JESUS AND MEAT
By Allan Roy Andrews
American Reporter Columnist
Published on the news site of The American Reporter.
First posted, May 21, 2000
WASHINGTON -- A new word came to me last week for which I am always grateful because despite its signaling an area of ignorance it also indicates that an old dog can learn new vocabulary.
The word came out of an unlikely place. Unlikely for two reasons: first, I found it in an editorial from a newspaper I had never read before--the Norman (Okla.) Transcript; second, because it was in a newspaper.
Newspapers tend to shy away from new vocabulary. They stick pretty much to the known--unless, of course, it's a term taught to reporters by lawyers or law enforcement people. We journalists have somehow let ourselves be kowtowed by the legalists in the public sector. But I digress.
My new word is PAREVE.
I also learned, of course, that anyone familiar with the language of vegetarianism or of kosher meal preparations probably knows this word well.
The exact context of the Transcript's use of this word had to do with billboards that are appearing around the nation sponsored, in part, by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
In its attempt to be clever, PETA has supported billboards that exclaim, "Jesus was a vegetarian."
According to the Transcript's editorial, this billboard "gets Christian carnivores riled in just about every city it hits." PETA's intention, ostensibly, is to raise the moral consciousness of every meat-producer and meat-consumer.
The Transcript editorial, apparently written by a "Christian carnivore" or at least a carnivore sympathizer, takes a preacherly approach in exegeting a passage from the Bible; in particular, the 24th chapter of the gospel of Luke, verses 41-43.
"The Bible is mostly silent on what Jesus ate, preferring to focus on what he taught, but it's not entirely silent," the essayist writes.
Quoting the Biblical passage where the risen Jesus meets his disciples and asks, "Have ye here any meat?", the Transcript notes that Jesus is given broiled fish. The writer then concludes: "Pareve he might have been but not vegetarian, unless you consider fish a vegetable."
Pareve, by the way, is derived from the Yiddish word parev, and it has to do with food prepared without dairy or milk products. It's a very important term for Jews in the preparation of kosher meals.
I'm not certain we can draw conclusions on whether or not Jesus was a carnivore, even from a passage such as the Transcript uses as a proof text.
I put the question to a friend of mine who is studying to become an Episcopal priest, and she said, "Well, in those days hardly anyone ever ate meat, and when they did it was probably what had been offered as a sacrifice to God."
What strikes me as more problematic about this little controversy, if it can be called that, is that Jesus' cultural behavior is deemed normative for ours. It's a kind of scholarly version of "What would Jesus Do? (WWJD) that might be termed, "What did Jesus do?" (WDJD).
This could be troublesome: Suppose it is determined that Jesus was left-handed. Are we then to suppose that left-handedness is sacred and not, as the Latin-speaking Romans believed, that it was a sign of sinister character? Based on what we can tell from the Scriptures, Jesus girded his loins with linen garments and robes. Are we then to suppose that forms of modern cloth are inappropriate as garments? (Fantasy headline: Jesus shunned polyester!)
It's generally assumed that Jesus was a carpenter. Does this cast a sacred aura around that profession and suggest that alternative professions such as ironworker, fisherman or candlestick maker ought to be abandoned or at least deemed less normative for human labor?
We could mount our own campaign to match PETA's with a billboard that rightly exclaims, "Jesus walked everywhere he traveled" (except when traveling on the back of an animal, which raises a whole new set of questions about the ethical treatment of animals). What would that do to the automobile industry?
My own sense is that both vegetarians and carnivores--and even pareve--err when they attempt to enlist Jesus on their side.
As a Christian carnivore, I really don't think it matters to my eating behavior whether Jesus was a vegetarian or not. He clearly attacked gluttony, whether it be carnivorous gluttony or vegetarian gluttony.
The New Testament's ultimate challenge is that Jesus was God, or as a young theologian I once heard put it: He is God incarnate; that is, God in the meat!
