Charles Ellicott Commentary Luke 10:1

"Now after these things the Lord appointed seventy others, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself was about to come." — Luke 10:1 (ASV)

After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also.—Some important manuscripts give “seventy-two,” but the evidence favors the reading “seventy.” The number had a threefold significance:

1. Seventy elders had been appointed by Moses to help him in his work of teaching and judging the people (Numbers 11:16), and to these the spirit of prophecy had been given so they might bear the burden with him.
2. As the Sanhedrin, or great Council of scribes, priests, and elders, consisted of seventy members besides the president (the number having been fixed on the assumption that they were the successors of those whom Moses had chosen), our Lord’s choice of the number would almost certainly suggest that the seventy disciples were placed by Him in a position of direct contrast with the existing Council, as an assembly guided not by human traditions but by direct inspiration.
3. The number seventy had also come to have another symbolical significance of special interest. Partly by a rough calculation of the names of the nations in Genesis 10, and partly on account of the mystical completeness of the number itself, seventy had become the representative number for all the nations of the world. Consequently, in the Feast of Tabernacles—which, in any harmonistic arrangement of the Gospel narrative, must have almost immediately preceded the mission of the Seventy (see Note on John 7:2)—a great sacrifice of seventy oxen was offered on behalf of all non-Israelite members of the great human family (Lightfoot, Hor. Hebr. in Joann. 7).

In appointing the Seventy, our Lord revived, as it were, the order or “school” of prophets, which had been extinct for so long. The existence of such men in every Church is implied in nearly every Epistle (for example, Acts 13:1; Acts 15:32; 1 Corinthians 12:28; 1 Corinthians 14:29; 1 Thessalonians 5:20). The fact that St. Paul and others join together the “Apostles and Prophets” as having jointly been the foundation on which the Church was built (Ephesians 2:20; Ephesians 3:5; Ephesians 4:11; 2 Peter 3:2) makes it probable that the latter words, no less than the former, initially pointed to a known and definite body.

The Seventy presented such a body. Although not sharing in the special authority and functions of the Twelve, they were nevertheless endowed with similar prophetic powers, and the mysteries of the kingdom were revealed to them (Luke 10:21).

Bearing this in mind, and remembering the words that our Lord had spoken during that feast regarding the “other sheep, not of that fold” (John 10:16), which He had come to gather, we may see in what is recorded here a step full of meaning—a distinct and formal witness to the future universality of the Church of Christ.

The omission, in the charge addressed to them, of the command given to the Twelve against entering the way of the Gentiles or any city of the Samaritans (Matthew 10:5) is, from this perspective, full of interest.

The question, of course, arises as to why such a mission was omitted by St. Matthew and St. Mark. To this, only partial answers can be given:

1. The mission belonged to the last period of our Lord’s ministry, where their records are comparatively scarce, and was confined to the region—apparently of Peræa and Judæa—which He was then about to visit.
2. It was one in which, by its very nature, the Twelve were not participants, and which, therefore, naturally occupied a less prominent place in the recollections of those from whom the narratives of the first two Gospels were primarily drawn.