Purity of the Body, Sexuality, and Religious Office
The purity of the body was what God asked of them. Sin was something exterior, visible to all people. For example, the illnesses like leprosy (Leviticus 13 and 14) were the cause of impurity and the person was banned from entering the city. The illness and the impurity were contagious, so touching a sick person or being touched by a sick person was cause of impurity. Jesus changes this when he is touched by a woman with hemorrhages in Mark 5, 24-34. Being a woman, she couldn’t touch or even talk to a man in public. This woman was even worse because of her illness and she had been sick for so long, more than 12 years, in effect make her very impure. But Jesus, after being touched by her, doesn’t condemn her as the Jews expected, rather he heals her and congratulates her for her faith. He showed them that the impurity didn’t come from the body, but from the heart.
Women were a source of sin for the jewish men since creation (Genesis 3). Women caused carnal desires in the men and for that reason they blamed them of seduction and they made them cover themselves with veils in order to not provoke the men. Sexual infidelity was always the fault of the woman (Sirach 25, 13-26). She was the impure one and he couldn’t control his own sexual desires. The adulteress is the example Jesus utilizes to teach the Jews that both men and women are sinners and they both have impure desires and that they should control their bodies (John 8, 1-11). Again Jesus acts in contrary to what the Pharisees and Doctors of the Law were expecting, forgiving the women instead of condemning her. In addition to showing that he had the power to forgive sins, he also spoke to the woman in public, something very rare in those ancient times.
The Gospel itself makes it clear that women were not valued as a person (Matthew 5, 21). They were the property of the fathers, if not their husbands, and valued at the same level as a slave, an ox, or an ass, as stated in the ten commandments of Moses (Exodus 20, 17).