false witness, slander. These are what defile a person” (vv. 18–20). And note this carefully: in both Matthew 15:19 and Mark 7:21 the Greek word for “sexual immorality,” porneia, occurs in the plural—it is literally “sexual immoralities,” found in this plural form only in these two verses in the entire New Testament. This refers comprehensively to all sexual acts outside of marriage, which, as we know, consisted only of the union of a man and a woman in Jewish biblical law in Jesus’s day. In fact,