contact with Gentiles, some might have considered them unclean. The ‘sinners’ are a more general category, and people disagree as to who precisely they were. They may just have been people who were too poor to know the law properly or to try to keep it (see John 7:49). Certainly they were people who were regarded by the self-appointed experts as hopelessly irreligious, out of touch with the demands that God had made on Israel through the law. Throughout the chapter Jesus is not saying that such people