¹ Then Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem came to Jesus and said,

² 'Why do your disciples break away from the tradition of the elders? They eat without washing their hands.'

³ He answered, 'And why do you break away from the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?

⁴ For God said, "Honour your father and your mother" and "Anyone who curses his father or mother will be put to death."

⁵ But you say, "If anyone says to his father or mother: Anything I might have used to help you is dedicated to God,

⁶ he is rid of his duty to father or mother." In this way you have made God's word ineffective by means of your tradition.

⁷ Hypocrites! How rightly Isaiah prophesied about you when he said:

⁸ This people honours me only with lip-service, while their hearts are far from me.

⁹ Their reverence of me is worthless; the lessons they teach are nothing but human commandments.'

¹⁰ He called the people to him and said, 'Listen, and understand.

¹¹ What goes into the mouth does not make anyone unclean; it is what comes out of the mouth that makes someone unclean.'

¹² Then the disciples came to him and said, 'Do you know that the Pharisees were shocked when they heard what you said?'

¹³ He replied, 'Any plant my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots.

¹⁴ Leave them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind; and if one blind person leads another, both will fall into a pit.'

¹⁵ At this, Peter said to him, 'Explain the parable for us.'

¹⁶ Jesus replied, 'Even you -- don't you yet understand?

¹⁷ Can't you see that whatever goes into the mouth passes through the stomach and is discharged into the sewer?

¹⁸ But whatever comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and it is this that makes someone unclean.

¹⁹ For from the heart come evil intentions: murder, adultery, fornication, theft, perjury, slander.

²⁰ These are the things that make a person unclean. But eating with unwashed hands does not make anyone unclean.'

²¹ Jesus left that place and withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.

²² And suddenly out came a Canaanite woman from that district and started shouting, 'Lord, Son of David, take pity on me. My daughter is tormented by a devil.'

²³ But he said not a word in answer to her. And his disciples went and pleaded with him, saying, 'Give her what she wants, because she keeps shouting after us.'

²⁴ He said in reply, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.'

²⁵ But the woman had come up and was bowing low before him. 'Lord,' she said, 'help me.'

²⁶ He replied, 'It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to little dogs.'

²⁷ She retorted, 'Ah yes, Lord; but even little dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters' table.'

²⁸ Then Jesus answered her, 'Woman, you have great faith. Let your desire be granted.' And from that moment her daughter was well again.

²⁹ Jesus went on from there and reached the shores of the Lake of Galilee, and he went up onto the mountain. He took his seat,

³⁰ and large crowds came to him bringing the lame, the crippled, the blind, the dumb and many others; these they put down at his feet, and he cured them.

³¹ The crowds were astonished to see the dumb speaking, the cripples whole again, the lame walking and the blind with their sight, and they praised the God of Israel.

³² But Jesus called his disciples to him and said, 'I feel sorry for all these people; they have been with me for three days now and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them off hungry, or they might collapse on the way.'

³³ The disciples said to him, 'Where in a deserted place could we get sufficient bread for such a large crowd to have enough to eat?'

³⁴ Jesus said to them, 'How many loaves have you?' They said, 'Seven, and a few small fish.'

³⁵ Then he instructed the crowd to sit down on the ground,

³⁶ and he took the seven loaves and the fish, and after giving thanks he broke them and began handing them to the disciples, who gave them to the crowds.

³⁷ They all ate as much as they wanted, and they collected what was left of the scraps, seven baskets full.

³⁸ Now four thousand men had eaten, to say nothing of women and children.

³⁹ And when he had sent the crowds away he got into the boat and went to the territory of Magadan.

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The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) is a Catholic translation of the Bible published in 1985. The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) has become the most widely used Roman Catholic Bible outside of the United States. It has the imprimatur of Cardinal George Basil Hume.

Like its predecessor, the Jerusalem Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) version is translated "directly from the Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic." The 1973 French translation, the Bible de Jerusalem, is followed only "where the text admits to more than one interpretation." Introductions and notes, with some modifications, are taken from the Bible de Jerusalem.

Source: The Very Reverend Dom (Joseph) Henry Wansbrough, OSB, MA (Oxon), STL (Fribourg), LSS (Rome), a monk of Ampleforth Abbey and a biblical scholar. He was General Editor of the New Jerusalem Bible. "New Jerusalem Bible, Regular Edition", pg. v.

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