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Imitate God’s Mercy TodayThe Watchtower—1991 | April 15
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“If [the sinner] does not listen to them, speak to the congregation. If he does not listen even to the congregation, let him be to you just as a man of the nations and as a tax collector.”—Matthew 18:15-17.
3. What did Jesus mean in saying that an unrepentant wrongdoer was to be “as a man of the nations and as a tax collector”?
3 Being Jews, the apostles would understand what it meant to treat a sinner “as a man of the nations and as a tax collector.” Jews avoided association with people of the nations, and they despised Jews who worked as Roman tax collectors.a (John 4:9; Acts 10:28) Hence, Jesus was advising the disciples that if the congregation rejected a sinner, they were to cease associating with him.
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Imitate God’s Mercy TodayThe Watchtower—1991 | April 15
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a “Tax collectors were especially despised by the Jewish population of Palestine for several reasons: (1) they collected money for the foreign power that occupied the land of Israel, thus indirectly giving support to this outrage; (2) they were notoriously unscrupulous, growing wealthy at the expense of others of their own people; and (3) their work involved them in regular contact with Gentiles, rendering them ritually unclean. Contempt for tax collectors is found both in the N[ew] T[estament] and the rabbinic literature . . . According to the latter, hatred was to be extended even to the family of the tax collector.”—The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia.
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