Luke 11:39-40

11:39 But the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean 1  the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. 2  11:40 You fools! 3  Didn’t the one who made the outside make the inside as well? 4 

Luke 11:44

11:44 Woe to you! 5  You are like unmarked graves, and people 6  walk over them without realizing it!” 7 

1 sn The allusion to washing (clean the outside of the cup) shows Jesus knew what they were thinking and deliberately set up a contrast that charged them with hypocrisy and majoring on minors.

2 tn Or “and evil.”

3 sn You fools is a rebuke which in the OT refers to someone who is blind to God (Ps 14:1, 53:1; 92:6; Prov 6:12).

4 tn The question includes a Greek particle, οὐ (ou), that expects a positive reply. God, the maker of both, is concerned for what is both inside and outside.

5 tc Most mss (A [D] W Θ Ψ Ë13 Ï it) have “experts in the law and Pharisees, hypocrites” after “you,” but this looks like an assimilation to the parallel in Matt 23:25, 27, 29. The shorter reading has earlier attestation from a variety of reliable mss (Ì45,75 א B C L Ë1 33 1241 2542 lat sa).

6 tn Grk “men.” This is a generic use of ἄνθρωπος (anqrwpo"), referring to both males and females.

7 sn In Judaism to come into contact with the dead or what is associated with them, even without knowing it, makes one unclean (Num 19:11-22; Lev 21:1-3; Mishnah, m. Demai 2:3). To Pharisees, who would have been so sensitive about contracting ceremonial uncleanness, it would have been quite a stinging rebuke to be told they caused it.