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Mat_9:16-17. No one puts a patch consisting of cloth that has not been fulled upon an old robe, for that which is meant to fill up the rent (the patch put on to mend the old garment) tears off from the (old rotten) cloak, when it gets damp or happens to be spread out, or stretched, or such like. That αὐτοῦ does not refer to the piece of unfulled cloth (Euth. Zigabenus, Grotius, de Wette, Bleek), but to the old garment, is suggested by the idea involved in πλήρωμα (id quo res impletur, Fritzsche, ad Rom. II. p. 469). Τί is not to be supplied after αἴρει , but the idea is: makes a rent. Comp. Rev_22:19, and especially Winer, p. 552 [E. T. 757]. The point of the comparison lies in the fact that such a proceeding is not only unsuitable, but a positive hindrance to the end in view. “The old forms of piety amid which John and his disciples still move are not suited to the new religious life emanating from me. To try to embody the latter in the former, is to proceed in a manner as much calculated to defeat its purpose as when one tries to patch an old garment with a piece of unfulled cloth, which, instead of mending it, as it is intended to do, only makes the rent greater than ever; or as when one seeks to fill old bottles with new wine, and ends in losing wine and bottles together. The new life needs new forms.” The Catholics, following Chrysostom and Theophylact, and by way of finding something in favour of fastings, have erroneously explained the old garment and old bottles as referring to the disciples, from whom, as “adhuc infirmes et veteri adsuetis homini” (Jansen), it was, as yet, too much to expect the severer mode of life for which, on the contrary (Mat_9:17), they would have to be previously prepared by the operation of the Holy Spirit. This is directly opposed to the meaning of Jesus’ words, and not in accordance with the development of the apostolic church (Col_2:20 ff.), by which fasting, as legal penance, was necessarily included among the στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου , however much it may have been valued and observed as the spontaneous outcome of an inward necessity (Act_13:2 f., Mat_14:23; 2Co_6:5; 2Co_11:27). Neander suggests the utterly irrelevant view, that “it is impossible to renovate from without the old nature of man” (the old garment) through fasting and prayers (which correspond to the new patch).
Leathern bottles, for the most part of goats’ skins (Hom. Il. iii. 247, Od. vi. 78, ix. 196, v. 265) with the rough side inward, in which it was and still is the practice (Niebuhr, I. p. 212) in the East to keep and carry about wine. Comp. Jdt_10:6; Rosenmüller, Morgenl. on Jos_9:5.
ἀπολοῦνται ] Future, the consequence of what has just been described by the verbs in the present tense. On εἰ δὲ μήγε , even after negative clauses, see note on 2Co_11:16.
REMARK.
According to Luk_5:33, it was not John’s disciples, but the Pharisees, who put the question to Jesus about fasting. This difference is interpreted partly in favour of Luke (Schleiermacher, Neander, Bleek), partly of Matthew (de Wette, Holtzmann, Keim), while Strauss rejects both. For my part, I decide for Matthew; first, because his simpler narrative bears no traces of another hand (which, however, can scarcely be said of that of Luke); and then, because the whole answer of Jesus, so mild (indeed touching, Mat_9:15) in its character, indicates that those who put the question can hardly have been the Pharisees, to whom He had just spoken in a very different tone. Mar_2:18 ff., again (which Ewald holds to be the more original), certainly does not represent the pure version of the matter as regards the questioners, who, according to his account, are the disciples of John and the Pharisees,—an incongruity, however, which owes its origin to the question itself.