What Does Matthew 23:15 Mean?

(15) **To make one proselyte.**—The zeal of the earlier Pharisees had showed itself in a propagandism which reminds us rather of the spread of the religion of Mahomet than of that of Christ. John Hyrcanus, the last of the Maccabean priest-rulers, had offered the Idumeans the alternative of death, exile, or circumcision (Jos. *Ant. xiii.* 9, § 3). When the government of Rome rendered such measures impossible, they resorted to all the arts of persuasion, and exulted when they succeeded in enrolling a heathen convert as a member of their party. But the proselytes thus made were too often a scandal and proverb of reproach. There was no real conversion, and those who were most active in the work of proselytising were, for the most part, blind leaders of the blind. The vices of the Jew were engrafted on the vices of the heathen. The ties of duty and natural affection were ruthlessly snapped asunder. The popular Jewish feeling about them was like that of the popular Christian feeling about a converted Jew. Proselytes were regarded as the leprosy of Israel, hindering the coming of the Messiah. It became a proverb that no one should trust a proselyte, even to the twenty-fourth generation. Our Lord was, in part at least, expressing the judgment of the better Jews when He taught that the proselyte thus made was “two-fold more the child of hell”—*i.e., *of Gehenna—than his masters.