Luke 20


Luke 20 is the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the teaching of Jesus Christ in the temple in Jerusalem, especially his responses to questions raised by the Pharisees and Sadducees. The book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that Luke composed this Gospel as well as the Acts of the Apostles.

Text

The original text was written in Koine Greek. This chapter is divided into 47 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are:
This parable of Jesus, also known as the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, found in three of the four canonical gospels, and also in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. It describes a householder planting a vineyard and letting it out to husbandmen, who failed in their duty. The owner sent various servants successively to collect a share of the proceeds of the harvest, but each time the husbandmen rejected them. Unlike the texts in Matthew and Mark, Luke states that "perhaps" they will respect the owner's son. The word ἴσως is not used elsewhere in the New Testament. It appears once in the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, at, where the Greek is translated as "perhaps", but as "surely" in many English translations based on the Hebrew text.

Verses 17–18

Jesus is alluding to –.
This parable was about chief priests and Pharisees and was given to the people present in the Temple during the final week before the death of Jesus.

No further questions

and similarly record that after a series of partisan questions, the scribes concluded that they were not able to outwit Jesus and "after that they dared not question Him anymore".
American theologian Albert Barnes suggests that "never was wisdom more clear, never more triumphant"; the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges reflects that at this point events became more perilous for Jesus as his opponents recognised that they would be unable "to pose themselves as superiors to in wisdom and knowledge" and contempt was therefore "deepened into real hatred".

Beware of the scribes

Verse 46 recalls the second of Luke's woes to the Pharisees: