Questions Designed to Close the Case

“Preached the gospel” is euangelizomai, a verb Luke uses ten times and Mark never. “Came upon him” is ephistemi, to stand over someone suddenly, used of the angel at the shepherds (2:9) and the two men at the tomb (24:4). Chief priests, scribes and elders are the three groups Jesus named in his first prediction of rejection (9:22).

Two questions are stacked: what kind of authority, and who conferred it. The crowds in Capernaum had already noticed that “his word was with power” (4:32), the same noun, exousia. “These things” most naturally means the clearing of the temple in 19:45 and the teaching that followed it.

Answering a question with a question was an accepted move in debate among teachers, and it was not an evasion so long as the second question bore on the first. “One thing” is literally “a word”, logos: Jesus asks for a single answer.

“From heaven” is a reverent way of saying “from God”, the idiom of the prodigal’s “I have sinned against heaven” (15:18). Luke has already told how John’s baptism was received: “all the people… and the publicans, justified God, being baptized with the baptism of John” (7:29).

“Reasoned with themselves” is syllogizomai, to reckon up together, found only here in the New Testament. The answer they fear hearing is already on record: “the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptized of him” (7:30).

“Stone us” is katalithazo, a compound meaning to stone outright, found nowhere else in the New Testament. “Be persuaded” is a perfect participle, settled conviction. Luke’s readers know the people are right: Zacharias called John “the prophet of the Highest” (1:76), and Jesus called him “much more than a prophet” (7:26).

Literally, they answered that they did not know. The men charged with judging prophets for Israel declare, in the temple and in public, that they have no opinion on the most famous prophet of their generation.

The two replies are not symmetrical. They said they did not know; Jesus does not say that, he says he will not tell. The Greek verb changes from knowing to saying, and the difference is the whole point of the exchange.

Luke alone says the parable was addressed to the people, with the leaders listening in (verse 19). He omits the hedge, winepress and tower that Mark takes from Isaiah 5:2, and he alone adds that the owner was away “for a long time”, like the nobleman of 19:12.

Rent on leased land was often paid in kind, as a share of the crop. A new vineyard yielded nothing usable for years: the law barred eating the fruit of new trees for three years and gave the fourth year’s to God (Leviticus 19:23–25), so the owner’s patience is built into the arrangement.

“Again he sent” is literally “he added to send”, a Hebrew idiom carried straight into Greek, the kind of phrasing the Greek Old Testament uses throughout. “Entreated him shamefully” is atimazo, to dishonour. In Mark some servants are killed; in Luke none are, so the son is the first to die.

“Wounded” is traumatizo, found in the New Testament only here and in Acts 19:16, where the sons of Sceva flee “naked and wounded”. The third servant is “cast out”, the same verb that in verse 15 comes before the killing of the son.

The owner’s question, “What shall I do?”, is the one the rich fool (12:17) and the unjust steward (16:3) ask in their soliloquies. “My beloved son” is the voice from heaven at the baptism (3:22). Only Luke has “it may be”, isos, perhaps, found only here in the New Testament.

“Come, let us kill him” is word for word the Greek Old Testament of Genesis 37:20, where Joseph’s brothers see him coming across the field and plot against the favoured son sent by his father to check on them.

Luke, like Matthew, has the son thrown out of the vineyard first and killed afterwards; Mark has him killed and then thrown out. Luke’s order matches the crucifixion outside the city walls, which Hebrews 13:12 reads as suffering “without the gate”.

“God forbid” translates me genoito, “may it not be”, which occurs only here in the Gospels; Paul uses it fourteen times, ten of them in Romans. The people listening grasp enough to recoil from the ending.

“Beheld” is emblepo, to look straight at, the verb of 22:61 when “the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter.” Psalm 118:22’s “head of the corner” may be the cornerstone that squares a foundation or the capstone that locks an arch; either way it is the stone the building cannot do without.

The saying fuses two stones. Isaiah 8:14–15 speaks of a stone of stumbling on which many “shall stumble, and fall, and be broken”. Daniel 2:34–35 has a stone cut without hands that smashes the statue into chaff, and the Greek of Daniel 2:44 uses likmao, “grind to powder”, strictly to winnow.

“The same hour” is Luke’s phrase for a response that follows at once. The leaders understood the parable perfectly, where the Twelve in 18:34 did not understand plain speech. Fear of the people restrains them again, as in 19:48 and 20:6.

“Spies” is enkathetos, someone hired and planted, used only here in the New Testament. “Feign” is hypokrinomai, to play a part on stage, the root of “hypocrite”. The governor is Pontius Pilate, named in 3:1, and Luke states the plan to hand Jesus to him before it happens.

The flattery is well chosen. “Acceptest the person” is a Hebrew idiom, “lift the face”, meaning to show partiality: the law forbade judges to do it (Leviticus 19:15) and said God does not (Deuteronomy 10:17). They praise him for the very impartiality they hope will hang him.

Luke uses phoros, the ordinary Greek word for tribute paid by a subject people; Mark and Matthew use kensos, the Latin census, the head tax. That tax had provoked the revolt of Judas of Galilee in AD 6 (Acts 5:37), so the question carried a body count.

“Craftiness” is panourgia, readiness to do anything, the word Paul uses of the serpent beguiling Eve (2 Corinthians 11:3). The question “Why tempt ye me?” is missing from the oldest manuscripts of Luke and was probably supplied from Matthew and Mark.

The penny is a denarius, a silver coin roughly equal to a labourer’s day wage. The denarius of Tiberius carried his head and the legend “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus”. Jesus does not produce one; his questioners do, in the temple courts.

They asked whether it was lawful to “give” (didomi); Jesus answers “render”, apodidomi, to give back, to pay what is owed. Early readers such as Tertullian (Against Marcion 4.38) took the second clause to mean that what bears God’s image, the human being (Genesis 1:27), is owed to God.

“Before the people” is Luke’s addition, and it names what the trap required: a public statement that could be repeated to the governor. It fails, and they fall silent. Luke will record the charge anyway in 23:2, “forbidding to give tribute to Caesar”.

The Sadducees appear nowhere else in Luke’s Gospel. Acts 23:8 explains them for Luke’s readers: they say “there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit.” They were drawn largely from the priestly aristocracy, and Josephus says they held only to the written law (Antiquities 13.297).

The law is Deuteronomy 25:5–6, the levirate, from the Latin levir, a husband’s brother. Its purpose was that the dead man’s “name be not put out of Israel”. The Book of Genesis had shown it refused by Onan (Genesis 38:9), and the Book of Ruth shows Boaz acting “to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance” (Ruth 4:10).

Seven husbands and one bride appear in the Book of Tobit, where Sarah is widowed seven times on her wedding nights (Tobit 3:8). The Sadducees may be borrowing a familiar tale, now turned into a legal problem.

Many ancient manuscripts read simply “and the second”, without “took her to wife, and he died childless”; the King James follows the fuller text. Either way, the brothers are dispatched one line apiece.

“In like manner the seven also” compresses the list, since the joke needs no more detail. Readers of 2 Maccabees 7 knew another seven brothers who died one after another under Antiochus, each confessing the resurrection; here seven die in a case built to deny it.

The woman has no name, no voice and no children. She outlives all seven, and in the Sadducees’ case she exists only as the one passed from brother to brother along the line.

The point of the case is that Moses himself seems to create an impossibility: if the dead rise, the law of the levirate leaves one woman with seven husbands at once. The Sadducees set the Torah against the resurrection and invite Jesus to choose.

“The children of this world” is a Semitic idiom, “sons of this age”, which Luke used in 16:8: “the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.” “Given in marriage” names the woman’s side of the arrangement, given by her father.

“Accounted worthy” is kataxioo, the verb of Acts 5:41, where the apostles rejoiced to be “counted worthy to suffer shame”. The resurrection “from the dead” is literally “out from among the dead”, the raising of the righteous that Luke called “the resurrection of the just” (14:14).

“Equal unto the angels” is isangelos, a word not found in any Greek writing before this. The Sadducees denied angels as well as resurrection (Acts 23:8), so the one sentence answers both denials. “Children of the resurrection” is the same Semitic idiom as verse 34.

“At the bush” is how a passage was cited before there were chapter numbers: in the section about the bush, Exodus 3:6. The Talmud later records rabbis pressed by opponents to prove the resurrection from the Torah itself, and offering texts in answer (Sanhedrin 90b), which is what Jesus does here.

Only Luke adds “for all live unto him”. The phrase has a close parallel in 4 Maccabees 16:25, where those who die for God “live unto God, as do Abraham and Isaac and Jacob”. Luke lets it state what the argument assumes: God’s relation to the patriarchs did not end at their graves.

The scribes who approve would be largely of the Pharisees’ party, which held to the resurrection against the Sadducees. Paul uses the same division in Acts 23:6–9, and there too “the scribes that were of the Pharisees’ part” take his side.

“Durst not” is tolmao, to dare. Mark puts this line after the question about the greatest commandment, which Luke has already told at 10:25–28 with a lawyer; so in Luke it closes the Sadducees’ question instead.

“They” are the scribes, as Mark names them. “Son of David” was the common title of the expected king; the Psalms of Solomon (17:21), written in the century before, pray God to “raise up unto them their king, the son of David”. The questioner is now Jesus.

Luke alone says “in the book of Psalms”, and uses the same phrase in Acts 1:20. The Hebrew has YHWH speaking to adoni, “my lord”; the Greek says kyrios twice, and the King James marks the difference with capitals. No verse of the Old Testament is quoted or echoed more often in the New.

Putting feet on a defeated enemy was a literal act: Joshua had his captains set their feet on the necks of five captured kings (Joshua 10:24). Egyptian footstools were painted with bound captives so that the king rested his feet on them.

The question is left hanging and no one answers. Luke’s reader has been given an answer from the first chapter: Gabriel said the child would be called “the Son of the Highest” and receive “the throne of his father David” (1:32), both at once.

“In the audience of” means in the hearing of, the 1611 sense. The warning is addressed to the disciples but spoken so that the whole crowd can hear it, a charge laid in public against men who are also present.

“Long robes” is stole, the same word as the “best robe” put on the returning prodigal (15:22). The seats, greetings and chief places have been criticised before, against Pharisees (11:43) and at a dinner (14:7–11); now the scribes are named.

The text does not say how widows’ houses were devoured; suggestions include mismanaging estates held in trust, or taking fees and gifts for legal advice. “For a shew” is prophasis, a pretext. “Greater damnation” is literally a heavier judgment, a sentence proportioned to the offence.