Luke 15

Luke 15 is the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. 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. This chapter records three parables of Jesus Christ: the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost or 'prodigal' son, a trilogy about redemption that Jesus tells after the Pharisees and religious leaders accuse him of welcoming and eating with "sinners".

Biblical commentator Heinrich Meyer refers to this chapter, the following chapter and Luke 17:1–10 as a "new, important, and for the most part parabolic set of discourses" linked by the murmuring of the Pharisees and Jesus' responses to them and to his disciples. Arno Gaebelein notes that while these parables have wide appeal and application, in studying them "it must not be overlooked that the Lord answers in the first place the murmuring Pharisees".

The original text was written in Koine Greek. Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are:

This chapter is divided into 32 verses.

This is the third mention by Luke of the tax collectors (Greek: οι τελωναι, hoi telōnai, also translated as "publicans"); they were previously one of the groups who answered John the Baptist's call to repentance, and Jesus ate with them, amidst the Pharisees' earlier complaints, in chapter 5. Frederick Farrar suggests that "the sinners" refers in general to all "the degraded and outcast classes".

Meyer compares the murmuring of the Pharisees and scribes (verses 1–2) with the murmurings of the Israelite community in the wilderness in Exodus 16:1–8 and 17:3. Eric Franklin suggests that in eating with them, "Jesus is anticipating their inclusion within the kingdom of God", and that the Pharisees' complaint about this was also raised later, in the early church, and "was in fact a subject of disagreement" in the early church.

Verses 3–7 record this parable, which appears in two of the canonical gospels of the New Testament, as well as in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. According to the Gospels, a shepherd leaves his flock of ninety-nine sheep in order to find the one sheep who is lost. Compared with Matthew's version of this parable, Luke emphasises the shepherd's responsibility for the loss (verse 3: if he loses one of them; in Matthew, one of them goes astray), the unconditional nature of the search, and the joy which was brought about by the sinner's repentance.

Farrar notes that "the Pharisees and scribes in an external sense were 'just persons', for as a class their lives were regular, though we learn from Josephus and the Talmud that many individuals among them were guilty of flagrant sins." The application of the term to them is ironic: the reality is that "they did need repentance but they did not want it".