Luke 10:1

1 st. The Sending, Luke 10:1-16.

Ver. 1. The Mission. ᾿Αναδείκνυμι, to put in view; and hence, to elect and install (Luke 1:80); here, to designate. The word instituer (Crampon) would wrongly give a permanent character to this mission. Schleiermacher and Meyer think that by the καὶ ἑτέρους, others also, Luke alludes to the sending of the two messengers (Luke 9:52). But those two envoys are of too widely different a nature to admit of being put on the same footing, and the term. ἀνέδειξεν could not be applied to the former. The solemn instructions which follow leave no room to doubt, that by the others also, Luke alludes to the sending of the Twelve. The term ἑτέρους, others, authorizes the view that the Twelve were not comprehended in this second mission; Jesus kept them at this time by His side, with a view to their peculiar training for their future ministry.

The oscillation which prevails in the MSS. between the numbers seventy and seventy-two, and which is reproduced in Luke 10:17, exists equally in several other cases where this number appears, e.g., the seventy or seventy-two Alexandrine translators of the Old Testament. This is due to the fact that the numbers 70 and 72 are both multiples of numbers very frequently used in sacred symbolism 7 times 10 and 6 times 12. The authorities are in favour of seventy, the reading in particular of the Sinaïticus. Does this number contain an allusion to that of the members of the Sanhedrim (71, including the president), a number which appears in its turn to correspond with that of the 70 elders chosen by Moses (Num 11:16-25)? In this case it would be, so to speak, an anti-Sanhedrim which Jesus constituted, as, in naming the Twelve, He had set over against the twelve sons of Jacob twelve new spiritual patriarchs. But there is another explanation of the number which seems to us more natural. The Jews held, agreeably to Genesis 10, that the human race was made up of 70 (or 72) peoples, 14 descended from Japhet, 30 from Ham, and 26 from Shem. This idea, not uncommon in the writings of later Judaism, is thus expressed in the Clementine Recognitions (Luke 2:42): “God divided all the nations of the earth into 72 parts.” If the choice of the Twelve, as it took place at the beginning, had more particular relation to Christ's mission to Israel, the sending of the seventy, carried out at a more advanced epoch, when the unbelief of the people was assuming a fixed form, announced and prepared for the extension of preaching throughout the whole earth.

Jesus sent them two and two; the gifts of the one were to complete those of the other. Besides, did not the legal adage say, In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established?

Lange translates οὗ ἔμελλεν, “where He should have come,” as if the end of the visit made by the seventy had been to make up for that for which Jesus had not time. This meaning is opposed to the text, and particularly to the words before Him.