Historical Reliability of the GospelsAnswered

At the Transfiguration, why do Matthew, Mark and Luke have Peter address Jesus with different words?

A viewer asks why Matthew 17:4, Mark 9:5 and Luke 9:33 have Peter calling Jesus "Lord" (Kyrie), "Rabbi" and "Master" (Epistata) in the same scene.

Answer

So we've got Luke. And it came to pass, Peter said to Jesus, Master, Epistata. Okay, so let me see what your question is. Luke 9:33, that's correct. Matthew 17:4: good it is that you're here. You've got Kyrie. Oh, so I see what you're trying to do. So in situations like this, first of all, Kyrie is a very common way to address someone of senior authority. It's not just Lord in the sense that Jesus is the Lord, Lord God. It can be Sir, instead of, hey you. So we could imagine him having a combination of Kyrie and Epistata. That's possible, because Kyrie can be added to other words of respect at the same time, because it's sort of a more common word. And Mark 9:5. Now here, this will be a little more difficult. And answering, Peter says to Jesus, Rabbi, good it is that you are here. Let us make three tents. But I think I know why you're pointing this out, because you want to know, if they're all describing the same exact scene, then why do they all use different words? And my answer would be that all three words were used. And the one with Kyrie and Epistata is easy. If you mix Kyrie with Rabbi, that would be easy also. And I also would want to look for any textual variants before I made any decision whatsoever. As a matter of fact, we can do that right now and see if that's a place where we want to look before we start investigating the text itself, which is what any good exegete would do. And this will give you a little lesson on what the biblical exegete does when he comes to a difficulty like this, where each evangelist is using a different word coming from the same mouth, it seems. So, Luke 9:33. We have a textual variant where Epistata is used. In Papyrus 45 and Codex X, we have a few more words added. So there you go. Let's look at Mark 9:5. So our only real path to go here is if Rabbi and Kyrie could be interchanged in other places in the Gospels or used together. That would suffice, at least for the time being, to answer the discrepancy that we have discovered here of three words used by the same person, Peter. And by the way, this is what we have to go through whenever we're exegeting Scripture. This is what we have to go through every single time, to make sure you have all the bases covered. And so Matthew 17:4, let's read that. Now, Kyrie appears here, but there are no textual variants in Matthew 17:4. So our real struggle, at least at this level, is seeing if we can have Peter saying Kyrie and Rabbi at the same time. And one evangelist picks Kyrie, and the other evangelist picks Rabbi, and that's what they chose. But it does not mean that there's an error in Scripture because you've got three evangelists using three different words from the same person. And as Augustine has said to us, God wrote Scripture this way to test us. So are we going to look at it and say, well, we can't figure it out within a minute, so we'll just give up and say, oh, Scripture can't be inspired because we can't figure out what the answer is? Well, that's what some people do. We say, no, Scripture is always correct. We just have to figure out how it's correct.

Answered by Dr. Robert Sungenis

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