Luke 17


Luke 17 is the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the teachings of Jesus Christ and the healing of ten lepers. 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 37 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are:
"Offences", literally "stumbling blocks".

Cleansing ten lepers (17:11–19)

This is one of the miracles of Jesus in the Gospels. On his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, "Jesus, Master, have pity on us!" When he saw them, he said: :"Go, show yourselves to the priests." And as they went, they were cleansed. One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan. Jesus asked:
Then he said to him:
This miracle has been described as emphasising the importance of faith, for Jesus did not say: "My power has saved you" but attributed the healing to the faith of the beneficiaries.

The coming of the kingdom (17:20–37)

Verse 20

Verse 21

Lutheran biblical writer Harold Buls notes that the Pharisees' question is a 'when?' question whereas Jesus' answer is a 'what?' response: the Pharisees "were expecting the Kingdom of God... to come soon"; this is "a faulty notion about the character of the Kingdom". Jesus replies that the Kingdom of God does not come "with observation" or "with a visible display": the word παρατηρήσεως appears only here in the New Testament.