Jesus in Judea and Perea: The Final Year (7 of 12)

The most quoted parables in the world come from this stretch, and they were told by a man walking deliberately toward his own execution. What a parable is doing when it works on you is set out in the post on how the parables work.

What Does It Mean That He Set His Face Toward Jerusalem?

That the journey was a decision rather than a drift.

Luke 9:51 marks the turn: as the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. The Greek idiom is stronger than most translations carry, and it echoes the prophetic language of setting the face.

From that verse Luke’s Gospel becomes a travel narrative running roughly ten chapters, longer than any other Gospel gives to the journey. The destination is stated at the start and referred to repeatedly, so the reader always knows where this is going even while the material looks like ordinary teaching.

Who Were the Seventy-Two?

A second, larger sending, beyond the Twelve.

Luke 10:1-20. He appoints them and sends them ahead in pairs to every town and place he was about to go, with instructions similar to the earlier mission of the Twelve: no purse, no bag, no sandals, greet no one on the road.

Why Does the Number Seventy-Two Matter?

Because it is the number of the nations, and Luke expects that to be recognised.

Gen 10 lists the peoples of the earth after the flood, the table of nations, and the count comes to seventy in the Hebrew text. Deut 32:8 then says the Most High divided those nations and set their boundaries according to the number of the sons of God, while keeping Israel for himself. That is the Babel arrangement: the nations handed over, one people retained.

Now put the two sendings side by side. In Luke 9 Jesus appoints twelve and sends them out, and twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel. In Luke 10 he appoints seventy-two and sends them out, and seventy is the number of the nations.

Twelve for the domain God kept. Seventy for the domains he gave away.

Joseph Fitzmyer, in the Anchor Yale commentary on Luke, notes exactly this reading: the number is widely taken to reflect the table of nations and to symbolise the coming evangelisation of the Gentiles, where the Twelve were sent to Israel itself.

Is It Seventy or Seventy-Two?

The manuscripts disagree, and the reason they disagree is the best part.

Some copies of Luke 10:1 read seventy. Others read seventy-two. The split is old and it is not easily resolved.

But look at where else that same split occurs. The Hebrew text of Gen 10 yields seventy nations. The Greek Septuagint yields seventy-two.

So the variant in Luke is not scribal carelessness about a round number. It is two traditions counting the table of nations differently, and Luke’s copyists inheriting that difference. The disagreement is itself evidence that the number was understood to point at Gen 10, because otherwise there would be nothing to disagree about.

Heiser adds one more layer. The Ugaritic texts describe seventy sons of El in the divine council, which is the same figure appearing in the same role, and it is the background Deut 32 is working against.

What Did Jesus Say When They Returned?

They come back with joy that even the demons submit in his name, and he answers with the line about seeing Satan fall like lightning from heaven, then tells them to rejoice instead that their names are written in heaven.

Read against the number they went out as, that answer is not a change of subject. Seventy-two men go to the nations, come back reporting that the powers gave way, and Jesus describes the accuser falling. The arrangement made at Babel is being unwound, and the reversal starts with a short-term mission by people whose names we do not have.

What Is the Point of the Good Samaritan?

That the question about neighbours was the wrong question.

Luke 10:25-37. An expert in the law asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, answers his own question correctly with the two great commands, and then asks who his neighbour is, wanting to justify himself.

The story that follows puts a priest and a Levite on the road past a beaten man, and a Samaritan stopping. For the original hearers the Samaritan was not a neutral outsider but a religious and ethnic enemy.

Bailey supplies the detail that makes the priest’s decision a real dilemma rather than simple callousness. The man is stripped and unconscious, which removes every marker by which a first-century traveller identified anyone: clothing, speech, accent. The priest cannot tell whether the body is a Jew he is obliged to help, a Gentile he is not, or a corpse whose touch would defile him and cost him a week of purification, his income from the tithes, and his household’s along with it.

He had a genuine question and he resolved it in favour of his own standing. That is worse than indifference, not better, and it is why the parable works on a lawyer who knew the rules.

The Samaritan’s risk is the mirror of it. He puts a wounded Jew on his own animal and walks him into a Jewish town, then stays the night in the inn and settles the bill in the morning. A Samaritan found with an injured Jew in Jewish territory could expect the community to draw the obvious conclusion.

The full treatment, including the priest’s dilemma and what the Samaritan risked by entering a Jewish town, is in the post on the Good Samaritan.

The closing question reverses the framing entirely. He does not ask which of the three the wounded man was neighbour to. He asks which one was a neighbour to the man. The expert cannot even say the word Samaritan, answering instead, the one who had mercy on him.

The question who is my neighbour is a question about limits. The parable refuses to answer it and asks a different one about being one.

What Are the Parables of the Lost?

Three stories in one chapter answering one complaint.

Luke 15 opens with the Pharisees and scribes muttering that this man welcomes sinners and eats with them. Everything after is the answer to that sentence.

A lost sheep, sought until found. A lost coin, searched for with a lamp until found. And a lost son, watched for and run to.

The third is the one that breaks the pattern, and Bailey has spent three books on it. Several things in it land differently once the village is in view.

The opening request is worse than rudeness. The son asks for his inheritance while his father is in good health, then sells the land, in the village, in not many days. Sale of land in that culture took months and often years. Selling that fast means he took what he could get, in public, in front of neighbours who now know exactly what has happened in that family. Ben Sirach calls slander by a whole town a terror worse than death.

Which sets up the thing hanging over the whole parable. Jewish sources describe a village ceremony called the qetsatsah, the cutting off, for a man who lost family land outside the community. The relatives filled a jar with parched corn and nuts and smashed it in front of the people, declaring that so-and-so is cut off from his inheritance. Only recovering the land could undo it.

The prodigal sold the land and lost the money among Gentiles who keep pigs. If that ceremony was not performed when he left, it was certainly waiting for him.

So read the running again. The father is not only crossing a distance and swallowing his dignity, though he is doing both, since gathering up the robes and exposing the legs was not what an elder did in public. He is getting to his son before the village does. The embrace happens on the road, in front of everyone, and after it nobody in that town can enact anything.

The speech is worth a second look too. He asks to be made like one of the hired men, and the word is not the one for a household slave or a table servant. It is the word for a paid craftsman. Slaves are not paid, and he needs wages, because the plan is to earn his way back and repay what he lost. That is not repentance. It is a proposal, and the father interrupts it before he finishes.

And the parable does not end with the party. It ends outside with the older brother refusing to come in, and the father going out to him as well, which is the second public humiliation the man absorbs in one day.

Bailey notices what the older brother did not do earlier. In that culture a serious family breach produces a mediator, and the older son is the obvious candidate. When the outrageous request was made he said nothing. He had a part to play at the beginning of the story and declined it, which makes his complaint at the end considerably less sympathetic.

The complaint that opened the chapter is his complaint, and the story leaves him standing in the field with the door open.

The full treatment, including the qetsatsah ceremony and what the father’s run was preventing, is in the post on the prodigal son.

What Happened at the Feasts in Jerusalem?

Escalating confrontation, recorded mainly by John.

The I am the light of the world discourse. The healing of the man born blind, which produces one of the most tightly written interrogation scenes in Scripture, ending with the man expelled from the synagogue and Jesus finding him afterward.

The good shepherd discourse, with the claim that he lays down his life and takes it up again of his own accord.

And at the Feast of Dedication, the direct claim that he and the Father are one, after which they pick up stones.

Is the Woman Caught in Adultery Really in the Bible?

The story is genuinely disputed, and the dispute is about manuscripts rather than about doctrine.

The passage usually printed as John 7:53 to 8:11 is missing from the earliest and best Greek manuscripts of John. It does not appear in the two great fourth-century codices. No Greek father comments on it for roughly the first thousand years of the church, and several early commentators work straight through John 7 into John 8 as though nothing sits between them.

When it does start appearing, it wanders. Some manuscripts place it where we expect it. Others put it after John 7:36, or at the very end of John, or in Luke, most often after Luke 21:38.

That wandering is the strongest single piece of evidence. A passage that belongs in a book does not move around inside it, and it certainly does not migrate into a different book. What moves like that is material being inserted, with copyists disagreeing about where it goes.

This is why modern translations set it apart with a bracket or a footnote saying the earliest witnesses lack it, and why some print it in a smaller typeface or move it to a margin.

Did the Woman Caught in Adultery Actually Happen?

Not necessarily, and this is where the discussion gets more interesting than the usual verdict.

A number of serious scholars hold that the episode preserves a genuine memory of Jesus that circulated independently before finding a home in a written Gospel. It reads like him. The trap set by the question, the refusal to answer on the terms offered, the sentence that dismantles the accusers without excusing the accused, all of that is recognisable.

So there are two questions and they have different answers. Was this part of what John wrote? Almost certainly not. Is it a true story about Jesus? Possibly, and possibly a very old one.

Holding those apart is the whole discipline here. Treating the passage as securely Johannine is not defensible on the manuscript evidence. Treating it as a late invention with no claim on anyone goes further than the evidence requires.

What it should not be is quietly preached as though the question does not exist. Anyone who reads a modern Bible will see the bracket, and a reader who has been told nothing about it has reason to wonder what else they were not told.

Why Was the Raising of Lazarus the Turning Point?

Because it made him too dangerous to leave alone.

John 11. He deliberately delays, arrives after four days, and speaks with both sisters. Martha gets the declaration: I am the resurrection and the life.

The shortest verse in the English Bible sits here, and it is worth noticing that he weeps at a tomb he is about to empty. The grief is not made unnecessary by knowing the outcome.

Wright hears the chapter rhyming forward. A tomb, a stone across the entrance, a request to take it away, and grieving women. A week or two later Mary Magdalene stands at another tomb and says they have taken away her master and she does not know where they have laid him. And the invitation the sisters give Jesus here, come and see, is the same phrase used at the very start of the Gospel and again on the beach at the end.

Then John 11:45-53. Many believe, others report to the Pharisees, and the council convenes. Their reasoning is explicitly political: if we let him go on, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.

Caiaphas gives the verdict that it is better for one man to die for the people than for the whole nation to perish, and John notes the unintended second meaning.

From that day, John says, they plotted to take his life. The greatest sign produced the decision to kill him.

Why Did Jesus Ask a Blind Man What He Wanted?

Because it was a real question, and Bailey argues it functions as an examination.

Modern readers hear it as rhetorical. The man is blind, so obviously he wants to see. That reads a modern situation back into an ancient one.

Begging was a recognised profession offering a service to the community. Every pious person owed alms to the poor, and the poor had to be available for the duty to be discharged. So the beggar in that culture did not ask apologetically for a coin. He sat in a public place and called out, give to God. What he was actually saying was that his own need was beside the point, and that he was handing the passer-by an opportunity to meet an obligation, in public, where it would be seen.

When money came he stood and loudly declared the giver the most generous man he had ever met, invoking blessing on his family and his going out and coming in. The praise was worth the coin.

The trade required a visible handicap, and blindness was the strongest qualification available. A blind beggar was virtually guaranteed an income.

Which produces the problem underneath the question. This man has no education, no training, no employment record and no marketable skills. Healed, he has to support himself, and it will be extremely difficult. Bailey puts the uncomfortable question directly: is it not in his interests to remain blind?

The grace on offer is free and it is not cheap, and the exam presses exactly that. Is he prepared for what being healed will cost him.

How Do We Know He Passed?

By two shifts in his own words.

He had been shouting for mercy, using the title Son of David, and mercy from a passing dignitary in that setting most naturally means a coin. After the question he addresses Jesus as Lord, and he names the thing he actually wants, which is his sight.

He moves from a general appeal to a specific request, and from a public messianic title to a personal one.

Bailey identifies three things inside the faith Jesus then commends. That Jesus has God’s power to heal. That his compassion for the poor includes this man. And that he is the Son of David whom the beggar is prepared to call Lord.

The Arabic Diatessaron adds a gloss to the request, having him ask to receive his sight so that he might see Jesus. That is a later imaginative addition rather than the text, and Bailey notes it as thoughtful rather than original.

The word used when Jesus tells him his faith has saved him covers rescue, healing and wholeness together. The last thing Luke records is that he followed, glorifying God, which is what a man does when he no longer has a roadside to sit at.

What Did Jesus Say to the Rich Young Ruler?

Sell everything, and the man walked away.

Mark 10:17-27. He runs up, kneels, asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, and claims to have kept the commandments from his youth. Mark adds that Jesus looked at him and loved him.

Then: one thing you lack. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and come, follow me.

The man’s face falls and he goes away sad, because he had great wealth. It is the only recorded case of someone being called directly and refusing.

The camel and the needle’s eye follows, and the disciples are astonished, asking who then can be saved. There is no gate called the Needle’s Eye. The saying means what it appears to mean, and the answer given is that with God all things are possible.

What Happened with Zacchaeus?

The opposite outcome, a few chapters later.

Luke 19:1-10. A chief tax collector, wealthy, short, up a tree. Jesus stops, calls him by name, and invites himself to the man’s house, which draws the usual muttering about going to be the guest of a sinner.

The tree is not comic and neither is the running. Bailey points out that an adult man of standing in that culture did not run in public, because it required gathering up the robe and exposing the legs. And a collaborator did not push into a crowd at all, where a knife between the ribs would never be traced. Zacchaeus ran ahead, out of the crowd, and climbed a sycamore, which has dense foliage and low branches and by law stood some distance outside the town.

He was not getting a better view. He was trying to see without being seen, and he was spotted anyway.

Zacchaeus stands and announces he will give half his possessions to the poor and repay anyone he has cheated four times over.

Set that beside the rich ruler. Same problem, opposite result, and the difference is not that Zacchaeus was told to do less.

Part of a series following the Life of Jesus timeline.

Footnotes2

1. That Luke 15 ends outside the house with the older brother, rather than at the party, is the structural key to the chapter. The audience was the older brothers, and the parable stops at the moment where their response is still open.
2. The council's reasoning in John 11:48 is entirely political and the text presents it without editorial comment. They do not dispute the sign. They calculate its consequences, and the calculation is about Roman intervention rather than about theology.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Luke 9:51-19:27, John 8:12-11:57, and Mark 10:17-52.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapters 13, 15 and 22. Supports the father running in Luke 15 and the honour dynamics of that parable, the priest's dilemma over an unidentifiable body in the Good Samaritan and the Samaritan's risk in entering a Jewish town, and the shame attached to an adult man running and climbing a tree in the Zacchaeus account. In print from IVP Academic.

N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 11-21 (SPCK, 2002). Supports the echoes between the Lazarus tomb scene and the account of Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, and the recurrence of the phrase come and see. In print.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Finding the Lost: Cultural Keys to Luke 15 (Concordia, 1992), and The Cross and the Prodigal (IVP Academic, 2005). Support the sale of the inheritance as a public offence, the qetsatsah ceremony and its bearing on the father's run, the reading of the prodigal's speech as a proposal rather than repentance, and the older son's failure to act as mediator. In print.

Midrash Rabbah on Ruth 7:11 and the Jerusalem Talmud, Ketuboth 2:10 and Kiddushin 1:5. The sources describing the qetsatsah ceremony. Cited via Bailey.

Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke X-XXIV, Anchor Yale Bible 28A (Yale University Press, 2008), 846. Supports the reading of the number as reflecting the table of nations and the contrast with the Twelve sent to Israel. In print from Yale University Press.

Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (Lexham Press, 2015). Supports the connection between the sending of the seventy, the nations dispossessed at Babel, and the seventy sons of El in the Ugaritic divine council. In print from Lexham Press.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 13. Supports the reading of the question as an examination, the account of begging as a recognised profession offering a service, the give-to-God formula, the beggar's public praise of the giver, the difficulty of self-support after healing, the shift from Son of David to Lord and from mercy to sight, and the note on the Arabic Diatessaron. In print from IVP Academic.

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 16-28 (SPCK, 2002), on Matt 20:29-34. Supports the reading of the moment as a genuine crisis rather than an obvious request. In print.

Where the sourcing stops: the ordering of events in this period varies between Luke and John and the sequence here follows the timeline rather than claiming a settled chronology. The Needle's Eye gate correction is covered separately on this site.