CMP Review 2024-06-02

“The mission of the Twelve is recorded in three Synoptics,” explains Ralph Earle, but “the sending of the Seventy only in Luke. This is in keeping with the point of view of this Evangelist. [Alfred] Plummer puts it this way: ‘This incident would have special interest for the writer of the Universal Gospel, who sympathetically records both the sending of the Twelve to the tribes of Israel (11:1–6), and the sending of the Seventy to the nations of the earth.’”

“In Perea,” he continues, “where these servants of Christ were sent, the population was more Gentile than in Judea. Yet it was predominantly Jewish. While nothing is said about the Gentiles in the instructions to the Seventy, neither is there any prohibition against preaching to them, as there was in the case of the Twelve (Matt. 10:5–6).”

In his volume The Gospel History, C. C. James places this sending of the Seventy shortly after the raising of Lazarus. Charlotte Mason follows James’s chronology and explores the expending mission of our Lord in her poem “The Seventy are sent forth.” Find it here.

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