Luke 6:3

Have ye not read so much as this Rather, Did ye not even read this? He answers them in one of their own formulae, but with a touch of irony at their ignorance, which we trace also in the "Did ye never read?" of St Mark; neverthough ye are Scribes and devote all your time to the Scriptures? Perhaps the reproving question may have derived an additional sting from the fact that the very passage which our Lord quoted (1 Samuel 21:1-6) had been read on that Sabbath as the Haphtarah of the day. The service for the day must have been over, because no meal was eaten till then. This fact does not however help us to determine which was the second-first Sabbath, because the present Jewish lectionary is of later date.

and they which were with him That the day on which this occurred was a Sabbath results from the fact that it was only on the Sabbath that the new shewbread was placed on the table, Leviticus 24:8-9.

The Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath Rather, -Lord even of the Sabbath," though you regard the Sabbath as the most important command of the whole Law. In St Mark we have further, "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath."

This was one of no less than six great occasions on which the fury of the Pharisees had been excited by the open manner in which our Lord set aside as frivolous and unauthoritative the burdens which the Oral Law had attached to the Sabbath. The other instances are the healing of the cripple at Bethesda (John 5:1-16); the healing of the withered hand (Luke 6:1-11); of the blind man at Siloam (John 9:1-41); of the paralytic woman (Luke 13:14-17); and of the man with the dropsy (Luke 14:1-6). In laying His axe at the root of a proud and ignorant Sabbatarianism, He was laying His axe at the root of allthat "miserable micrology" which they had been accustomed to take for religious life. They had turned the Sabbath from a holy delight into a revolting bondage. The Apocryphal Gospels are following a true tradition in the prominence which they give to Sabbath healing, as a charge against Him on His trial before the Sanhedrin.

In the famous Cambridge Manuscript (D), the Codex Bezae, there is here added the following passage: "On the same day, seeing one working on the Sabbath, He said to him, O man, if indeed thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed: but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed, and a transgressor of the Law." This very remarkable addition cannot be accepted as genuine on the authority of a single MS., and can only be regarded as one of the agrapha dogmata, or -unrecorded