The author keeps saying Jesus ate with sinners “at the places where they congregated.” However, the occasions when the Gospel specifically mentions Jesus’s eating with sinners are when He dined at the house of Zacchaeus in Jericho, and when He ate with Matthew the tax collector after He had said, “Follow me.”
In both cases, the host (Zacchaeus or Matthew) had invited his friends to meet the man who had called him to a converted life.
Jesus was dining with a Pharisee, Simon, when He was approached by “a woman who was a sinner,” by implication a prostitute. I don’t really get the impression from the Gospel that everyone in the room was sinless, until *that woman* walked in to repent ... no matter what the respectable male invitees thought of themselves.
Good points.