Christians and the biblical food laws

Christians can eat pork, and nearly every church teaches that they may. The question usually comes up for a reason. A Jewish or Muslim friend may have asked why Christians eat what Leviticus forbids, a relative may have begun keeping the food laws, or you may have read Leviticus 11 for yourself and wondered whether you have been doing something wrong. The New Testament answers with good news about food and about people: God has gathered Jews and Gentiles into one family around one table.

Christians who eat pork can also honor those who do not. Observant Jews keep the food laws as part of God’s covenant with Israel, and some Christians abstain for reasons of conscience.

What does the Bible say about eating pork?

The ban on pork appears twice in the law of Moses, in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. Leviticus calls the pig unclean because, although it has a split hoof, it “doesn’t chew the cud,” and it commands, “You shall not eat their meat” (Leviticus 11:7–8).

Leviticus does not give a health reason for the rule. It gives a reason of holiness: “For I am the LORD who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:45). The food laws were a daily sign that Israel belonged to God.

Faithful Jews have kept those laws at great cost. The Second Book of Maccabees, part of the Old Testament in Orthodox Bibles and printed among the Apocrypha in many Protestant ones, tells of the aged scribe Eleazar, who “was compelled to open his mouth to eat swine’s flesh” under the Greek king Antiochus IV in the 160s BCE, and who chose death instead (2 Maccabees 6:18). The next chapter tells of seven brothers and their mother who died rather than eat “the abominable swine’s flesh” (2 Maccabees 7:1). Christians can honor that faithfulness, which was given for the love of God.

Did Jesus say all foods are clean?

Jesus taught that what makes a person unclean comes from the heart:

He said to them, “So, are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

Mark 7:18–19, NRSVUE

The words in parentheses are Mark’s comment on Jesus’ teaching, written for a church that by then included many Gentiles. Matthew’s version of the same scene has Jesus say, “That which enters into the mouth doesn’t defile the man; but that which proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man” (Matthew 15:11), without Mark’s comment. Jesus himself was an observant Jew (see Was Jesus Jewish?), and the Gospels never show him eating pork. The early church worked out what his teaching meant for Gentiles after his resurrection.

What did Peter’s vision in Acts 10 mean?

The question came to a head in Acts 10. Peter, praying on a rooftop, saw a sheet let down from heaven full of animals that the law called unclean:

In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” The voice said to him again, a second time, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Acts 10:12–15, NRSVUE

Peter then went to the house of Cornelius, a Roman officer, and explained what the vision meant: “God has shown me that I shouldn’t call any man unholy or unclean” (Acts 10:28). The vision was about people as much as food. The food laws had kept Jews and Gentiles from eating together, and God was making one family of both at one table. The welcome Peter learned on that rooftop is the welcome every church is still learning. Paul later rebuked Peter for drawing back from eating with Gentile Christians in Antioch (Galatians 2:11–14).

Did the apostles require Christians to keep the food laws?

The apostles set Gentile Christians free from the food laws. When some believers taught that Gentile converts had to keep the law of Moses, the apostles and elders met in Jerusalem. Their letter to the Gentile churches named only a few requirements:

For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from sexual immorality.

Acts 15:28–29, NRSVUE

Pork is absent from the list. Paul stated the principle in Romans: “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean of itself” (Romans 14:14). He told the Corinthians, “Whatever is sold in the butcher shop, eat, asking no question for the sake of conscience” (1 Corinthians 10:25). The letter to the Colossians says, “Let no one therefore judge you in eating or drinking” (Colossians 2:16), and 1 Timothy says that “every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4).

Do any Christians avoid pork?

Yes. The Seventh-day Adventist Church teaches its members to keep the clean and unclean food laws of Leviticus 11, so Adventists do not eat pork or shellfish. The Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches keep traditional food restrictions as well. Many Messianic Jews, who believe in Jesus and keep Jewish practice, also keep kosher.

Paul’s counsel to the church in Rome, which was divided over food, applies to every such case:

Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong to make someone stumble by what you eat; it is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother or sister stumble.

Romans 14:20–21, NRSVUE

If you are sharing a meal with Jewish, Muslim, or Adventist friends who do not eat pork, love asks you to serve something else. If a fellow Christian keeps the food laws out of conscience, Paul tells you not to despise that choice, and he tells that Christian not to judge you.

What do the churches teach about eating pork?

The ELCA, the PC(USA), the United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church, like the Orthodox churches of the Greek and Russian traditions and nearly every other church, teach that Christians may eat pork. The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England state the principle in Article VII: “the Law given from God by Moses, as touching Ceremonies and Rites, do not bind Christian men,” while “no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral.” The same reasoning explains why most Christians do not treat tattoos as forbidden.

Christians do still practice fasting and abstinence as spiritual disciplines, such as giving up meat on Fridays in Lent. Those practices are acts of self-denial and prayer, and they treat no food as unclean in the way the pig was unclean for Israel. For more on what makes something a sin, see What is sin?

Whatever is on your plate, every meal can become a small act of thanksgiving, since “nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” Martin Luther’s Small Catechism taught households to begin their meals with words from Psalm 145, and they make a good grace for any table: “The eyes of all wait for you. You give them their food in due season. You open your hand, and satisfy the desire of every living thing” (Psalm 145:15–16).