GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 7:22
Additional Charges
There was a story in the news recently about a young man who stole a car from a parking lot. The victim notified the police, and they were able to locate the stolen car. With lights flashing and sirens wailing, they chased the car through the city streets to the interstate highway. The car reached speeds of over one hundred miles per hour. The thief lost control of the car, which left the highway, rolled over several times, and came to rest upright in a ditch. Fortunately—or maybe unfortunately—the car thief survived. The police arrested the driver, charging him with car theft, eluding the police, and speeding. Then the officer said, “There will be additional charges.”
When writers composed the original biblical texts, they didn’t use chapter and verse divisions. Hebrew scholars divided the Old Testament around A.D. 900. Stephen Langton (c. 1150–1228), Archbishop of Canterbury, divided the New Testament into chapters around A.D. 1227. A French printer, Robert Estienne (1503–1559), divided Langton’s chapters into verses for his Latin and Greek Bibles. The first English Bible to use both chapter and verse divisions was the Geneva Bible, published in 1560. This work is honored and revered by readers, but sometimes the divisions seem a little inconvenient. For example, textual scholars divided Jesus’ list of what constitutes human defilement in the middle, so Mark 7:21 says, “For from within, out of the heart of men, come evil thoughts: sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries,” and the list continues with Mark 7:22: “covetousnesses, wickednesses, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, foolishness.” It’s as if verse 22 says, “There are additional charges.”
Many writers view Jesus’ list as categories rather than individual acts, and many of them overlap. They are all, though, an indictment of the defiled heart.
Writers translate one especially interesting polluting condition of the heart as “an evil eye” (KJV, ASV, YLT). Jesus, however, used a Jewish idiom that contemporaries understood to mean stinginess. Thus, NIV translators rendered the same phrase found in Proverbs 23:6 as, “Do not eat the food of a stingy man.”
However one reads these verses, it’s a fearful thing to hear, “There will be additional charges.”
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