Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Luke 18:11 - 18:11

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Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Luke 18:11 - 18:11


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

11. σταθείς. The word might almost be rendered ‘posing himself.’ Standing was the ordinary Jewish attitude of prayer (1Ki 8:22; Mar 11:25), but the word (which is not used of the Tax-gatherer) seems to imply that he stood by himself to avoid the contaminating contact of the ‘people of the earth,’ and posed himself in a conspicuous attitude (Luk 19:8; Mat 6:5; Act 2:14), as well as “prayed with himself” as the words are perhaps rightly rendered. He was “a separatist in spirit as in name,” Trench. (Pharisee from pharash ‘to separate.’)

πρὸς ἑαυτόν. He prayed, so to speak, to himself. He was the object of his own idolatry.

ὁ θεός. The nom. for the voc., see Luk 8:54, Luk 12:32. ‘O God.’ His prayer is no prayer at all; not even a thanksgiving, only a boast. See the strong denunciation of such insolent self-sufficiency in Rev 3:17-18.

ὥσπερ οἱ λοιποὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων. ‘As the rest of mankind.’

ἅρπαγες, ἄδικοι, μοιχοί. Could he, in any real sense, have made out even this claim to be free from glaring crimes? His class at any rate are charged by Christ with being “full of extortion” (Mat 23:25); and they were unjust, seeing that they “omitted judgment” (id. 23). They are not indeed charged by Jesus with adultery either in the metaphorical or literal sense, but they are spoken of as being prominent members of an adulterous generation, and on several occasions our Lord sternly rebuked their shameful laxity in the matter of divorce (Mat 19:3-9). And not only does Josephus charge them with this crime also, but their Talmud, with perfect self-complacency, shews how the flagrant immorality of even their most eminent Rabbis found a way to shelter itself, with barefaced and cynical casuistry, under legal forms. See Joh 8:1-11, and Lightfoot, Hor. Hebr. ad loc.; Life of Christ, II. 152. It appears from the tract Sotah in the Mishnah, that the ordeal of the ‘water of jealousy’ had been abolished by Jochanan Ben Zakkai, the greatest Rabbi of this age, because the crime had grown so common.

ὡς οὗτος ὁ τελώνης. Spoken δεικτικῶς with a gesture as well as an accent of contempt. He thus makes the Publican a foil to his own virtues. “This,” says St Augustine, “is no longer to exult, but to insult.” It implies, as Luther says, “this publican who skins and scrapes everyone, and clutches wherever he can.”