Having looked at Matthew 18:8-9 and its parallel in Mark, now let us turn our attention to the its parallel passages in Luke.  Interestingly, Luke’s parallel for Matthew 18:1-5 occurs in Luke 9:46-48, whereas its parallel for 18:6-9 occurs in Luke 17:1.  Luke 9:46-48 more closely resembles Mark’s version than Matthew’s version.  It frames the consequence as Jesus correcting their behavior after they argue who is greater in the road, verse 48 reads “who would receive this child in my name, receives me, and who who would receive me, receives the one who sent me,” whereas Matthew’s version omits the reference to the one who sent Jesus.  

Additionally, this passage is immediately followed in vv. 49-50 by a passage in which Jesus is asked about people casting out demons in his name, in which Jesus responds that whoever is not against them is for them. I noted this in a footnote in the last post, but here it seems that Matthew has omitted a passage that both Mark and Luke include, which seems to contradict some of the language in Matthew 7:22-23 (which have no parallels in Mark and Luke). 

Luke 17:1-2 reads:

[1] And he said to his disciples, It is not permissible for the causes of stumbling not to come, however woe to the one by whom they come. [2] It is better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he was cast into the sea than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble.

And that’s it! Luke omits all of the language about Gehenna, chopping off hands and feet and plucking out eyes. Since Luke is writing for a primarily Gentile audience, which is perhaps less familiar with the prophetic and apocalyptic traditions of Hebrew scripture, maybe these have been omitted to make the passage more palatable to its intended audience. 

Comparing these parallel passages is, I think, a reasonably good illustration of why the school of Christian thought that make the argument that the Bible is the LITERAL word of God and the TRUTH, inasmuch as there is a fair amount of disagreement among the Synoptic Gospels here.  Particularly, Matthew seems to have left out a passage that Mark and Luke include, and which contradicts an argument that Matthew makes elsewhere in the text.  Luke completely abandons all of the language about self-mutilation and divine punishment, which the other Gospels include.  And even if we are not comparing parallel passages, Mark’s quotation of Isaiah suggests a radically different version of divine punishment than the “eternal hellfire” that I suspect the average Biblical literalist would read into the passage.  

This is not to say that I find any particular reading of the Bible right or wrong (although I certainly do not find many Evangelical readings of scripture to be particularly compelling), but rather to say that the text of the Bible should be approached humbly, and we should be careful about being too certain in our interpretation of it.  The thing that I find most compelling about the Bible is that it is a conversation that the descendants of a particular religious tradition have been having with each other for millennia, and that same nature means that we must perform a good deal of due diligence to make sure that we aren’t ignoring the conversation that has gone before us.