Charles Ellicott Commentary Luke 18:9

"And he spake also this parable unto certain who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and set all others at nought:" — Luke 18:9 (ASV)

Unto certain who trusted in themselves . . .—Here, as above, the purpose of the parable is stated at the outset. It is perhaps open for us to think that isolated fragments of our Lord’s teaching, treasured up here and there in the memory of disciples, and written down in answer to St. Luke's inquiries in the second stage of the growth of the Gospel records, would likely have such an introduction.

The “certain who trusted” are not specified as being actual Pharisees and, we may believe, included disciples in whom the Pharisee temper was gaining mastery, and who needed to be taught, as by a reductio ad absurdum, what it naturally led to.

Despised others.—Literally, the rest—namely, all others. The word for “despise,” literally, count as nothing, is again one of those that St. Luke has, and the other Evangelists do not (the one in Mark 9:12 differs in form), but that is frequent in the vocabulary of St. Paul (Romans 14:3; Romans 14:10; 1 Corinthians 16:11, et al.).

This universal depreciation of others would seem almost an exaggeration, if experience did not show—e.g., as in the history of Montanism and analogous forms of error—how easily men and women, religious societies, and orders drift into it, and how hard it is to set any limits to the monomania of egotism—above all, of religious egotism.

It never uttered itself, perhaps, in a more repulsive form than when the Pharisees came to speak of the great mass of their brother-Israelites as the brute people, the “people of the earth.”