Luke 5:36-38

5:36 He also told them a parable: ¹  “No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews ²  it on an old garment. If he does, he will have torn ³  the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. ⁴  5:37 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. ⁵  If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. 5:38 Instead new wine must be poured into new wineskins. ⁶ 

¹ sn The term parable in a Semitic context can cover anything from a long story to a brief wisdom saying. Here it is the latter.

² tn Grk “puts”; but since the means of attachment would normally be sewing, the translation “sews” has been used.

³ tn Grk “he tears.” The point is that the new garment will be ruined to repair an older, less valuable one.

⁴ sn The piece from the new will not match the old. The imagery in this saying looks at the fact that what Jesus brings is so new that it cannot simply be combined with the old. To do so would be to destroy what is new and to put together something that does not fit.

⁵ sn Wineskins were bags made of skin or leather, used for storing wine in NT times. As the new wine fermented and expanded, it would stretch the new wineskins. Putting new (unfermented) wine in old wineskins, which had already been stretched, would result in the bursting of the wineskins.

⁶ tc Most mss (A C [D] Θ Ψ Ë¹³ Ï latt sy) have καὶ ἀμφότεροι συντηροῦνται (kai amfoteroi sunthrountai, “and both will be preserved”), assimilating the text to Matt 9:17. The earliest and best witnesses, as well as many others (Ì^4,75vid א B L W ˹ 33 579 700 1241 2542 co), however, lack the words.