jeopardized their peace and safety, later Christian belief developed in the aftermath of the Judean rebellion against Rome that Jesus was *really* a divine redeemer sent on a mission (which is what really made him "anointed"), whose death at the hands of the Judean leaders (those ignorant boobs) justified God putting an end to their sacrificial system and enslaving a large proportion of those of Judean stock.
But tha's jus' me.
DCH