The Seventy and the Problem of Names

In the tenth chapter of Luke, Jesus appoints seventy — or seventy-two, depending on which manuscripts you follow — and sends them out in pairs to every town he is about to visit. They go. They return. They report. And then Luke never names a single one of them. The mission is recorded; the missionaries are not.

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The Lists That Don’t Agree

The four canonical gospels agree that Jesus had twelve apostles. They do not agree on who those twelve were. The discrepancy is not a matter of copyist error or manuscript corruption; it is present in the primary texts themselves, and it has been there from the beginning.

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