1 Then came together unto him certain of the Pharisees and the scribes from Jerusalem.1
2 And when they saw some of his disciples eat bread with unwashen hands, they found fault.
3 For the Pharisees and many of the Jews held that if food is eaten with unwashen hands, it is defiled.
4 And they asked Jesus, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands?
5 He answered and said unto them; Well hath Esias said of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.
6 Howbeit in vain do they worship Me, and their fear toward Me is taught by the precept of men.2
7 For ye teach the traditions of men as commandments of God3 and lay aside what God commanded.
8 For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die:
9 But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Korban, that is, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free.
10 And ye suffer him no more to do aught for his father or his mother.4
11 Making the word of God of none effect.
12 And when he had come away from the people and entered into a house, he received the Spirit and testified and said unto his disciples, Verily, verily, I say unto you, No prophet from Israel will be sent to uproot their traditions.
13 For no man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; and no man putteth new wine into old bottles; but new wine must be put into new bottles.
14 For this cause will my heavenly Father raise a prophet from the midst of another nation, and put His word into his mouth, that He may uproot every plant which He hath not planted;5 that He may give unto the world a new wine that men of all nations may quench their thirst.
15 After these things it came to pass that there came to Jesus a Greek woman, Syrophoenician by nation:
16 Her daughter had an unclean spirit, and she besought Jesus that he would cast it out of her.
17 But he answered her not a word; and his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.
18 But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.6
19 Howbeit I know another man of God, and she can go to him, for he taketh devils out of all kinds of people.
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Notes
- For the incident related here, see Mark 7:1-23 and Matt. 15:1-5. In accounts of such incidents, the canonical Gospels present Jesus’ attitude as being far more radical than it actually was. For it appears from the Acts that Jewish customs and attitudes condemned by the Gospels with merciless force, were shown by the closest of Jesus’ followers and leaders of the primitive Christian community. Thus, for example, we may note with Marcello Craveri, (The Life of Jesus, p. 140) how the Acts tell us of the great conflict that Peter suffered when he had to overcome his own resistance, presumably for the first time, to entering the house of a pagan (Cornelius), who had asked to be baptized, and how he later sought to explain to the company of the faithful, insisting that, at any rate, he had not eaten anything forbidden by the law as unclean (Acts 10:28; 11:8). But a criticism not aimed at destroying Jewish traditions of excessive rigidity in some matters on the part of his countrymen and a relaxed attitude toward some of their religious prohibitions can be attributed to Jesus. The Qur’an expresses this by saying that Jesus made lawful some of the things prohibited earlier to Israel, although, at the same time, he confirmed the Torah (3:50). What this means is that while Jesus confirmed the main and the basic part of the Jewish laws and traditions, he modified them in some of the details and tried to make it more flexible. ↩
- Isa. 29:13. The quotation in the Gospels is inaccurate. ↩
- Thus, without using a language destructive of Judaism, Jesus tried to point out that (1) true worship of God was more important than following religious rules and regulations, and (2) the children of Israel were bound by what God really commanded them and not by all the traditions of the elders. At Paul’s hand, this element of Jesus’ thinking became a declaration of total freedom from the law. The conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was originally a conflict between hypocrisy and true religiosity within the Jewish tradition, but with Paul this became a question of whether or not Jewish rules have any religious validity anymore. The Gospel accounts of the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees are considerably influenced by Paul and the conflict he generated. In particular, Jesus’ speech to the “crowd” and his private conversation with his close disciples (Mark 7:14-23; Matt. 15:10-20), after his argument with the Pharisees from Jerusalem, are a product of this conflict, the purpose of the two evangelists being to give Jesus’ authority to the victorious Pauline view that Jewish rules about cleanliness, defilement, etc., had no religious validity. The strong language in which Jesus replied to the Pharisees also seems to be influenced by Paulinism. ↩
- If Jesus taught honoring one’s father and mother, he probably honored his own parents, too (cf. Qur’an 19:32). ↩
- Matt. 15:13; Luke 5:36-39. The two synoptic Gospels no doubt look toward the developments that took place after Jesus with the emergence of Paul and the Gentile Christianity. But since Gentile Christianity conflicts with the thinking and teachings of Jesus, it should be regarded as one of the plants that was not planted by the heavenly Father and needs to be uprooted. ↩
- Mark 7:25-27; Matt. 15:21-24. The two Gospels, however, continue the story and say that after further insistence from the mother, Jesus healed the girl, thus retreating from his position that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. This is clearly an attempt to validate the Gentile mission started later under the leadership of Paul. Actually, the whole story seems to be the product of the conflict among Jewish Christians concerning the mission to the Gentiles. The story about the Syrophoenician woman was probably first created by those opposed to the mission, and then it was modified when the Gentiles finally began to be accepted by a majority of Christians as a result of Paul’s victory. But the original story is closer to Jesus’ own attitude (cf. Note 1, Chapter 4), and we have used it here to support the image of Jesus as primarily an Israeli prophet whose influence nevertheless extended beyond the Jewish people and became instrumental in preparing the way for a more truly universal religion—Islam. ↩