170 Hanna Stettler handwashing to his readers” (48). That there was much uncertainty concerning the issue in the early church, does not necessarily imply that Jesus did not state his opinion on it clearly. Rom 14,14 (cf. 14,20 and Tit 1,15) is still best explained as a reference to this saying of Jesus (49). If he did not “fight” against the law (as Räisänen would have him do)(50), but declared it to be fulfilled because the basileia had dawned, and if he did so only in a cryptic way in public (Mark 7,15) but more clearly in private (as Mark 7,17-18 states and N. T. Wright emphas- izes) (51), it is conceivable that the church only gradually moved away from its adherence to the purity Torah (52). It would have done so to the extent that it realized that it had been called to be the “vanguard of the eschatological Israel on earth”(53). As Mark rightly saw, Jesus will have taken the issue of washing one’s hands as a starting point, but then insisted “that genuine purity is a matter of the heart, for which the normal purity laws … are of no relevance” (54). (48) WRIGHT, Jesus and the Victory of God, 397. (49) Counter RÄISÄNEN, “Food Laws”, 87, and in agreement with S. WESTERHOLM, Jesus and Scribal Authority (CB.NT 10; Lund 1978) 81f. Some scholars have have pointed out that in the Galatian conflict (cf. Gal 2,11-14), Paul does not quote any such saying of Jesus (RÄISÄNEN, “Food Laws”, 142f; D. RUDOLPH, “Jesus and the Food Laws. A Reassessment of Mark 7:19”, EQ 74 [2002], 301). However, at a closer look it seems that Jesus’ saying as well as its confirmation reported in Acts 10 are presupposed in Gal 2. In 2,14 Paul can say that Peter lives “like a Gentile and not like a Jew”. What other warrant would there have been for Peter to “live like a Gentile”, if not the word of Jesus? (50) ”Food Laws”, 87. (51) Jesus and the Victory of God, 397. Ibid.: “For Mark, the abolition, or simple ignoring, of Jewish food taboos was not something that needed to be whispered behind locked doors. By his time it was well out in the open”. This “secrecy unnecessary for the early church” is a hint, that Jesus did say “cryptically, something much like this”. (52) Cf. WRIGHT, Jesus and the Victory of God, 397: “The new outlook was eventually and gradually worked out in the early church, with Mark 7.19b as one important step in that process”. (53) STUHLMACHER, Biblische Theologie, I, 200 (translation mine). The argu- ment sometimes adduced in this context (see e.g., KLAWANS, Impurity and Sin, 145; RUDOLPH, “Jesus and the Food Laws”, 301-302), that in early church history the adherence of Gentile Christians to the purity Torah is witnessed to, needs to be interpreted the other way round: In church history we more often see a tendency to greater observance of the law than to greater freedom. It is much more likely that Jesus declared the food laws to be obsolete and that the church giving in to pressure from Jewish Christians reintroduced them than the opposite. We see this very movement towards stricter observance of the law as early as Gal 2,1-14. (54) WRIGHT, Jesus and the Victory of God, 396.