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Matthew 23

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Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples,

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Saying, The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat:

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All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.

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For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.

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But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,

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And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,

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And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

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But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.

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And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

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Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.

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But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.

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And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

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But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

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Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

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Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

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Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!

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Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?

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And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty.

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Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?

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Whoso therefore shall swear by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon.

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And whoso shall swear by the temple, sweareth by it, and by him that dwelleth therein.

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And he that shall swear by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon.

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Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

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Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

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Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

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Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

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Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

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Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

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Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,

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And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.

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Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.

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Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.

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Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

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Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city:

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That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.

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Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.

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O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!

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Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.

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For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

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Matthew 23

The Woe Discourse is the most sustained prophetic denunciation in the Gospel — seven woes against the scribes and Pharisees delivered publicly in the temple. Each woe targets a specific form of religious performance that replaces genuine righteousness with public display: not entering the kingdom and blocking others from entering, devouring widows' houses while making long prayers, making converts twice as fit for hell as themselves, swearing by the gold of the temple rather than the temple that makes the gold holy, giving the tithe of spices while neglecting justice and mercy and faithfulness, cleaning the outside of the cup while the inside is full of greed and self-indulgence, appearing righteous while being full of hypocrisy. The chapter closes with the lament over Jerusalem — how often I have longed to gather your children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing — and the announcement that the house will be left desolate until the day they say blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Matthew 23:39

For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. The departure and the future return: you will not see me again until you say blessed is he who comes — the Psalm 118:26 Hosanna that the crowd shouted at the triumphal entry. The until communicates the eschatological hope: the seeing will come again, when the generation that rejected him welcomes him as the crowd of the triumphal entry did. Romans 11:25–26 holds the same hope: Israel's partial hardening will end when the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.

Matthew 23:26

You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. The order of cleansing: inside first, then the outside will also be clean. The teaching of Matthew 15:11 (what comes out of the mouth defiles) applied to the Pharisees directly: the inside that is cleaned produces the outside cleanness that the ritual purity system seeks by external means.

Matthew 23:32

Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. The ironic imperative — fill up the measure — communicates the inevitability of the path they are on: they will complete what their fathers began by killing the prophets. The they are about to kill Jesus confirms the irony: the tomb-builders are becoming the prophet-killers.

Matthew 23:33

You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? The serpents and brood of vipers — the same epithet John the Baptist applied to them (Matthew 3:7) — are the climactic indictment. The how are you to escape being sentenced to hell is the question that the seven woes have been building toward: the judgment that the Pharisees' hypocrisy has accumulated cannot be escaped.

Matthew 23:34

Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. The sending of prophets, wise men, and scribes — the messengers of the kingdom — who will be killed, crucified, flogged, and pursued by the religious establishment. The future tense communicates the ongoing pattern: the Pharisees who killed the prophets will continue to kill the prophets. The followers of Jesus will suffer what Jesus suffered.

Matthew 23:35

So that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. The accumulated blood of the prophets — from Abel (the first martyr in Genesis 4) to Zechariah (the last martyr in the Hebrew Bible's arrangement, 2 Chronicles 24:20–21) — is charged to the generation that kills Jesus. The blood that has been shed throughout the prophetic tradition reaches its climax in the rejection of the one to whom all the prophets pointed.

Matthew 23:36

Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. The generation that kills Jesus is the generation that inherits the full weight of the accumulated prophetic rejection. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD is the historical fulfillment that Matthew's readers understood in the light of this verse.

Matthew 23:37

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! The lament over Jerusalem — one of the most poignant passages in the Gospels — is the mourning of the rejected lover. The hen-and-chicks image communicates the maternal tenderness of the divine pursuit: how often would I have gathered you — the repeated attempts throughout the prophetic history — and you were not willing. The unwillingness is the consistent human rejection that the divine love consistently pursues.

Matthew 23:38

See, your house is left to you desolate. The judgment: your house — the temple, and by extension the entire religious establishment — is left desolate. The desolation is the fulfillment of the prophetic language of abandonment: the divine presence that made the temple holy departs, leaving the structure empty and therefore vulnerable to the destruction that Matthew 24 will describe.

Matthew 23:9

And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. The father title — religious authority that reproduces disciples as a father reproduces children — is also forbidden: only the heavenly Father holds that status. The prohibition on calling human teachers father addresses the dependency relationship that religious paternity creates.

Matthew 23:10

Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The instructor title is the third forbidden status designation: the community has one instructor, the Christ. The three prohibitions — rabbi, father, instructor — address the three ways that religious authority is typically claimed and used to create hierarchical dependence. The community of brothers and sisters who have one teacher, one Father, and one instructor has no room for the title-seeking that the Pharisees exemplify.

Matthew 23:11

The greatest among you shall be your servant. The servant-greatness principle from Matthew 20:26 is applied here to the contrast with the Pharisees' honor-seeking. The greatest is the servant — not the one with the longest fringes and the best seat at the feast.

Matthew 23:12

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. The kingdom's consistent reversal principle: self-exaltation produces humbling; self-humbling produces exaltation. The eschatological passive (will be humbled, will be exalted) communicates divine agency: God does the humbling and the exalting. Luke 14:11 and 18:14 repeat the same principle.

Matthew 23:13

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. The first woe: the scribes and Pharisees shut the kingdom. The door-shutting communicates the gatekeeping function that the Pharisees have assumed — and their failure in that function: they neither enter themselves nor allow those trying to enter to do so. The teachers who should be opening the kingdom are closing it.

Matthew 23:14

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows' houses and for a pretense you make long prayers; therefore you will receive the greater condemnation. The second woe (verse numbering varies in manuscripts): the financial exploitation of vulnerable widows paired with the religious performance of long prayers. The long prayers that are pretense are the theatrical piety that the Pharisees perform while profiting from the vulnerable. The greater condemnation communicates the compounded judgment: both the exploitation and the hypocrisy carry their respective penalties.

Matthew 23:15

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. The third woe: the missionary zeal that produces converts who are twice as much a child of hell as the converts' teachers. The problem is not the proselytizing but what the convert is converted to — the Pharisaic system that closes the kingdom rather than opens it.

Matthew 23:16

Woe to you, blind guides, who say: if anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath. The fourth woe targets the oath-casuistry that created binding and non-binding oaths based on the specific object sworn by. The blind guides who have developed a system of oath-taking that can be manipulated to avoid binding commitment have again placed their tradition above the truth.

Matthew 23:17

You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? The rhetorical question exposes the incoherence of the oath-casuistry: the gold of the temple is sacred because of the temple, not vice versa. The gold's sanctity derives from the temple's sanctity; swearing by the gold of the temple invokes the temple's holiness whether one acknowledges it or not.

Matthew 23:18

And you say: if anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath. The second example of the oath-casuistry: the altar versus the gift on the altar. The same logic applies — the gift's sanctity derives from the altar that sanctifies it.

Matthew 23:19

You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? The parallel rhetorical question: the altar that makes the gift sacred is greater than the gift that the altar makes sacred. The oath-casuistry has inverted the proper order.

Matthew 23:20

So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. The conclusion of the oath-casuistry argument: swearing by the altar invokes the altar and everything on it; the distinction between altar and gift is a fiction maintained to allow oath-evasion. The Sermon on the Mount's do not swear at all (Matthew 5:37) is the deeper resolution.

Matthew 23:21

And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it. The temple oath invokes God who dwells in the temple — the oath cannot be separated from the divine presence that makes the temple holy.

Matthew 23:22

And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. The heaven oath invokes God who sits on the heavenly throne — every oath, whatever its object, is ultimately an invocation of God. The oath-casuistry that tried to create non-divine oaths has failed: all oaths invoke the divine.

Matthew 23:23

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. The fifth woe: the meticulous tithing of garden herbs — going beyond the Torah's agricultural tithe to include the smallest garden plants — while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. The you ought to have done, without neglecting the others is not the abolition of the tithe but the insistence that the detailed observance must accompany the weightier matters, not replace them.

Matthew 23:24

You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! The camel-and-gnat image is one of the most memorable in the Gospels: the meticulous straining of the water to remove a tiny impure insect (the gnat, an unclean creature) while swallowing the largest unclean animal in the land (the camel). The image captures the inverted priorities of the Pharisaic system: extreme attention to the small and complete neglect of the large.

Matthew 23:25

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. The sixth woe: the clean outside and the unclean inside. The cup-and-plate image applies the ritual purity framework to the Pharisees themselves: the same concern for ritual cleanness that governs their vessel-washing does not govern their inner life. The greed and self-indulgence that fill the inside are the moral impurity that the external cleaning does not address.

Matthew 23:27

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. The seventh and climactic woe: the whitewashed tombs that are beautiful outside and dead inside. Tombs were whitewashed before Passover to warn pilgrims not to inadvertently touch them and become ritually impure. The image is the perfect summary of the Pharisaic hypocrisy: the external beauty that warns others away from impurity while the inside is full of death and all uncleanness.

Matthew 23:28

So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. The application of the whitewashed-tomb image to the Pharisees: the outward appearance of righteousness that conceals the hypocrisy and lawlessness of the inside. The lawlessness — anomia, the violation of the law — is what the Pharisees' law-keeping conceals: the very people who are known for their law observance are guilty of lawlessness in the things that matter most.

Matthew 23:29

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous. The eighth woe: the building and decorating of the prophets' tombs as an act of piety toward those their ancestors killed. The tomb-building communicates that the Pharisees consider themselves in a different moral category from those who killed the prophets — a self-assessment that Jesus will challenge.

Matthew 23:30

Saying: if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets. The Pharisees' self-distancing from the prophets' killers: if we had been there, we would not have done it. The would-not-have is the self-righteous assumption that they are different from their ancestors.

Matthew 23:31

Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. The self-witness of the tomb-building: the very act of claiming descent from the prophets' murderers while claiming to be different witnesses against them. They are sons of those who murdered the prophets — and the next verses will show that the apple has not fallen far from the tree.

Matthew 23:1

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples. The Woes against the Scribes and Pharisees are addressed to both the crowds and the disciples — the teaching has a dual audience. The crowds need to understand the limits of Pharisaic authority; the disciples need to understand the failure of the Pharisaic model that they must not reproduce.

Matthew 23:2

The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat. The acknowledgment of the Pharisees' legitimate teaching authority — they sit on Moses' seat — precedes the indictment of how they have abused it. The teaching authority is real; the problem is the gap between what they teach and what they do.

Matthew 23:3

So do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. The distinction between what the Pharisees say (observe) and what they do (do not imitate): the teaching may be correct even when the teacher's life does not model it. The do and observe their teaching is qualified by the do not do their works — follow the substance, not the example.

Matthew 23:4

They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. The heavy burdens of Pharisaic legal elaboration — the oral tradition that added hundreds of interpretive regulations to the Torah's commandments — are placed on others while the Pharisees exempt themselves through their own legal expertise. The contrast with Jesus' yoke (Matthew 11:30: my yoke is easy and my burden is light) is the contrast between the rabbi who carries the burden alongside the disciple and the teacher who loads the burden and walks away.

Matthew 23:5

They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. The performance motivation: all their deeds done to be seen (theaomai — the same root as theater). The expanded phylacteries (the boxes containing Scripture passages strapped to the forehead and arm for prayer) and the lengthened fringes (the tassels on the prayer garment) are the visible religious practices that signal devotion while communicating status.

Matthew 23:6

And they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues. The love of social recognition — the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues — is the community expression of the performance motivation. The seats of honor and the best positions communicate the social status that the religious performance is designed to secure.

Matthew 23:7

And greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. The public greetings in the marketplace and the rabbi title communicate the same status-seeking: the public acknowledgment of their authority and learning is the Pharisees' desired reward for their ostentatious religious performance.

Matthew 23:8

But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. The disciples are forbidden the rabbi title: they have one teacher (Jesus) and they are siblings — equals, not a hierarchy. The community that Jesus is forming has no human rabbi at its center; the one teacher grounds everyone at the same level as students.