John 9:22 These words spoke his parents, because they feared the Jews: for the Jews had agreed already… (cf. John 16:2; Luke 6:22): — 1. The lightest kind of excommunication continued for thirty days and prescribed four cubits as a distance within which the person may not approach anyone, not even wife and children; with this limitation it did not make exclusion from the synagogue necessary. 2. The severer included absolute banishment from all religious meetings, and absolute giving up of intercourse with all persons, and was formally pronounced with curses. 3. The severest was a perpetual banishment from all meetings and a practical exclusion from the fellowship of God's people. It has been sometimes supposed that the words of Luke 6:22 — (1) "Separate you;" (2) "reproach you;" (3) "cast out your name"refer to these gradations, but probably the only practice known in the time of our Lord was that which was later regarded as the intermediate form, falling short of perpetual banishment, but being, while the ban lasted, exclusion from all the cherished privileges of an Israelite. (Archdeacon Watkins.) Parallel Verses KJV: These words spake his parents, because they feared the Jews: for the Jews had agreed already, that if any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue. |
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