Luke 20

Luke 20 is the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the teaching of Jesus Christ in the temple in Jerusalem, especially his responses to questions raised by the Pharisees and Sadducees. 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.

The original text was written in Koine Greek. This chapter is divided into 47 verses. Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are:

Luke follows Mark 11:27–33 with some abbreviation, and with some material peculiar to himself.

The New King James Version reads "on one of those days", reflecting the additional word εκεινων (ekeinōn), inserted into the Textus Receptus. This word, added "for greater precision", is missing "from the authorities of greatest importance, condemned by Johann Jakob Griesbach, and deleted by Karl Lachmann and Constantin von Tischendorf".

Luke presents Jesus continuing to teach 'the people' in the Temple, who are "presented as favourably disposed to him", but when the chief priests, scribes and elders question him about his authority, Jesus raises a question in return about the origin of John's baptism.

In the popular mind, John was a prophet, but the temple leaders had "refused to believe him" (verse 5). In Luke 7:30, the Pharisees and the lawyers had declined John's baptism. Matthew and Mark both refer generally to the leaders' fear of the people, but do not suggest that the people would stone their leaders. William Robertson Nicoll argues that the suggestion that they would actually carry this out should be taken "cum grano" ("with a pinch of salt").

So those who have questioned Jesus decline to answer, stating that they "did not know where it came from". F. W. Farrar notes that there is a Hebrew proverb, Learn to say I do not know, which it is wise to use in a case of "real uncertainty", but wrong when, as in this case, they did hold an opinion on the matter and "it was their plain duty [in this case] to have arrived at a judgment".

This parable of Jesus, also known as the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, is found in three of the four canonical gospels (Luke 20:9–19, Mark 12:1–12, and Matthew 21:33–46), and also in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. For Rudolf Bultmann, the passage is not a "parable" but an "allegory", and "intelligible only on that basis". It describes a householder planting a vineyard and letting it out to husbandmen, who failed in their duty. The owner sent various servants successively to collect a share of the proceeds of the harvest, but each time the husbandmen rejected them. Unlike the texts in Matthew and Mark, Luke states that "perhaps" (Greek: ἴσως, isōs, "probably" in the NKJV and in Marvin Vincent's interpretation) they will respect the owner's son. The word ἴσως is not used elsewhere in the New Testament. It appears once in the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, at 1 Samuel 25:21, where the Greek is translated as "perhaps", but as "surely" in many English translations based on the Hebrew text. As the parable continues, the wicked husbandmen conspire to kill the son, in the expectation that the vineyard would pass to them. Finally, the owner comes and "destroys" those husbandmen and gives the vineyard to others.