Chizuk Emunah Under the Microscope: Chapter 15

"You shall not eat any abomination."
(Deuteronomy 14:3)

Troki uses this verse to attack Matthew 15:11 "It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person."

Troki argues that Christians must consider themselves unholy and unclean for eating of non-kosher foods. If the founders of Christianity wanted to abolish all food laws, why did they prohibit Gentile Christians from eating meat from strangled animals, and from foods like blood sausage. Adam incurred the wrath of God for eating forbidden food once. How much more do Christians defile themselves by eating of forbidden food over and over again. Zechariah 9:7 speaks of the age of Messiah, where even Gentiles will avoid non-kosher foods.

    I will take away its blood from its mouth,
        and its abominations from between its teeth;
    it too shall be a remnant for our God;
        it shall be like a clan in Judah,
        and Ekron shall be like the Jebusites.
(Zechariah 9:7 ESV)

First, the Seventh-Day Adventists do follow basically the same dietary restrictions as the Karaites. This argument, therefore, cannot apply to them.

Not all Jewish authorities agree with Troki's arguments as well. Midrash Tehillim on Psalm 146:7 states "The LORD looses the prisoners or the forbidden. What is this? Some say that every beast which was made unclean in this world the LORD, blessed be He, makes clean in the world to come."
Midrash Kohelet on Ecclesiastes 11:8 states :"The Law which man learns in this world is vanity compared with the Law of Messiah."

Hence, Rabbinical Judaism does allow for the law to change in different eras. This is similar to the Christian notion of dispensationalism. When Messiah comes, the laws will be either changed or reinterpreted.

Rabbi J. Immanuel Schochet even agrees with this:


 The objection only works if Jesus is not Messiah. But since that's the case, this verse cannot be uses to establish that Jesus is not Messiah, for that would be circular reasoning.

 Secondly, most Christians are Gentiles, and are therefore not bound by the Laws of Moses in any case. Troki objects to Jesus and his statement of food not defiling a man. I will get to that objection later. Probably the best response is from Daniel Boyarin. In ancient Judaism, clean does not equal kosher. The difference between permitted vs prohibited food is kosher vs. treif. Jesus was not talking about that. He wast talking about ritually clean vs. ritually unclean, or tahor vs. tamei. Jesus declared all foods tahor, overriding rabbinical, but not biblical, prohibitions.

Zechariah 9:7 states not that Gentiles will keep kosher, but that they will cease from observing pagan festivals.

The issue with the injunction against eating blood in Acts 15 does not imply that Gentile Christians are bound by the Mosaic Law. This injunction is more like a rabbinical restriction, where the apostles lay out these rules to keep the peace in the early church.