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A Lesson Concerning Defilement.
The Pharisees voice an objection:
v. 1. Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, which were of Jerusalem, saying,
v. 2. Why do Thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.
Then, when the Pharisees were becoming so wrought up that they were holding councils to destroy Him. The movement was extending beyond their control, the popular enthusiasm was still growing. They were beginning to realize that they had no ordinary person to deal with. And so their hostility caused them to reinforce the Pharisees of Galilee with the learned men from the metropolis, for Jerusalem was the stronghold of the strictest legalism among the Jews. The purpose of the deputation was to discredit Jesus as being careless and lax toward His disciples in His insistence upon keeping the regulations of the Jewish elders. Even during the Babylonian captivity, but especially since the time of Ezra, the interpretation or explanation of the Law, as made by the great rabbis of the Jews, had gradually grown into a large body of precepts, additional to the books of the Old Testament. This Mishna, as it was called, in later years received further additions in the so-called Gemara, all of which were incorporated in the Talmud, the religious book of the present-day Jews. These additional laws and precepts governed even the minutest details of everyday life, thus laying upon the average Jew an intolerable burden. The local rabbis and elders of the synagogues were supposed to teach all these precepts and insist upon their being observed most rigidly. A breach of these rabbinical rules was placed on a level with breaking the greatest moral laws. The tradition was as yet unwritten, it was the "law upon the lip," but its authority was the greater, the more remote in the past was the elder that had first spoken it. Note: Not the unhygienic or unaesthetic feature of coming to meals with dirty hands is attacked. It is an act of monstrous impiety, a breaking of sacred religious traditions that the disciples were guilty of in the opinion of the Pharisees. For such an act they excommunicated people from the synagogue. Their question implied also that Jesus was guilty for permitting such a sacrilege.