Luke 10:16

10:16 “The one who listens to you listens to me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”

Luke 10:1

The Mission of the Seventy-Two

10:1 After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him two by two into every town and place where he himself was about to go.

Luke 4:8

4:8 Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You are to worship 10  the Lord 11  your God and serve only him.’” 12 


tn Grk “hears you”; but as the context of vv. 8-9 makes clear, it is response that is the point. In contemporary English, “listen to” is one way to express this function (L&N 31.56).

sn Jesus linked himself to the disciples’ message: Responding to the disciples (listens to you) counts as responding to him.

tn The double mention of rejection in this clause – ἀθετῶν ἀθετεῖ (aqetwn aqetei) in the Greek text – keeps up the emphasis of the section.

sn The one who sent me refers to God.

tn Grk “And after these things.” Here δέ (de) has not been translated.

tc There is a difficult textual problem here and in v. 17, where the number is either “seventy” (א A C L W Θ Ξ Ψ Ë1,13 Ï and several church fathers and early versions) or “seventy-two” (Ì75 B D 0181 pc lat as well as other versions and fathers). The more difficult reading is “seventy-two,” since scribes would be prone to assimilate this passage to several OT passages that refer to groups of seventy people (Num 11:13-17; Deut 10:22; Judg 8:30; 2 Kgs 10:1 et al.); this reading also has slightly better ms support. “Seventy” could be the preferred reading if scribes drew from the tradition of the number of translators of the LXX, which the Letter of Aristeas puts at seventy-two (TCGNT 127), although this is far less likely. All things considered, “seventy-two” is a much more difficult reading and accounts for the rise of the other. Only Luke notes a second larger mission like the one in 9:1-6.

tn Or “city.”

tn Grk “And Jesus.” Here καί (kai) has not been translated because of differences between Greek and English style.

tc Most mss, especially the later ones (A Θ Ψ 0102 Ë13 Ï it), have “Get behind me, Satan!” at the beginning of the quotation. This roughly parallels Matt 4:10 (though the Lukan mss add ὀπίσω μου to read ὕπαγε ὀπίσω μου, σατανᾶ [{upage opisw mou, satana]); for this reason the words are suspect as a later addition to make the two accounts agree more precisely. A similar situation occurred in v. 5.

10 tn Or “You will prostrate yourself in worship before…” The verb προσκυνέω (proskunew) can allude not only to the act of worship but the position of the worshiper. See L&N 53.56.

11 tc Most later mss (A Θ 0102 Ï) alter the word order by moving the verb forward in the quotation. This alteration removes the emphasis from “the Lord your God” as the one to receive worship (as opposed to Satan) by moving it away from the beginning of the quotation.

12 sn A quotation from Deut 6:13. The word “only” is an interpretive expansion not found in either the Hebrew or Greek (LXX) text of the OT.