Matthew Thiessen

“Ritual impurity has nothing to do with guilt unless one brings it into the wrong context—that is, into sacred space. Ritual impurity and moral impurity (sin) are two different categories, although they overlap at times, as some scholars have stressed. The woman who suffers a ritual impurity is not guilty of sin, but were this same woman to enter into the courtyard for women at the Jerusalem temple, she would wrongfully encroach upon holy space, bringing impurity into contact with the realm of the holy, and would thus become guilty of sin or moral impurity as well.62”
― Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels' Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism

“If you were a gentile who was being told repeatedly, explicitly and implicitly, that your heritage, your customs, and your forms of piety were all the negative results of abandoning the one true God, you might very well ask yourself what you needed to do in order to be saved.29 Many gentiles who heard this message likely rejected it as an inaccurate and unfair depiction of the gentile condition, but if they accepted it, they might naturally have found themselves wanting to be anything but a gentile. It’s into this Jewish understanding of the gentile problem that Paul interjects his message about Jesus the Messiah.”
― Matthew Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah's Herald to the Gentiles