Matthew 9:10
Matthew 9:1010Later, as Jesus was dining at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with Him and His disciples.
Jehovah's Witnesses rarely foreground in their own teaching, but when confronted with it in the shunning debate they must reckon with its implications. The Watchtower cites — "let him be to you just as a man of the nations and as a tax collector" — as a proof text for total shunning. Yet records Jesus himself sitting at table with tax collectors and sinners, the very category he later names in . The JW position effectively requires reading "treat him as a tax collector" as meaning "cut all contact," while the Gospel record shows Jesus doing the opposite with actual tax collectors.
The Protestant reading treats as the interpretive key to . If Jesus tells us to treat the unrepentant person "as a tax collector," we must ask how Jesus himself treated tax collectors — and the answer is that he ate with them, called one as an apostle (Matt 9:9), and was publicly criticised for being a "friend of tax collectors and sinners" (Matt 11:19). Following Jesus's own example means relational engagement rather than social isolation. The Pharisees' position was "do not associate with sinners"; the Watchtower's shunning policy replicates the Pharisees' position, not Jesus's. As argument 092 notes, Jesus replied to the Pharisees' complaint with "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" (Matt 9:13) — a direct rebuke of the purity-by-separation logic that underlies the Watchtower's family-shunning policy. No verse in the Bible instructs a parent to stop speaking to their child, and Jesus's table fellowship with tax collectors demonstrates that biblical discipline was never meant to mean total relational severance.