some personal moral failing on their part. It could simply be that they had Gentile blood, or had contracted some illness like leprosy, which made them ritually unclean. But it has to be said that a fairly high proportion of those who would have been called 'sinners' in first-century Jewish society were so called as a result of their chosen lifestyle. Some of them, perhaps, were drunkards; some of them might have been sexually immoral; others were tax collectors, corrupt collaborators with the detested occupying army of Rome. Quite a few were the sort of people who didn't go to church on Sunday, but went down the pub instead. Others didn't pray on their knees; they preyed on their neighbours. As you might expect, respectable religious people in Israel gave all such 'sinners' the cold shoulder; they were outcasts. To keep company with such people was to be defiled by them; to be, as we would say, tarred with the same brush. Religious people saw themselves as the 'saints'. They were racially pure Jews, physically whole—no leprosy or anything like that about them—and morally impeccable. The 'saints' kept God's law to the letter, studying their Bibles with a zeal that would put many Christians to shame, and observing it with a rigid and uncompromising pedantry.
Chief among these 'saints' were the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. The Pharisees were a first-century fundamentalist club. The teachers of the law were professional Bible scholars. Between them they constituted a formidable spiritual élite, possessing huge social prestige, and not inconsiderable political power in first-century Judea, where religion was part of the structure of society in a way that it's long since ceased to be in most western countries. Naturally they assumed that any Bible teacher would seek their seal of approval. The last thing they expected of a would-be rabbi like Jesus was that he would abandon the company of the saints altogether in order to socialize with the first-century equivalent of the
