Matthew 11:19

ὁ υἱὸς τ. ἀ.: obviously Jesus here refers to Himself in third person where we might have expected the first. Again the now familiar title, defining itself as we go along by varied use, pointing Jesus out as an exceptional person, while avoiding all conventional terms to define the exceptional element. ἐσθίων καὶ πίνων : the “Son of Man” is one who eats and drinks, i.e., non-ascetic and social, one of the marks interpretative of the title = human, fraternal. καὶ λέγουσι, and they say: what? One is curious to know. Surely this genial, friendly type of manhood will please! ἰδοὺ, lo! scandalised sanctimoniousness points its finger at Him and utters gross, outrageous calumnies. φάγος, οἰνοπότης, φίλος, an eater with emphasis = a glutton (a word of late Greek, Lob., Phryn., 434), a wine-bibber; and, worse than either, for φίλος is used in a sinister sense and implies that Jesus was the comrade of the worst characters, and like them in conduct. A malicious nick-name at first, it is now a name of honour: the sinner's lover. The Son of Man takes these calumnies as a thing of course and goes on His gracious way. It is not necessary to reflect these characteristics of Jesus and John back into the parable, and to identify them with the piping and wailing children. Yet the parable is so constructed as to exhibit them very clearly in their distinctive peculiarities by representing the children not merely employed in play and quarrelling over their games, which would have sufficed as a picture of the religious Jews, but as playing at marriages and funerals, the former symbolising the joy of the Jesus-circle, the latter the sadness of the Baptist-circle (vide my Parabolic Teaching of Christ, p. 420). καὶ ἐδικαιώθη, etc. This sentence wears a gnomic or proverbial aspect (“verba proverbium redolere videntur,” Kuinoel, similarly, Rosenmüller), and the aorist of ἐδικ. may be taken as an instance of the gnomic aorist, expressive of what is usual; a law in the moral sphere, as elsewhere the aorist is employed to express the usual course in the natural sphere, e.g., in James 1:11. Weiss-Meyer strongly denies that there are any instances of such use of the aorist in the N. T. (On this aorist vide Goodwin, Syntax, p. 53, and Bäumlein, § 523, where it is called the aorist of experience, “der Erfahrungswahrheit”.) ἀπὸ, in, in view of (vide Buttmann's Gram., p. 232, on ἀπὸ in N. T.). ἔργων : the reading of [68] [69], and likely to be the true one just because τέκνων is the reading in Luke. It is an appeal to results, to fruit (Matthew 7:20), to the future. Historical in form, the statement is in reality a prophecy. Resch, indeed (Agrapha, p. 142), takes ἐδικ. as the (erroneous) translation of the Hebrew prophetic future used in the Aramaic original = now we are condemned, but wait a while. The καὶ at the beginning of the clause is not = “but”. It states a fact as much a matter of course as is the condemnation of the unwise. Wisdom, condemned by the foolish, is always, of course, justified in the long run by her works or by her children.

[68] Codex Sinaiticus (sæc. iv.), now at St. Petersburg, published in facsimile type by its discoverer, Tischendorf, in 1862.

[69] Codex Vaticanus (sæc. iv.), published in photographic facsimile in 1889 under the care of the Abbate Cozza-Luzi.