Mark 7:5–15

⁵So the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law asked Jesus, “Why is it that your disciples do not follow the teaching handed down by our ancestors, but instead eat with ritually unclean hands?”

^6*Jesus answered them, “How right Isaiah was when he prophesied about you! You are hypocrites, just as he wrote:

‘These people, says God, honour me with their words,

but their heart is really far away from me.

^7*It is no use for them to worship me,

because they teach human rules

as though they were God’s laws!’

⁸“You put aside God’s command and obey human teachings.”

⁹And Jesus continued, “You have a clever way of rejecting God’s law in order to uphold your own teaching. ^10*For Moses commanded, ‘Respect your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever curses his father or his mother is to be put to death.’ ¹¹But you teach that if a person has something he could use to help his father or mother, but says, ‘This is Corban’ (which means, it belongs to God), ¹²he is excused from helping his father or mother. ¹³In this way the teaching you pass on to others cancels out the word of God. And there are many other things like this that you do.”

The Things That Make a Person Unclean

¹⁴Then Jesus called the crowd to him once more and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand. ¹⁵There is nothing that goes into a person from the outside which can make him ritually unclean. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that makes him unclean.”