Matthew Chapter 23 verse 9 Holy Bible
And call no man your father on the earth: for one is your Father, `even' he who is in heaven.
read chapter 23 in ASV
And give no man the name of father on earth: because one is your Father, who is in heaven.
read chapter 23 in BBE
And call not [any one] your father upon the earth; for one is your Father, he who is in the heavens.
read chapter 23 in DARBY
And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.
read chapter 23 in KJV
read chapter 23 in WBT
Call no man on the earth your father, for one is your Father, he who is in heaven.
read chapter 23 in WEB
and ye may not call `any' your father on the earth, for one is your Father, who is in the heavens,
read chapter 23 in YLT
Matthew 23 : 9 Bible Verse Songs
Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerse 9. - Your father. This was the title given to eminent teachers and founders of schools, to whom the people were taught to look up rather than to God. It was also addressed to prophets (2 Kings 2:12; 2 Kings 6:21). In ver. 8 Christ said, "be not called;" here he uses the active, "call not," as if he would intimate that his followers must not give this honoured title to any doctor out of complaisance, or flattery, or affectation. Upon the earth. In contradistinction to heaven, where our true Father dwells. They were to follow no earthly school. They had natural lathers and spiritual fathers, but the authority of all comes from God; it is delegated, not essential; and good teachers would make men look to God, and not to themselves, as the source of power and truth.
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(9) Call no man your father.--This also, under its Hebrew form of Abba, was one of the titles in which the scribes delighted. In its true use it embodied the thought that the relation of scholars and teachers was filial on the one side, paternal on the other; but precisely because it expressed so noble an idea was its merely conventional use full of danger. The history of the ecclesiastical titles of Christendom offers in this respect a singular parallel to that of the titles of Judaism. In Abbot (derived from Abba=Father), in Papa and Pope (which have risen from their application to every priest, till they culminate in the Pontifex summus of the Church of Home), in our "Father in God," as applied to Bishops, we find examples of the use of like language, liable to the same abuse. It would, of course, be a slavish literalism to see in our Lord's words an absolute prohibition of these and like words in ecclesiastical or civil life. What was meant was to warn men against so recognising, in any case, the fatherhood of men as to forget the Fatherhood of God. Even the teacher and apostle, who is a father to others, needs to remember that he is as a "little child" in the relation to God. (Comp. St. Paul's claim in 1Corinthians 4:15.)
