Luke 24


Luke 24 is the twenty-fourth and final chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. 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. This chapter records the discovery of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, his appearances to his disciples and his ascension into heaven.

Text

The original text was written in Koine Greek. This chapter is divided into 53 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are:
"They" refers to "the women who had come with Him from Galilee", who are "Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them". The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges suggests that the words "certain other women" are a spurious late insertion, not being part of the text in the Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus or Codex Regius manuscripts.

Verse 10

The names of some women are mentioned in the canonical gospels, but only Luke's gospel mentions Joanna, implying that Luke receives his special information from "one or more than one of" the women. In Mary called Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Chuza, and Susanna are named as women who provided material sustenance to Jesus during his travels, along with other unnamed women. While Matthew, Mark and John mentioned the names of the women present at the cross, Luke only refers them as "the women that followed him from Galilee", but name the women at the end in the story of the women's visit to the empty tomb. The two passages with the names of some women alongside the mention of the "twelve" and "apostles", respectively, "form a literary inclusio" which brackets the major part of Jesus' ministry.

Verse 12

describes Jesus' appearance to two disciples who are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, which is said to be 60 stadia from Jerusalem. One of the disciples is named Cleopas, while his companion remains unnamed.

Verse 53

Luke's gospel ends where it began: in the temple.
The King James Version ends with the word "Amen", following the Textus Receptus, but modern critical editions of the New Testament exclude this word, as do many modern English translations. In a manuscript copy of Beza's, there are added words:
a tradition also known to the eleventh-century Byzantine bishop Theophylact of Ohrid.