Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I am in a hotel room in Cody, Wyoming. It's cowboy chic. It has log beds, although they're mattresses, but the frames are made of logs, and it's got this cool like cowboy rustler rope where the normally wood trim would go. They just did all the edges like that. It's really absolutely lovely. We finished up our Yellowstone thing the last couple of days. It was really fun. We've gone there a bazillion times as a family because this is where we're from. But this is one of the most interesting visits we've ever had because the animals are all out, even though it's the middle of summer, because there just aren't that many people around, you know, because the world is weird right now and people aren't going to Yellowstone, apparently. So it was really fun. And if you sat any of my kids down or my friends down who we traveled with, and you asked them what went on, they would give you roughly the same events. We saw a wolf, we ran into an Italian guy and his family, and we took pictures of them and talked a whole bunch, and that was really fun. We had an awful, horrible meal at Old Faithful. The sun was perfect at Old Faithful, and the eruption looked about as good as we've ever seen it look. But they might not give you those details in the exact same order. Now, in my brain, it's really simple because Yellowstone is a big circular caldera, right? It's it's the basin of a giant supervolcano. And because the basin of the giant supervolcano is where all of the interesting geothermal features are, the road, of course, follows that exact rim so you can see all of the geothermal features. So I think of it as a clock where you come into the park at six o'clock and then you go clockwise around to three o'clock, you go out to Cody, and you come back down to where we live. But my kids aren't driving. They don't conceive of it like that. They conceive of it as a series of anecdotes that they arrange, usually in order of importance. We've talked about this on the YouTube channel before as well. So if you ask me to give a recounting of what happened yesterday at the park, you're going to get the whole thing organized chronologically in that three-quarters of a clock clockwise motion. But if you ask my son, who's nine, you're just gonna get the stuff that he found most interesting and he'll leave off other things. And if you give him the impression that you really like animals, then he'll tell you all the animal stories in whatever order he happens to remember them, and that works just fine. You wouldn't call either of us liars and you'd be able to reconcile the stories very easily. Well, when we get to Matthew chapter 8 and the events that happen as Jesus is coming down from the Sermon on the Mount, we run into some apparent surface-level chronology issues between the account in Matthew and the corresponding account in Luke. Of course, in Matthew, as you know from hanging out with me for the last couple of weeks, Jesus heals the guy who has leprosy, and then immediately after that, starting in verse 5, he heals the centurion's servant. And then Matthew goes on to record in an order that looks like it's chronological. I guess it's not smoking gun, obvious it's chronological, but it looks like it's happening in order. Jesus goes into Capernaum, and we get a whole bunch of Capernaum and around Capernaum anecdotes that flesh out more about Jesus' authority over, well, everything that limits people. Remember, we talked about five of the things that limit all people the other day, and he's just gonna set those pins up and flick them down one at a time to demonstrate that he has authority over all of that stuff. So Matthew clearly has a structure here that he is trying to achieve. That is, Sermon on the Mount is awe-inspiring and really makes the audience think, not just on the individual existential spiritual level, which has been the larger point of focus for us because most of you in the audience are not Jewish and we are thinking about this way after the fact. But in addition to that existential spiritual level, he is also framing this up to tackle the question we dealt with at length yesterday, which is again that question of old family of faith, new family of faith, fulfillment of the old family of faith with the new family of faith, and how all of that fits together. So it would make sense then that Jesus would need to demonstrate that authority that Jesus has to make the claims in the Sermon on the Mount, while also demonstrating his authority over the social and religious and cultural assumptions of the day, all of which are challenged in these back-to-back anecdotes in touching a man with leprosy and engaging positively with the occupying Gentile Roman centurion. And of course, all of this is structured with a Jewish audience in mind and trying to make that Jesus is king of the promised kingdom, this is what we've all been looking for, thing come into focus for them. But you jump over to Luke, and Luke is not writing to Jewish people. He's not trying to make the case that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of the Jewish things that he assumes his audience would be familiar with. No, he doesn't assume his audience would be familiar with all of that stuff. And in fact, Luke offers more lengthy asides and explanations of all of these little Jewish cultural flourishes and stuff from what we would call the Old Testament. So Luke then is writing to a larger audience, an overwhelmingly Gentile audience, and he's trying to make the case that Jesus was innocent of what he was charged with by the law. People are going to look at this and be like, hey, you don't want to cross Roman authority. And the state, of course, had determined that Jesus was guilty of a capital offense and killed him. So Luke is writing an apologetic to say, here's who Jesus was, here's what he did, and here's a vindication of Jesus demonstrating that he was not guilty, and not only that he was not guilty, but that he is, in fact, the Son of God and the Redeemer for all people, Jew, Gentile, everybody. So we get over to Luke chapters 5, 6, and 7, and that's where we run into the same content that we're seeing in Matthew. Now you might remember from early on, the when we're looking at Matthew and Luke on like the birth narrative stuff, it lines up pretty closely for quite a while. Temptation and baptism and things like that, we had a pretty easy time bouncing back and forth. But then the chapters quit corresponding after that, and Luke sneaks his account of the same teachings that occur in the Sermon on the Mount into Luke chapter 6. Now, is Luke chapter 6 giving another account of the Sermon on the Mount, or are we talking about something different here entirely? Luke 6.17 says that Jesus went down with them and stood on a level place, and a large crowd of his disciples were there with him, and a great number of people from all over Judea, from Jerusalem, and from the coastal region around Tyre and Sidon who had come to hear him and be healed of their diseases. Those troubled by impure spirits were cured, and the people all tried to touch him because power was coming from him and healing them all. And then he looks at the disciples and he says, Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you'll be satisfied. And nah if you're listening closely, you're like, wait a minute, that does sound like the Sermon on the Mount. This is the same stuff. But apparently, Luke is either giving a condensed version of Matthew's larger version that he recorded of the Sermon on the Mount. That would make sense. Luke wasn't there. He gathered these details from people who were. He says so in the opening verses of his gospel. Matthew was there. He had a note-taking, detail-oriented skill set because of his job as a publican or a tax collector. So it makes sense that he would do a good job of doing some kind of shorthand recording of the entire Sermon on the Mount, and then boiling that down to what he put in the gospel. But that boil down would still be much bigger than Luke's version, given the way Luke gathered this information. So one possibility is that Matthew and Luke are recording the same sermon, and the person who described the place on the hill where this happened was kind of a level spot, but they're really still talking about a level spot on a mount. And so whether you're talking about the sermon on the plane or the sermon on the mount, you're talking about the exact same thing. Another possibility is that Jesus, much like me or you or anybody who talks about things they care about a lot, said the same stuff many, many times because he was trying to connect with a whole bunch of people and make this kingdom stuff evident to a whole bunch of people. His message was the message of the kingdom. And Luke is recording a speech that happens in very close chronological proximity to what we call the Sermon on the Mount that Matthew recorded, and that's why the details aren't exactly the same, because the speech had a little bit of a different point of emphasis. Either way you slice it, the sermon that Matthew records looks to be very targeted to a Jewish audience, and the sermon that Luke records again would make more sense to a broader audience. Either way, the sermon gets over with in Luke chapter 6. It ends with the wise and foolish builder thing, the same way the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7 ends, and then we bounce over to Luke 8, and we discover that the centurion healing thing is the next anecdote. Oh, well, where's the leper deal? I mean, that seems like it's a really giant thing. You touched a leper and everybody was impressed, and that would have challenged all the paradigms of the world. Where does that go? Well, for that, we got to go back to Luke chapter 5 and verse 12. And there we get an almost identical account of Jesus healing the man with leprosy that we just looked at. Now in Luke, this is arranged right next to the healing of the paralytic. And you remember when we were covering the leprosy thing? I was like, whoa, this reminds me a ton of Jesus healing the paralyzed man where he got lowered through the roof and all of that kind of stuff. Because at the end, the controversy would have been, you know, what's the bigger deal? The miracle that happened here? Or what Jesus is really saying and proclaiming and the authority he wields spiritually and socially. And so the healing of the guy with leprosy, it's like, well, which is the bigger deal? To get rid of a guy's leprosy in front of everybody? Or to say, I declare you clean? Can Jesus really do that? And likewise in the paralyzed man account, which is the bigger deal? Jesus spells it out overtly. Is it to say your sins are forgiven, or is it to say, get up and take your mat and go home? So then Jesus is like, well, well, just so that you know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I tell you there, Mister, get up and take your mat and go home. And the guy does that, and everybody's blown away. And the miracle confirms Jesus' ability to declare things clean, socially and medically, and ceremonially and before God. And the paralysis episode confirms Jesus' authority to declare someone forgiven. So Luke puts those two right next to each other. But what's interesting is he doesn't use any particular chronological language with these anecdotes in Luke chapter 5 that correspond with what we're looking at in Matthew chapter 8. Instead, these open with, while Jesus was in one of the towns. Oh, okay, so that doesn't necessarily have to go anywhere. Like if you ask my kid, what did you see in Yellowstone? Oh, we saw a wolf, we saw a bison, we saw an elk. That's not in order, but he's not claiming that's in order, he's just telling you what he saw. Likewise, the account of the paralyzed man, still in Luke chapter 5, opens with, one day Jesus was teaching. Now at times, Luke is very intentional about the chronology of things, and at other times, Matthew doesn't seem to be quite as concerned with the chronology of things, but here, the context clues and the language in the text make it obvious that Luke is not trying to say this happened right then. He's arranged these anecdotes in the same way my son might arrange the story of when we went to Yellowstone around his favorite thing about that, which is animals, based on a descending order of most interesting animal to least interesting animal. So Luke seems to be interested in demonstrating Jesus' authority in this way, and he arranges the order of things in the manner that he thinks will best accomplish that. But then we go to Luke chapter 7, and it looks like we're getting a little different set of details with the story of the centurion. So let's wrap up this the harmonizing Matthew and Luke in this part of the story of Jesus episode quickly by looking at that. So Luke 7:1. When Jesus had finished saying all the things of the people who were listening, he entered Capernaum. There, a centurion servant, who his master valued highly, was sick and about to die. Okay, everything's the same so far. The centurion heard of Jesus and sent some elders of the Jews to him, asking him to come and heal his servant. Okay, now we have a deviation, because in Matthew chapter 8, it sounds like the guy himself shows up. So it doesn't sound like he sent Jewish representatives, but let's keep reading. When they came to Jesus, these Jewish representatives in Luke 7, they pleaded earnestly with him, this man deserves to have you do this because he loves our nation and has built our synagogue. Okay, so there's that bit I've been alluding to for the last three days about his good reputation in the community. So Jesus went with them. Then it says he was not far from the house when the centurion sent friends to say to him. So again, the centurion isn't coming out, he sent somebody else. And then he goes on to say, Lord, don't trouble yourself. I don't deserve to have you come under my roof. I'm a person at authority. I tell somebody to do that, they do it. I tell somebody else do that, they do it. And all the stuff that corresponds almost exactly to Matthew chapter eight. When Jesus heard this, he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd following him, he said, I tell you, I've not found such great faith even in Israel. And then that's it. He doesn't go into any of the larger stuff that he does in Matthew chapter eight about Israel and Abraham and Isaac and who's on the outside of the party and who's on the inside of the party. Why? Well, obviously, that wouldn't interest Luke's audience at all. They wouldn't be asking those questions, they wouldn't care, but it would interest Matthew's audience enormously, especially given the long rendition of the Sermon on the Mount that Matthew just covered. It would have raised a bajillion questions for people. So Luke glosses over this part and just keeps the affirmation of the centurion. That's what would be relevant to the mind of the Gentile audience member. He keeps all the stuff about the centurion assuming a right posture before the king, which is maybe an even huger, more pronounced theme in Luke than it is in Matthew. Luke just hits this all the time. Then this person came up and fell at Jesus' feet, then this person came up and wept and cried and cleaned Jesus' feet with their hair. I mean, it's just everywhere in Luke. So then all we're really left with is just how to reconcile the account of whether the centurion showed up or he sent people to show up. And obviously, one possibility here would be that Luke went and did research a couple of decades or so after the fact. People had forgotten a few of the details, the people he talked to got this wrong. And so he gives the gist, Matthew was there, he's an eyewitness, his account is more accurate. That is one possibility. It's not necessarily what I think, but there are very intelligent people who think that, who have a very high view of the Bible, and I have to acknowledge their perspective on this. I think the better explanation is that a man who wielded that level of authority, like the centurion did, could send emissaries, and those emissaries effectively spoke for him. It would also seem that Luke can even more so accentuate the idea of the centurion saying, I am a man in authority. I tell people go there, they go, I tell people come here, they come, by demonstrating that he sent out emissaries, and that those emissaries even included people who theoretically should be his enemies. So the centurion does a little bit of transcending some of the social norms, and Jesus does a lot. Whatever the case, there are parts of the New Testament where I look at the Gospels, I'm like, man, that's a difficult one to reconcile. This is not one of those places, but I felt like it just deserved a whole episode of breaking down how all of these timelines fit together between the two most detailed corresponding synoptic gospels, that being Matthew and Luke. And hopefully you found it interesting as well. Thanks again for hanging out with me on my Yellowstone trip, which is now about to be concluded. So we'll be back to normal audio next time around. You're patient and awesome for working with me as I took this whole thing on the road. And also as I try to do, hopefully at least every week, I want to say a huge thank you to the patrons of the program at patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast. That's always also linked down below for supporting this and making it happen. Thank you so very, very much for making it so we can hang out and talk about the Bible together because I love doing this. All right, that's it. We're back to working through the text in Matthew 8 next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.