Sample Question:
Are the dietary laws relevant for Christians today?

Sample Answer:
The Jewish dietary laws as mentioned in Torah hold relevance to Jews and certain relevance to Christian believers. Although there are several passages in the New Covenant that seemingly negate the dietary laws, a closer examination of such statements, within their written context, prove that the dietary laws are not negated in the New Covenant.

For example, Mark chapter 7 (vs.19) is not about dietary laws but ritual purity as taught by the Oral Torah in relationship to hand washing. Regarding Acts 10:9-28 David Stern writes, “Kefa (Peter) is still puzzling over the meaning of the vision he had seen…Kefa’s mind was still on the vision. What could it possibly mean? Would God, who established his covenant with the Jewish people and gave them an eternal Torah at Mount Sinai, and who is Himself unchangeable (Malachi 3:6), change his Torah to make unclean animals Kosher? This is the apparent meaning, and many Christian commentators assert that this is in fact the meaning. But they ignore the plain statement a few verses later, which at last resolves Kefa’s puzzlement “God has shown me not to call any person unclean or impure.” So the vision is about a person(s) and not about food. Furthermore, Yeshua said, “Don’t think that I have come to do away with the Torah.”

Furthermore, one of the most challenging passages, Galatians 2:12b, deals with Kefa eating with Gentiles. There are two schools of thought and neither suggests that Kefa did not keep the dietary laws. One suggests that the dietary laws were not to be held as a greater mitzvah (deed) over keeping fellowship between the Jew and the Gentile. The other school of thought is most interesting. Rabbi Daniel Klutstein writes, “The problem may not have been whether fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers is more compelling than Kashrut (keeping Jewish dietary laws) but whether it is more compelling than ritual purity. Today it is hard to appreciate how important ritual purity was in first-century Jewish life although, the fact that one-sixth of the Talmud is devoted to this subject ought to give an indication. True, Orthodox Jews go to the mikveh (ritual bath) on various occasions. But in the first century, homes of observant Jews frequently had a mikveh built in: to be able to maintain ritual purity at all times it was considered normal to have a private mikveh. Hundreds of them can be seen today at archeological sites in Yerushalyim and throughout Israel. Consider that Kefa went frequently to the Temple; he would not have been able to enter in a ritually impure state, but eating with the Gentiles and being in their homes could render him impure and thus subject of criticism by the picky. A major point of Acts 10-11: is that Gentile believers were purified by God, so that Kefa learned to regard himself as ritually pure when eating with them. But before the overly critical Jews, he backed off and became a hypocrite or at least was intimidated into not being true to what he believed.”