Text:

At the end of v. 2 Textus Receptus adds emempsanto ‘they found fault,’ which is omitted by all modern editions of the Greek text.

Exegesis:

sunagontai pros auton (cf. 6.30; 2.2) ‘they gather together to him.’

hoi Pharisaioi (cf. 2.16) ‘the Pharisees.’

tines tōn grammateōn (cf. 1.22) ‘some of the scribes’: the participial phrase elthontes apo Ierosolumōn ‘(who) came from Jerusalem’ modifies ‘some of the scribes.’

koinais chersin, tout’ estin aniptois ‘with unclean hands, that is, unwashed’: for the benefit of his readers the author explains what is meant by ‘unclean hands.’

koinos (7.5) ‘common (to all),’ ‘communal’: from this primary sense the word came to mean (in the N.T.) ‘ordinary,’ ‘profane.’ Here, then, it would mean ‘ceremonially unclean.’ Morton Smith adduces proof from Rabbinical literature to show that koinos in the N.T. refers to “objects of which the cleanness or uncleanness is uncertain, and which are therefore a sort of third class apart from the clean (certainly so) and the (certainly) unclean.”

aniptos (only here in Mark) ‘unwashed.’ As the context shows, the protest of the scribes does not reflect an interest in hygiene: it is a matter of ceremonial laws of purification which the disciples of Jesus have neglected to observe.

Translation:

Now is to be taken strictly in the transitional sense, not with any temporal meaning.

Gathered together to him is an awkward phrase, even in English. The idea is that they formed a group there where Jesus was. The Greek preposition pros indicates their direction of interest and the reciprocal nature of the meeting. This expression is made more complicated by the fact that the scribes are also involved. In some languages this means that one must say ‘when the Pharisees, together with some of the scribes (those who had come from Jerusalem), had formed a group there where Jesus was, they saw that….’ One may also use the equivalent of ‘huddled together’ or ‘came together as a group.’

For scribes, see 1.22.

Because of the considerable distance of the noun Jesus from the pronominal forms him and his, it is often necessary to employ ‘Jesus,’ especially for the first occurrence of the third person pronoun.

It is probably impossible to find an adequate term to designate the neutral concept of koinos (see above), and even an equivalent of defiled is not readily discoverable in many languages. In some cases one may say ‘dirty’ (Southern Bobo Madaré); in others, ‘spotted,’ i.e. by impurities (Copainalá Zoque). Toraja-Sa’dan says ‘with not-pure hands,’ the word masero meaning ‘pure, ritually clean, holy’; Pamona renders ‘hands that arouse aversion.’ Other possibilities are ‘they had not been purified’ or ‘they had not been made clean.’

That is is equivalent to ‘that means’ or ‘it is also said.’

In following the Textus Receptus (something which is required in certain instances – see Introduction), one must render condemn, which may be translated as ‘sought their sin’ (Tzeltal), ‘said that it wasn’t good’ (Tabasco Chontal), or ‘talked against them’ (San Blas Kuna).

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of Mark. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1961. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .