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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - Mark 7:19 - 7:19
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Draught (ἀφεδρῶνα)
Liddell and Scott give only one definition - a privy, cloaca; and derive from ἕδρα, seat, breech, fundament. Compare English stool. The word does not refer to a part of the body.
Purging all meats (καθαρίζων πάντα τὰ βρώματα)
According to the A. V. these words are in apposition with draught: the draught which makes pure the whole of the food, since it is the place designed for receiving the impure excrements.
Christ was enforcing the truth that all defilement comes from within. This was in the face of the Rabbinic distinctions between clean and unclean meats. Christ asserts that Levitical uncleanness, such as eating with unwashed hands, is of small importance compared with moral uncleanness. Peter, still under the influence of the old ideas, cannot understand the saying and asks an explanation (Mat 15:15), which Christ gives in Mar 7:18-23. The words purging all meats (Rev., making all meats clean) are not Christ's, but the Evangelist's, explaining the bearing of Christ's words; and therefore the Rev. properly renders, this he said (italics), making all meats clean. This was the interpretation of Chrysostom, who says in his homily on Matthew: “But Mark says that he said these things making all meats pure.” Canon Farrar refers to a passage cited from Gregory Thaumaturgus: “And the Saviour, who purifies all meats, says.” This rendering is significant in the light of Peter's vision of the great sheet, and of the words, “What God hath cleansed” (ἐκαθάρισε), in which Peter probably realized for the first time the import of the Lord's words on this occasion. Canon Farrar remarks: “It is doubtless due to the fact that St. Peter, the informant of St. Mark, in writing his Gospel, and as the sole ultimate authority for this vision in the Acts, is the source of both narratives, - that we owe the hitherto unnoticed circumstance that the two verbs, cleanse and profane (or defile), both in a peculiarly pregnant sense, are the two most prominent words in the narrative of both events” (“Life and Work of Paul,” i., 276-7).