Summary: 3. (15) The religious leaders led their converts on the wrong path. "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves." You travel land and sea to win one proselyte: Their zeal in evangelism did not prove that they were right with God. These religious leaders went to great lengths to win others but they brought people to darkness, not light. Paul had the same idea in Romans 10:2 where he observed that some of the Jewish people of his day had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. "The word proselyte is an English transliteration of a Greek word proselutos, which means one who has approached or drawn near. The proselyte was the full convert who had accepted the ceremonial law and circumcision and who had become in the fullest sense a Jew." (Barclay) "A sizable body of scholarship convincingly argues that the first century A.D. till the Fall of Jerusalem marks the most remarkable period of Jewish missionary zeal and corresponding success." (Carson) When he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves: Through their great energy they could win some, but to no lasting good to those who were won. "Their business was not to turn men from sin unto God, but merely to convert them to an opinion, if they had once got them into their church, so as they could make their markets of them; never regarding their souls more." (Poole) "Jesus did not criticize the fact of the Pharisees' extensive missionary effort but its results … they 'out-Phariseed' the Pharisees." (Carson)
