Let me share with you, dear reader, what I thought was an interesting passage in “Male Pattern Boldness,” an article by Mark Perkins in the latest (January/February 2026) issue of Touchstone magazine:
After Jesus goes missing for three days, his parents find him in the temple, among the teachers of Scripture. When his mother addresses him with a classic parental mixture of relief and exasperation —“Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress” (2:48) —Jesus seems surprised. “Why did you seek me?” he asks. “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” (2:49).
The word translated “must” here —“it is necessary” —is one of Luke’s favorites. It shows up once each in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Luke uses it eleven times in his Gospel and then a further seventeen times in Acts, and it usually communicates a messianic necessity pertaining to God’s plan of salvation, as in: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (24:26); “I must be about my Father’s business.” Being about his Father’s business leads Jesus slowly, surely, inevitably back to Jerusalem, where he will once again go missing in Jerusalem for three days before being found alive.
There were two items of interest to me here. First, the passage is bookended by the sentences noting, in turn, a bookending to His ministry: Jesus begins and ends by going missing in Jerusalem for three days and then being found … alive! And I’d add that this also reminds us that Jesus cites as a sign in His ministry Jonah’s three-day disappearance and then miraculous reappearance. Pretty cool!
Second, I was intrigued by the point that Luke frequently uses a Greek word (dei, in case you’re interested) for “it is necessary.” Based on my rudimentary knowledge of Greek, this is a common construction but one that is not necessarily found in all languages. And based on my rudimentary knowledge of Gospel authorship, it is likely that Dr. Luke had more familiarity with Greek than the authors of the other three Gospels: The quality of his Greek is better, and after all Luke was a Gentile (and thus may well have had Greek as his first language), whereas Matthew, John, and Mark/Peter were all Jews (and would presumably have had Aramaic as their first language).
A different language — and/or facility in it — may make it easier to convey certain thoughts than they can be conveyed in other languages. That is certainly true at the word level (“the French have a word for it,” we say, and English is noteworthy for its eagerness to borrow words from other tongues), and I would think that it would be true as well in terms of grammatical constructions, verb tenses, and so forth. So Luke was positioned to emphasize something about Jesus’ ministry that the other Gospel writers were not. In fact, you might even say it was providential that we have these different linguistic skills among the Gospel writers, as well as the other differences in perspective they have.
Note: I wouldn’t apply this to different translations from the original, inspired Word.