Rereading the Gospels through Leviticus (4 lectures; lecture 1 free)

If two or more of these sound like you, this course may be a good fit.

• You have assumed that Jesus opposed and abolished Jewish law and the temple system.
• You struggle to see why the complex purity laws of Leviticus matter for believers today.
• You wonder why Jesus touched people with skin diseases or the woman with a flow of blood, and what was at stake in doing so.
• You want to distinguish precisely between impurity and sin in the Bible.
• You want to encounter Jesus as a Jew through contemporary historical Jesus research.

About the course

“Leviticus often brings Mary Douglas or Jacob Milgrom to mind. Jonathan Klawans is another essential scholar. His work helps us reconstruct the worldview of ancient Judaism more clearly—a worldview that remained relevant in Jesus's time and is assumed by the Gospels.

Why, for example, do the Gospels emphasize Jesus healing lepra and bodily discharges, and raising the dead? The term lepra, commonly translated as ‘leprosy,’ should not simply be equated with modern Hansen's disease. These stories involve ritual impurity. It is important to distinguish moral impurity from ritual impurity, a distinction that even scholars sometimes blur.

Klawans's Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism helps make sense of the worldview behind the Gospels. This influential work had not been translated into Korean when the course was prepared. We will read selected passages alongside Matthew Thiessen's Jesus and the Forces of Death. Together, these books may transform how we read the Gospels and Jesus's ministry.”

Difficulty: ★★☆

Provocativeness: ★★☆

Editor's note: This course challenges the familiar picture of Jesus as a destroyer of the law. It presents him not as an opponent of Judaism but as the holy power that defeats death, offering a stimulating intellectual and spiritual perspective.

Instructor

Hagyoung Lee, director

Director of Hagyoung Publishing

Ph.D. student, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto

M.A., Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

M.Div., Chongshin University Graduate School of Theology

Course contents

Lecture 1: An Overview of Jesus's World

Lecture 2: The World of Ritual Impurity

Lecture 3: Jesus and the Walking Dead

Lecture 4: Jesus and the Dead Womb

Remastered from an independently organized paid course taught by Hagyoung Lee in 2026.