Jesus Passage Analysis

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In our scholarly efforts to understand the whole and parts of the New Testament, it is necessary for us to analyze the passages throughout time and their ever-changing interpretations. Simply pondering how the text can be presently accepted is not enough when there are almost two thousand years of other possible interpretations as well. My goal here is to delve into an overall understanding of what the author was originally trying to say, and what effect they were trying to have. We will here discuss the famous passage of Jesus’ healing of the centurion’s slave, Luke 7:1-10.
In short, Luke 7:1-10 tells of a centurion’s slave in Capernaum who was on the verge of death. Upon hearing of Jesus’ presence, the centurion sent Jewish elders to beg …show more content…
When a few Jewish elders went to Jesus to ask for his assistance to save his slave, they explained that “‘He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us’” (Luke 7: 4-5). His portrayal is particularly important as not only is he tolerant of the Jews, he is distinctly supportive of them, even going as far as to helping them build their synagogue with his own two hands. This gives off the feel that not all centurions and Gentiles are the bad people they are here often made out to be, that perhaps some are actually deserving people who have been misunderstood. As the Gospel of Luke in general is thought of as being more sympathetic to Gentiles than the others, this passage falls closely in line with the idea that the faith of a Gentile is just as acceptable to Jesus as the faith of a …show more content…
This rejection leads to its dissemination elsewhere, principally among the non-Jews, the Gentiles” (157). This is the recurring idea that his message was to be spread ‘first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles’. Nowhere is this concept more significant than in Luke 7:1-10. While much of the Gospel is emphasizing Jesus’ ‘Jewishness’ and his fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures, the Jews’ repudiation of his message left room for the Gentiles to accept Jesus and the word of God. Furthermore, Luke is the only Gospel to have a continuation, essentially a sequel (Acts of the Apostles), in which the primary plotline focuses on the spread of early Christianity, heavily concentrated on non-Jews. In chapter 7’s passage, Jesus states that “‘I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith’” (Luke 7:9). This is one of the earliest indications of ‘first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles’ as it shows that even with all the time he had spent in Judaism’s homeland, he had never met a person who was as faithful as this man, a Gentile. He spread his message to the Jews first, but as it turns out a Gentile man was able to better enact it. This passage is a precursor for the highlighting of Gentiles in
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