This is the same confrontation already read on these pages from Matthew’s side (Matthew 15:1–9) — Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem, the same charge, the same Isaiah quotation — but Mark, writing for readers who do not know Jewish customs, stops to explain what Matthew’s audience needed no explanation for: an entire parenthesis (vv3–4) on what “the tradition of the elders” actually required before a meal. Matthew’s account moves straight from the charge to Jesus’s answer; only Mark pauses to describe the custom being defended.

⚠ “With the fist” (v3) is one of the most disputed phrases in the whole Gospel, and this translation prints the literal, strange reading rather than picking a guess and hiding the difficulty. Pygmē ordinarily means a fist, or boxing with one. No proposal commands agreement: the older lexical guess (Thayer’s) is a hand rubbed clean inside the other, closed fist against closed fist; a newer one reads it as a measurement of how far up the arm the water reached. The shelf shows the guessing, not a consensus. KJV and GNV both read ‘oft’ — treating the hand-washing as a matter of FREQUENCY rather than manner — and DRB matches them, ‘often washing their hands’; that reading traces back at least to Jerome’s Vulgate, whose own Latin has nisi crebro laverint manus, ‘unless they FREQUENTLY wash hands’ — exactly the divergence this project’s own doctrine expects of Douay-Rheims, tracing to the Latin rather than to the Greek. The Spanish RV 1909 and RV60 read the identical way, «si muchas veces no se lavan las manos», ‘if they do not wash their hands MANY TIMES’ — the same ancient guess surviving in a second language. ASV retreats to the vaguer ‘diligently’, refusing to commit. NWT 1984 alone reads ‘up to the elbow’, a different, later proposal about how far up the arm the water went. This translation keeps the Greek’s own strangeness on the page rather than adopting any one guess as settled.

⚠ “Immerse themselves” (v4) is literally the same verb as “baptize” — baptizontai, the ordinary Greek word for dipping or washing, used here of nothing more sacred than a shopper rinsing off before dinner. The same root reappears two words later as a plain noun, “the baptismous (washings) of cups” — Mark’s Gospel is comfortable using the vocabulary that will later name a sacrament for the most ordinary kind of cleaning there is. ⚠ The Greek text itself is divided here, and the two verbs differ by only a few letters — easily confused by a copying eye. This translation follows its own source text’s reading, ‘immerse’ (baptisōntai); the earliest widely-used critical editions (Westcott-Hort 1881, Nestle 1904) instead print ‘sprinkle’ (rhantisōntai) as their own main text, with both readings recorded side by side in the standard modern apparatus (NA27/UBS4). NWT 1984 alone on this shelf follows the sprinkling reading, ‘cleanse themselves by sprinkling’, against ASV’s ‘bathe themselves’ and KJV’s plain ‘wash’.

⚠ “Dining couches” (v4) is itself an uncertain addition, and the shelf splits three ways over what to do with it. The Greek manuscripts are not agreed that the list of washed objects should include klinōn, ‘of couches’ — the reclining furniture a household ate on — at all; this translation keeps it, following the reading its own source text prints, but flags it as the least secure item on the list. KJV keeps the clause but renders the same word ‘tables’ rather than couches; GNV, DRB, and the Spanish RV 1909/RV60 («lechos») all correctly keep it as bedding/reclining furniture; ASV and NWT 1984 both drop the clause entirely, following an earlier text that never had it. Three different decisions from three different readings of the same four words.

⚠ The chapter answers its own opening word with itself, ironically, and then answers that a third time at the very end. Isaiah prophesied well (v6, kalōs) — a plain compliment to the prophet. Three verses later Jesus turns the identical adverb back on his questioners: “Well do you set aside the commandment of God” (v9) — the same word, now sarcasm, praising them for how SKILLFULLY they defeat God’s own command. The chapter’s last line uses it a third time, sincerely again, of the crowd’s verdict on the deaf man’s healing: “He has done all things well” (v37, below). Sincere, ironic, sincere — the same Greek adverb framing everything this chapter does, unusually preserved as the same English word all three times as well.

The Isaiah citation and the argument it opens are shared almost verbatim with Matthew’s own account of this scene, already discussed there in full — the Greek Isaiah’s wording rather than the Hebrew’s, the tradition/commandment substitution that runs through both versions. What Mark adds beyond Matthew is the worked example: not just the principle stated, but one case, in full, of exactly how the tradition nullifies the commandment.

⚠ Corban (v11) is the one word in this whole exchange Mark keeps untranslated — a transliterated Aramaic/Hebrew loanword, immediately glossed (“that is, a gift”) for readers who would not otherwise know it, exactly as this Gospel does with Talitha koum and, later in this very chapter, Ephphatha. Matthew’s parallel account of the identical vow (15:5, already on these pages) drops the technical term and simply translates the concept into plain Greek, dōron, ‘a gift’ — Mark, writing more literally, keeps the actual word a son would have spoken aloud. The mechanism: declaring support owed to aging parents “Corban” released the son from ever having to hand it over — not even to God, since the vow itself, once spoken, was treated as binding without requiring the gift to actually be paid. A legal formula so carefully worded it protects nothing but the one who says it.

The Greek of v11 is itself famously rough — Jesus quotes the vow-formula directly and the sentence never quite finishes grammatically, trailing off after “Corban” before circling back in v12 to state what the vow actually accomplishes. This translation smooths the English syntax slightly for readability while keeping the formula’s own words intact; the roughness itself is arguably the point — a legal fiction quoted exactly as it would have been recited, not as a tidy sentence.

Two different verbs condemn the same tradition, kept distinct in this translation: the Pharisees set aside (v9, athetein) God’s commandment, and then nullify (v13, akyroun) his word — not quite synonyms, one a rejection and the other closer to voiding a contract, and Mark reaches for both within four verses rather than repeating himself.

⚠ One branch of the manuscript tradition expands the charge a second time. At v8, KJV reads ‘ye hold the tradition of men, AS THE WASHING OF POTS AND CUPS: and many other such like things ye do’ — a clause that repeats vv3–4’s own list a second time, absent from ASV’s plainer ‘and hold fast the tradition of men’ and from the critical text this translation follows. A detail already given once is given again for emphasis, in the later tradition alone.

The principle is announced publicly, to “all” the crowd, not just the Pharisees — the same public-riddle pattern already discussed at Matthew’s parallel: a saying stated in the open, its full weight withheld until the disciples ask for it privately a few verses later (v17). Defile here and throughout this chapter renders koinoō, built on koinos, ‘common, ordinary’ — to defile, in this vocabulary, is to render COMMON what ought to be set apart, not to make something dirty in itself. See the dictionary’s own entry, first met at Matthew 15:11, for where the same verb resurfaces at Peter’s vision in Joppa.

⚠ There is no verse 16. See the gap left in the numbering, just above. What makes this omission unusually easy to explain is that the sentence it would have supplied is not invented — it is Mark’s own recurring refrain, said twice already on these pages in a genuinely different setting: “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear” closes two of the parables of Mark 4 (4:9, 4:23, already on these pages). The most likely explanation offered for how the line came to be copied into some manuscripts here too is exactly that familiarity — a scribe’s memory of the refrain supplying words that were never in this passage to begin with, at the one place in the Gospel where a hard saying is given and their absence could look, to a later ear, like something is missing.

“Thus he declared all foods clean” (v19) is not part of Jesus’s own spoken words — it is Mark’s own narrating aside, stepping outside the quotation to draw out the conclusion for the reader, exactly as the dictionary’s koinoō entry already flags: the same principle stated here is what Peter will be shown a second time, more dramatically, on a rooftop in Joppa — refusing to eat anything “common or unclean” (Acts 10:14, not yet on these pages) and being corrected. Mark’s aside here is this Gospel writer’s own verdict on a question Acts will later have to settle again, the hard way, for the whole early church.

⚠ Mark’s list of what actually defiles runs to thirteen items; Matthew’s version of the identical teaching lists seven. Counting “evil thoughts” itself as the first item, the way Matthew’s own note already counts its shorter list — evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immorality, thefts, false witness, slanders, seven total — Mark’s runs: evil thoughts, sexual immorality, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, an evil eye, slander, arrogance, foolishness — thirteen. Six items are shared word-for-word between the two lists (evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immorality, thefts, and slander — the same Greek noun, blasphēmia, Matthew’s plural against Mark’s singular); Matthew’s one item with no match in Mark at all is “false witness.” Mark, in exchange, adds seven of his own (greed, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, an evil eye, arrogance, foolishness). Neither Gospel claims to be exhaustive; Mark’s version simply is not economical about it.

⚠ An evil eye (v22) is not a curse or a look — it is stinginess. Ophthalmos ponēros names the ungenerous, envious eye, the opposite of a generous one — the same idiom already tracked on these pages from Deuteronomy 15:9’s warning against grudging a poor brother a loan, and from the landowner’s own question in Matthew 20:15, ‘is your eye evil because I am good?’ Mark counts it among murders and slanders, on the same list, as a genuine moral failing rather than a folk superstition about being looked at.

The Greek text itself is not entirely settled even inside the list: the earliest witnesses to this passage disagree on the exact order of the first four items (whether “adulteries” opens the list or falls after “murders”), the kind of small transposition copying by hand across centuries reliably produces. It changes the list’s order, not its content.

This is the same encounter already read from Matthew’s side, in full (Matthew 15:21–28), whose own note named Mark’s version of this scene as a promise still owed — paid here. It is Jesus’s one recorded personal visit to Gentile soil in the Gospels, the Tyre and Sidon Matthew had earlier invoked only as a standard of comparison (Matthew 11:21, already on these pages) now actually entered in person.

⚠ “A Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth” (v26) is a live, ordinary ethnic-geographic label — Matthew’s own account of this same woman instead reaches for “Canaanite,” an Old Testament term a thousand years out of everyday use by the first century. The dictionary’s own syrophoinikissa entry and its chananaios counterpart cross-reference each other on exactly this point: two Gospels naming one woman with two words that could not be more differently loaded, Mark’s contemporary and neutral, Matthew’s archaic and reaching back to Israel’s ancient dispossessed enemy. “Greek” (Hellēnis) here means simply Greek-SPEAKING, part of the Hellenized culture of the Phoenician coast, not that she was ethnically from Greece itself.

⚠ Jesus refuses her request outright, and her counter-argument is what he credits for the reversal. “Let the children be fed first” (v27) states a priority — Israel first — that Matthew’s fuller account makes explicit in Jesus’s own words, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matthew 15:24, already on these pages). Mark does not include that line, but the same limit is doing the same work here. The woman does not dispute the image Jesus uses against her — she takes his own word for “little dogs” (kynaria, the diminutive for household pets, not the harsher word for scavenging strays) and argues FROM it rather than against it: even table pets eat what falls. Jesus's answer in v29 gives no verdict on her faith the way Matthew's fuller telling does (‘great is your faith’, 15:28); it simply grants the request — “because of this saying,” crediting her own words as what moved him. ⚠ Readers divide on what to make of the sequence: some take it as a genuine change of intention, a Gentile woman’s argument moving Jesus past a limit he had actually meant; others read the refusal as a test of faith he intended to pass all along, pointing to his use of similar tests elsewhere in this Gospel. The text states what happened and what he credited; it does not adjudicate between the two readings.

⚠ This healing happens entirely at a distance, by word alone — Jesus never sees or touches the child. He speaks to the mother; she goes home and finds the demon already gone. The closest parallel elsewhere in the Gospels is the Roman centurion’s servant, healed the same way by a word spoken across a distance (Matthew 8:5–13, already on these pages) — the other Gentile in the Gospels commended for a faith Israel itself is shown lacking.

Ephphatha (v34) is Aramaic, transliterated into the Greek text and then translated for the reader — the third time in this Gospel Mark does exactly this (Boanerges at 3:17, Talitha koum at 5:41, and this word), preserving the actual sound of what Jesus said before explaining its meaning, as though the original words themselves are part of what is being reported. The dictionary’s own talitha entry has named this verse as the pattern’s third stop since Mark 5 — a promise now paid.

⚠ “Spoke with difficulty” (v32) translates a word, mogilalos, that occurs exactly once in the whole New Testament — here, and nowhere else. Its only other appearance anywhere in Greek Scripture is the Septuagint’s own translation of Isaiah’s messianic prophecy: “the tongue of the mogilalōn (the stammering, or speech-impaired) will speak plainly” (Isaiah 35:6, not yet on these pages, LXX tranē de estai glōssa mogilalōn — the Hebrew behind it, ‘the tongue of the mute will shout for joy,’ is a different image). Mark reaches for this one rare word, used nowhere else in the whole New Testament, at exactly the healing that fulfills it — without ever citing Isaiah by name, the way Matthew’s Gospel is willing to cite a fulfillment outright. The vocabulary alone carries the claim.

⚠ The crowd’s own acclamation in v37 widens the man’s condition — “he even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak” uses a different, more general word (alalous, wholly speechless) than the precise medical term for what he actually had (mogilalos, difficulty speaking, not a total absence of it). Whether this is Mark's own imprecision or the crowd's, the text does not distinguish the two conditions the way v32 itself does.

⚠ “He ordered them to tell no one” (v36) uses the identical verb, diesteilato, that this Gospel has already used once before, of Jairus and his wife after their daughter was raised: “he strictly ordered them that no one should know this” (Mark 5:43, already on these pages). There the command simply stands, unremarked. Here Mark narrates its failure in the same breath it is given — “the more he ordered them, the more widely they proclaimed it” — the identical shape (a command to silence, defied) already told once before at this Gospel’s very start, over a healed leper (Mark 1:44–45, already on these pages): the more strictly the instruction, the less it holds. Three scenes with the same command; only two of them narrate the crowd disobeying it, and this is the louder of the two.

The crowd’s verdict — “he has done all things well” — closes the loop this chapter opened at v6 and turned bitter at v9; see the chapter’s own opening note for the full frame.