Mat 23:14

Mat 23:14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation. My alternative: Sadly, you religious clerks and lawyers are actors. You pray all day but just as a pretext so you can eat up the possessions of widows. For this, you will be judged. Before I get to this verse specifically, I want to note how my thinking about Christ's words is evolving. In parsing the Gospels using the spiritual-physical-mental-emotion world that Christ starts using from his first words in the Gospels, I am coming to the idea that Christ's view of the "hidden" spirit is best understood in terms of purpose or intention rather than the simple idea of a "soul" or "ghost." It is God's purpose that creates the physical world. The purpose expresses itself in the human mind. With the human mind, we are able to mentally abstract God's purpose for us. The nature of our minds and bodies leads to our emotional personal relationships, so they are also driven by our purpose. These personal emotional relationships reflect and amplify our relationship with God. When we die, we survive because our God-given individual purpose survives. This spirit, in the sense of purpose, is something like "God's plan for us," but is larger than that. It is the intention behind everything that happens in our lives. It is not what happens that matters, but the intention behind it. We may wonder why "bad" things happen to us, but nothing God can do is "bad," in itself because His intentions for us are good. Short-term, death, disease, and so on are certainly unpleasant, but, like all of life, they are temporary. Their intention is to shape us in terms of a larger, more long-lasting purpose. However, while divine intentions are always good, driven by a good purpose, human intentions are not always good. They are frequently driven by selfish purposes. That brings us to this verse. Here, you have Christ condemning the intentions of the scribes and Pharisees. It is not that they pray all day, but that they do so for the purpose of consuming the possession of widows. In other words, they use religions to justify their idle lives while living off of others. It is their intentions that we and God should judge their actions by, not their actions alone, which are good. Note: My main research tool for classical Greek, the Perseus Project at Tufts, is down because of hardware problems, which limits the work here because I cannot compare to non-biblical sources. The problem with biblical lexicons is that they take their definitions from traditional translations of the Bible, which obscures the original meaning since the Bible and its popularity over millennia has affected how words are commonly understood today, as opposed to how they were understood when the Bibles were written. For example, the word "hypocrites" above in Christ's time, is from the Greek "hupokrites," which meant "actors," that is, people playing a fictional part. The current meaning of "hypocrites" was taken from the way Christ used the term to refer to the "scribes and Pharisees" above. Remember, translations of the Bible weren't made into English until the Bible had affected the meaning of words for well over a thousand years.