<p>1:42<em> And immediately the leprosy departed from him and he was made clean; and</em>-For this whole incident, see commentary on Mt. 8:1-4. The immediacy of the cure upon touching the Lord raised all kind of questions for the legalistic mind, as to whether the Lord was made unclean or not (see on :41).</p><p>In Mt. 10:8 the Lord told the disciples to likewise &quot;cleanse the lepers&quot;. Again the Lord is giving the disciples the work of the priests to do. For it was their job to pronounce lepers cleansed. But He is asking them to do what He Himself had done here. His work was to be theirs. The later NT references to&nbsp;<em>our</em>&nbsp;being cleansed by the Lord Jesus (Eph. 5:26; Tit. 2:14; 1 Jn. 1:7,9 etc.) perhaps look back to how the historical Jesus cleansed lepers in Galilee. We are to see ourselves in that isolated and rejected man.</p><p>The Greek literally means 'scales' and the same word is used of scales falling from Saul's eyes in Acts 9:18. It could've been any skin disease rather than Hansen's disease.</p>