The Seventy

So I'm bopping along reading Luke's old Gospel about Jesus and his twelve homeboys, when I come to line 10:1 and there's cloning. Cloning? All of a sudden there's seventy two apostles WTF?

First I thought they must've wrote 12 with a squiggly 1 that looked like a 7, easy mistake. Nope, that's not it, they wrote out the names in the original, and you can't get drunk enough to confuse dodeka with evdominta. It's another one of those “Mystery of Faith”s the nuns always answered my questions with. Well, not any more.

SOLVED—THE MYSTERY OF THE SEVENTY

Thank you. See, Greek has two words for “other”
(I know this because of Ian over at Irreducible Complexity, prolly the greatest bible scholar in bibleschoardom. To paraphrase Zomgscience, if his blog was shit you'd roll in it.)

allos = another of the same kind

heteros = another of a different kind 

It's obvious now, isn't it? Remember the naked guy in the garden and all that? First there were the twelve, and then seventy more of a different kind of apostle. Wink, wink, get it? (Not that there's anything wrong with that).

 Luke 10:1 After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others heteros and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go.

This bible, it's so gay. It's just fabulous.