Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched him. I am willing, he said. Be clean — the textual tradition is divided: many manuscripts have moved with compassion while earlier manuscripts have indignant (orgistheis). Most textual scholars prefer indignant as the harder reading more likely to have been softened by later copyists. The indignation is directed not at the leper but at the disease and its power to exclude — the same righteous anger at evil that drives the exorcisms. The touch is the radical act: touching a leper created ritual impurity for the one who touched; Jesus reverses the equation, extending purity to the leper rather than receiving impurity from him.

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