Luke 10:38-42

5. Martha and Mary: Luke 10:38-42.

Here is one of the most exquisite scenes which Gospel tradition has preserved to us; it has been transmitted by Luke alone. What surprises us in the narrative is, the place which it occupies in the middle of a journey through Galilee. On the one hand, the expression ἐν τῷ πορεύεσθαι αὐτούς, as they went, indicates that we have a continuation of the same journey as began at Luke 9:51; on the other, the knowledge which we have of Martha and Mary, John 11, does not admit of a doubt that the event transpired in Judea at Bethany, near Jerusalem. Hengstenberg supposes that Lazarus and his two sisters dwelt first in Galilee, and afterwards came to settle in Judea. But the interval between autumn and the following spring is too short to allow of such a change of residence. In John 11:1, Bethany is called the town of Mary and her sister Martha, a phrase which assumes that they had lived there for a length of time. The explanation is therefore a forced one. There is another more natural. In John 10 there is indicated a short visit of Jesus to Judea in the month of December of that year, at the feast of dedication. Was not that then the time when the visit took place which is here recorded by Luke? Jesus must have interrupted His evangelistic journey to go to Jerusalem, perhaps while the seventy disciples were carrying out their preparatory mission. After that short appearance in the capital, He returned to put Himself at the head of the caravan, to visit the places where the disciples had announced His coming. Luke himself certainly did not know the place where this scene transpired (in a certain village); he transmits the fact to us as he found it in his sources, or as he had received it by oral tradition, without more exact local indication. Importance had been attached rather to the moral teaching than to the external circumstances. It is remarkable that the scene of the preceding parable is precisely the country between Jericho and Jerusalem. Have we here a second proof of a journey to Judea at that period?

Here we must recall two things: 1. That the oral tradition from which our written compilations (with the exception of that of John) are derived, was formed immediately after the ministry of our Lord, when the actors in the Gospel drama were yet alive, and that it was obliged to exercise great discretion in regard to the persons who figured in it, especially where women were concerned; hence the omission of many proper names. 2. That it is John's Gospel which has restored those names to the Gospel history; but that at the time when Luke wrote, this sort of incognito still continued.