in the audience of all the people Rather, while all the people were listening. Here followed the final rupture of Jesus with the authorities political, social, and religious of His nation. They had now made their own condemnation inevitable, and had justly provoked that great Denunciation on which (as less intelligible to Gentiles) St Luke here only touches. But he has given it in part before (Luke 11:39-52) in his account of the hostile banquet at the house of a Pharisee. In St Matthew it occupies, with its rhythmic grandeur and awfully solemn condemnation, the whole of the twenty-third chapter.

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