Luke 20

Luke 20 is the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the teaching of Jesus Christ in the temple in Jerusalem, especially his responses to questions raised by the Pharisees and Sadducees. The book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that Luke the Evangelist composed this Gospel as well as the Acts of the Apostles.

The original text was written in Koine Greek. This chapter is divided into 47 verses.

Luke follows with some abbreviation, and with some material peculiar to himself. One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders
The New King James Version reads "on one of those days", reflecting the additional word εκεινων (ekeinōn), inserted into the Textus Receptus. This word, added "for greater precision", is missing "from the authorities of greatest importance, condemned by Johann Jakob Griesbach, and deleted by Karl Lachmann and Constantin von Tischendorf". who are "presented as favourably disposed to him", but when the chief priests, scribes and elders question him about his authority, Jesus raises a question in return about the origin of John's baptism. In the popular mind, John was a prophet, but the temple leaders had "refused to believe him" (verse 5). In Luke 7:30, the Pharisees and the lawyers had declined John's baptism.

This parable of Jesus, also known as the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, is found in three of the four canonical gospels (, Mark , and Matthew ), and also in the non canonical Gospel of Thomas. For Rudolf Bultmann, the passage is not a "parable" but an "allegory", and "intelligible only on that basis". It describes a householder planting a vineyard and letting it out to husbandmen, who failed in their duty. The owner sent various servants successively to collect a share of the proceeds of the harvest, but each time the husbandmen rejected them. Unlike the texts in Matthew and Mark, Luke states that "perhaps" (, isōs, "probably" in the NKJV and in Marvin Vincent's interpretation) they will respect the owner's son. The word ἴσως is not used elsewhere in the New Testament. It appears once in the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, at Samuel 25:21 (NKJV), where the Greek is translated as "perhaps", but as "surely" in many English translations based on the Hebrew text. As the parable continues, the wicked husbandmen conspire to kill the son, in the expectation that the vineyard would pass to them. Finally, the owner comes and "destroys" those husbandmen and gives the vineyard to others.

So they watched Him, and sent spies who pretended to be righteous, that they might seize on His words, in order to deliver Him to the power and the authority of the governor. These tactics are slightly different from the way they are presented by Matthew and Mark : they sent some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him Luke is "on the one hand, less definite as to the parties to the conspiracy than the other Gospels, and on the other hand more explicit as to its aim". In this verse, Luke anticipates the events of Jesus' trial, when having questioned him before the Sanhedrin, they "arose and led Him to Pilate".

Then some of the Sadducees, who deny that there is a resurrection, came to Him and asked
Using the example of a woman who has successively married seven brothers in accordance with the Mosaic rule of levirate marriage prescribed by Deuteronomy 25:5, the Sadducees put "something of a trick question" to Jesus, exploring "the sense in which life after death can be meaningful". Farrar notes that verses 27 39 relate the discomfiture of the Sadducees. Farrar, in the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, reflects that at this point events became more perilous for Jesus as his opponents recognised that they would be unable "to pose themselves as superiors to [him] in wisdom and knowledge", and contempt was therefore "deepened into real hatred".