108_Luke Confuses the Reader

The beginning of the opening verse is copied directly from Matthew 7, 28, when he states, "...after he had finished all his sayings, which closed out Matthew's Sermon on the Mount." From here, Jesus enters Capernaum, illustrating that both Matthew and Luke chose to place their great sermons just outside of this town.

Immediately following this, we are told of an unnamed centurion from Matthew 8 who informs Jesus that his slave was ill. Luke adds that he was about to die.

Luke also changes the method of the meeting.

Where Matthew has the centurion himself approach Jesus, Luke has the centurion send Jewish elders to make the request of Jesus.

He also states that this centurion loves the Jewish people so much that he built the synagogue in Capernaum.

Before Jesus could reach his house, the centurion sent his friends to him, stating that he wasn't worthy to have Jesus enter his home.

So first he asked Jesus to come, then he tells him to stay away.

Jesus decided this revealed that the centurion had great faith, and such faith was strong enough to heal the servant.

The friends, which had been sent, were told to return to the centurion, where they would find the slave had already been healed.

In the past, scholars supposed that this story might have originated with the mysterious Q source, but the astute reader will recognize a striking similarity with the healing of Jairus' daughter in Mark 5 and the Canaanite woman's daughter in Mark 7.

In Mark 5, a man named Jairus approaches Jesus to beg his help because his daughter is ill. Jesus travels to his home where the girl has died.

He raises her up to the astonishment of the crowd.

What Matthew did was change Jesus' action of healing of the child into the centurion's faith bringing about the healing.

A detail found in Mark 7 when the Canaanite woman's faith caused her daughter to be healed of possession, and she then departed Jesus to find it so.

But how can we be sure that Matthew and Luke were drawing upon Mark 5 for inspiration? It's in the detail of the centurion's connection with the synagogue.

In Mark's original, Jairus was a temple elder.

Here, he has been changed to a Roman centurion to demonstrate that sometimes a Gentile has greater faith than a Jew.

But he sends temple elders to approach Jesus, and he was responsible for building the synagogue.

Luke has restored the connection to the synagogue that was lost when changing him from Jairus, a temple elder, to an anonymous centurion in the Gospel of Matthew.

From here, Jesus travels to another city where he finds a widow carrying the body of her recently deceased son.

He approaches and commands the son to rise, and instantly the boy sat up and began to speak.

This story seems to be taken from 1 Kings 17, verses 17-24, where Elijah likewise raised a widow's son.

But the manner of the raising is taken from Mark 5, and the aforementioned story of Jairus' daughter, when he tells the child to rise, and the child sits up.

He turns to the story of messengers from John the Baptist, as found in Matthew 11, when disciples from John go to Jesus to determine if he is the Messiah that John has been waiting for.

This makes little sense in the current form of the gospel, as John has already mentioned the arrival of the one greater than he during the baptism of Jesus prior to the Holy Spirit physically transforming into a bird and landing on Jesus accompanied by a voice from God stating that Jesus was his son.