Reason Number 1,054 Why Jesus Wouldn't Be Popular in the Modern American Church: Lack of Modern Hygiene

In the words of one scholar, "The past was pretty dirty."

Modern culture within third world countries are filled with people who are dirty and stink by modern American standards. In fact, many people within first world countries would probably be considered dirty  by modern Americans. This is because we find ourselves in the religion of snobbery where the health and wealth cult thrives. Imagine becoming impoverished and homeless and separated from the modern luxuries of running water on a daily basis. Imagine living in an area where running water was not really something to which you had access. Now, imagine that you do have access to these things but hygiene is not a priority in the culture. 

You may think that Christianity changed all of this but it didn't. The event of bathing was contingent upon one's proximity to clean water. It was a rare event that may have taken place every month to once ever year. Instead, one might wash in the event that he had contact with something extra filthy, as you have in the law of Moses, but beyond that, the ancients largely covered over their lack of hygiene rather than washed it away every day or every other day as we often do. 

They employed things like incense and perfumes that covered the smell. This is seen throughout the Bible and even something that is given to Jesus. This implies that there was a smell and the smell implies that there was filthiness.

Furthermore, there were very few mirrors the average peasant would own and so there wasn't a lot of checking of one's appearance every two seconds. Of course, a change of clothes every day was neither practiced in the ancient world nor in the most modern third world countries, again, unless one was rich. Even rich Roman soldiers, however, only tended to bathe once a month. When they did bathe, they used public baths that were filthy.  The average rich family in Rome of course bathed daily, but they once again bathed in these filthy baths. Their real baths were scraping the dirt and sweat off but not to discard but to use later for medicinal purposes. Talk about gross. 

As recent as last century many people only bathed once a year because they believed they would get sick from the bathing itself due to the fact that often the bathing source (a barrel, a pool, etc.) was contaminated by so many people using it. Hence, again, dry baths with things like ashes, scrubbers, dirt itself, flowers to cover smell, etc. were used, not to really clean oneself but to rid oneself cover over the smell. Modern first world bathing for cleanliness is just that: modern and first world.

Furthermore, most clothing throughout history has been "cleaned" by human urine. "What a lovely smell you've discovered" (Han Solo).

The fact that one can convince people that other people are the dirty ones is also displayed in our thinking of the Romans as very clean people and the Barbarians as filthy hordes of people when the Barbarians, at least those who lived along rivers (i.e., running water), were often cleaner than the Romans. 

Most of the poor had very few sets of clothing and many had only one set of clothes. This is implied when the Bible forbids one to take away a man's outer clothing which is his warmth at night. John the Baptist implies this when he refers to those who have no tunic (Luke 3). 

This is a desert culture and the desert is hot. Clothes are worn to sweat rather than to avoid sweat. Sweat brings bacteria and with dead bacteria, a smell. As one who lives in the desert, dirt is everywhere. They don't have nice rock or grass lawns to keep the dust down. The floors of their houses are dirt. Dirt was often scraped off, rubbed off with ashes, oils, etc. This would not get rid of the bacteria, and it was not meant to (no one even knew about bacteria). Instead, it was meant to give the appearance of cleanliness. The ancient Greeks, for instance, would make bath houses but so that they could show off their bodies, not to make themselves clean. It was to look clean. Most of this bathing took place in public bath houses, where nakedness would be uncovered, and so when the Seleucid kings built them in Jerusalem, they were rejected by the Jews as foul and places of corruption. 

Pools seem to have been made, not to bathe for physical hygiene, but to perform ritual cleanings that some even thought would be a means for God to heal them supernaturally (John 9). In fact, that particular pool was constructed, not to provide bathing for anyone but to restrict access to the spring waters that supplied it to any besieging armies. 

And this brings us to the ritual washing. The ritual washings in the law are not hygienic. I mean that the purpose of them is never said by the Bible to be that of making the Israelites healthy. Dirt, fungus, visible skin diseases, refuse, blood, dead things, etc. were already understood to be dirty things. God uses these as symbolic of what is physically dirty. He's not commanding hygiene. Hygiene is a concern for all people but it our hyper-concern for it has become an issue since the advent of discovering bacteria and its relationship with disease. This is not the issue in Israel any more than the food laws have to do with health.

In fact, this is a good example of people misunderstanding the purpose of food laws. It's not about health. Eating shellfish is some of the most healthy eating you can do. You'd lose tons of weight and have lots of nutrients for your body if you ate nothing but shellfish. Shellfish are used as an example of disgusting things because they look gross. They're giant bugs of the sea. It has nothing to do with health. 

This sort of eisegesis that reads our modern health and wealth cult back into the Bible is cultic.

But let's get back to Jesus. Traveling from town to town on dirt roads and speaking all day in the hot sun of the desert, fishing with his disciples, having little time to even catch his breath and pray because they people won't leave him alone. And those people? Can you imagine large ancient crowds in the desert pressing up against each other and then pressing up against the disciples and Jesus? No wonder perfume is such a commodity. But it isn't hygienic to cover up the smell of dead bacteria. It's physically unclean. Jesus was physically unclean. There's a statement hyper-antignostics can't stand. The health and wealth cult leaders who believe Jesus is just like them in the same way that modern Americans make Jesus movies with very American looking and sounding Jesuses, who believe can't distinguish between Jesus and a Mormon missionary, gasp in horror. "Not my Jesus," they think. "My Jesus would never smell from being dirty for any length of time. My Jesus cares as much about hygiene that I do. He would tear Himself away from the crowds, from the healings, from the teachings, from the children who need blessings, from the prayers to His Father, and go take a shower and change in the to clean clothes on a daily basis." After all, it only takes an hour or so to get dirty enough to stink. 

Filthy Jesus. Not worthy of the fellowship of such highbrow folk who bathe every day. One should think Him not worthy enough to save anyone who will enter into the clean world to come. Perhaps the thought is that there is no dirt in that world so there should be none is this one. But that's just it. We do live in the dirty world. We are dirty because we have not yet entered the world where we all unbathed smell like roses. Jesus didn't smell that way in this world and a servant is not greater than his Master. A servant may smell better than Jesus but this doesn't make him better than Jesus, nor does it make him better than any of Jesus' servants who fail the hygiene test of the modern privileged snobs who think that cleanliness is next to godliness. If that's true, Jesus isn't that godly, and you are still dead in your sins.

Christianity never carried with it better hygiene practices. If anyone tells you that, they don't know history. The upper class has always had more access to smelling better (I doubt they were much cleaner but they would have looked cleaner--there is a lesson even in that statement). But this sort of modern snobbery doesn't come from the Bible. It's actually an Enlightenment tendency to desire progression in all things, including hygiene, and perfecting humanity through this progression of the human animal. This is why hygiene became a hyper-focus of Victorian society. Now, people tied their morality to their hygiene as they tied whether they drank alcohol, played cards, and were educated to how much they had progressed and therefore how moral they were.

If Jesus cared about hygiene, He should have told the Pharisees when they complained that the disciples ate without washing their hands, "It is important but these spiritual truths about cleanliness are more important, even though cleanliness is next to godliness." Instead, He argued that such an idea was part of the old covenant which was not something required in the new and that nothing that goes into a man defiles him. Why isn't good hygiene a part of the new? Oh that's right, because it the laws of cleanliness have nothing to do with hygiene. They're rituals that represent spiritual truths and now that those spiritual truths are realized, God doesn't require them anymore. 

Does this mean you shouldn't observe hygienic practices? Of course you should. There are obligations to take care of one's family and if one knows that something is unhealthy they should tend to it. However, I am argued against the hyper-hygienic health and wealth cult that looks at any dirt or smell as ungodly, and would have condemned Jesus Himself for being ungodly (you know, if they didn't know it was Jesus in front of them). This is a crazy cult where those who are saturated in sins of insurrection, adultery, slander, etc. get to judge others by their preferential minutia. So that while straining out gnats and swallowing camels they nit and pick at others to feel superior. This is true arrogance that the Bible condemns as true ungodliness. The greatest irony is that people who do this are usually guilty of it. I cannot tell you how many people I hear talk about cleanliness who I have smelled as dirty, have looked disheveled, and whose children have looked gross with sweat, snot, and dirt all over their faces. 

Those who live in glass showers probably shouldn't throw stones, and they definitely might want to think whether they are getting their tightly held beliefs from the Bible or reading their own culture back into it. There is only one Jesus, and for our sakes, He who was rich and clean became poor and dirty for our sakes; and He did so because He was better than we are, dirt, smell and all.

Now, this won't convince the brainwashed sheep within our modern cult because nothing convinces cult members, but perhaps those who have the mind of Christ can awaken and see that they've been distracted by things the devil has put in their way so that they would not receive the gold God had for them and so miss out on becoming like Christ in this world.