The Seventy and the Problem of Names
~ Sunday, June 3, 2018 ~
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.
The passage is Luke 10:1–20. Jesus appoints a group larger than the Twelve, gives them instructions and authority, and dispatches them ahead of him. They return with a report — “even the demons submit to us in your name” — and Jesus responds with a passage about Satan falling from heaven like lightning. Then the narrative moves on. The group is never heard from again.
The number and its problem
The size of the group is contested at the manuscript level. Luke 10:1 reads “the Lord appointed seventy” in some traditions and “seventy-two” in others. This is not a marginal dispute. Bruce Metzger, whose critical commentary on New Testament manuscript variants is the standard scholarly reference, writes that the evidence is “fairly divided, and it is not easy to conclude what Luke actually wrote.”
The Textus Receptus, the Greek base underlying early printed Bibles, reads seventy. The Nestle-Aland critical edition — the modern scholarly standard — notes both variants as significant. Jerome chose seventy-two for the Latin Vulgate in the late fourth century.
Both numbers carry symbolic weight. Genesis 10 enumerates seventy nations of the earth, or seventy-two in the Greek Septuagint. Numbers 11:24–25 records Moses appointing seventy elders, with Eldad and Medad receiving the spirit outside the formal assembly. The discrepancy in Luke may be intentional — a recall of both traditions simultaneously — or it may be an early copyist’s intervention, reading one symbolic resonance rather than the other. The manuscript evidence does not settle the question.
What the Pseudo-Dorotheus list is
The impulse to name the unnamed did not go unsatisfied indefinitely. A Greek text known as On the Seventy Apostles of Christ attempts to supply names and assign bishoprics to each of the seventy. It has been attributed variously to Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170–235 CE) and to a figure called Dorotheus of Tyre (4th century). Current scholarship regards both attributions as pseudepigraphic; the text survives in ninth-century manuscripts.
It is worth noting what this list is not: it is not an early record, not independent testimony, not apostolic memory preserved in writing. It is, in effect, an ecclesiastical project of the late patristic period — an attempt to render complete what Luke had conspicuously left incomplete. The names it supplies may derive from other traditions; they may be constructions. What they represent, in any case, is the church’s discomfort with anonymous transmission.
A companion text, On the Twelve Apostles of Christ, was recovered from Greek manuscripts in the nineteenth century alongside the Seventy text. The two documents belong together as a naming project. The fact that both were required — that the Twelve themselves needed a supplementary document explaining their subsequent careers — indicates that the canonical texts were not considered sufficient on their own.
The silence and what it holds
Luke sends these seventy out, receives their report, and offers Jesus’s response. Then they disappear. They are not ordained. They are not listed. They are not assigned territories or successors. The mission is complete in the text; the missionaries have no further existence within it.
One reading of this silence is that Luke simply did not know their names. Another is that their names were known but not considered important to record. A third is that the silence is structural — that Luke was describing a category of transmission that was by nature anonymous, a spreading of authority that worked precisely because it was not attached to named individuals.
The third reading is not obviously less plausible than the first two. What is clear is that Luke, who took considerable care with names elsewhere in his narrative, chose not to use them here. The category of the sent-out, in Luke’s gospel, is defined entirely by function. It has no register.
In this series
- The Lists That Don’t Agree
- Paul’s Argument
- What Nag Hammadi Did to the Record
- The Number Beyond the Count
- The Missions North of the Danube
Sources
- Luke 10:1–24; Numbers 11:24–25; Genesis 10 (primary texts). Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th edition (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012).
- Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. Stuttgart: United Bible Societies, 1994.
- Hippolytus (Pseudo-), On the Seventy Apostles of Christ (patristic text, surviving in 9th-century manuscripts).