48 So you testify and consent to the works of your fathers. For they killed them, and you build their tombs.
*Minor differences ignored. Grouped by changes, with first version listed as example.
Truly ye bear witness - Ye acknowledge that those of old who killed the prophets were your fathers, and ye are about to show, by your conduct towards me and my apostles, that ye are not degenerated, that ye are as capable of murdering a prophet now, as they were of old.
Truly (k) ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres.
(k) When you persecute God's servants like mad men, even as your fathers did, though you try and cover it with a pretence of godliness, yet nonetheless, by beautifying the sepulchres of the prophets, what else are you doing but glorying in your father's cruelty, and setting up monuments (as it were) in glory and triumph of it?
Truly ye bear witness, that ye allow the deeds of your fathers,.... Or "ye bear witness, and ye allow"; that is, they both witnessed that their fathers killed the prophets, and they consented to what they did, and approved of their actions:
for they indeed killed them; it must be owned, and not their sons:
and ye build their sepulchres; which was a bearing and keeping up a testimony against them, and a continuing a remembrance of their crimes; and which looked as though they approved of them, or otherwise they should have been content to have the prophets lie buried in silence, and not erected stately monuments over them, which seemed to be raised more for the honour of those that put them to death, than of the prophets themselves. Or, whereas they did this under specious pretences of disliking their fathers' sins, which yet secretly they loved, and were of the same wicked disposition against the ministers of the word, and which they would quickly show; this discovered their hypocrisy, and confirmed the character Christ had before given of them; for it follows,
Whom they killed, ye build their sepulchres - Just like them pretending great reverence for the ancient prophets, while ye destroy those whom God sends to yourselves. Ye therefore bear witness by this deep hypocrisy that ye are of the very same spirit with them.
*More commentary available at chapter level.