Did the disciples understand when Jesus told them about his coming death?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This contradiction is wholly internal to the Synoptic tradition and turns on a documented editorial pattern. On the Two-Source hypothesis, Mark is the source Matthew and Luke both follow at the second passion prediction. Mark 9:31-32 reports plain incomprehension and fear: Jesus teaches that the Son of man will be delivered up and killed and rise after three days, "but they understood not that saying, and were afraid to ask him." Luke 9:44-45 follows Mark and intensifies the motif, adding that the saying "was hid from them, that they perceived it not." Matthew 17:22-23, handling the same pericope, deletes the incomprehension entirely and replaces it with an emotional response of grief: *kai elypēthēsan sphodra*, "and they were exceeding sorry." Grief of this kind presupposes understanding — one cannot be devastated by a message one has not grasped. So the three accounts give incompatible answers to the same question about the same conversation: did the disciples understand, or not?

The lexical evidence makes the conflict difficult to soften. Mark uses *ēgnooun to rhēma* (imperfect of *agnoeō*), "they kept failing to know the saying." *Agnoeō* denotes genuine ignorance or non-comprehension, not partial or hesitant grasp. Luke reinforces this with *ēn parakekalymmenon ap' autōn* — the saying "had been veiled from them," using the perfect passive participle of *parakalyptō*, a strong image of something deliberately covered over — and adds the purpose clause *hina mē aisthōntai auto*, "so that they should not perceive it." Matthew's *elypēthēsan sphodra* points in precisely the opposite direction: the disciples received the message clearly enough to mourn.

The harmonization (Carson, Blomberg, Hagner) proposes a partial-comprehension state: the disciples understood enough to grieve (the prediction of death) but not enough to dispel their confusion (its meaning and the resurrection sequel), so that Matthew reports the affective surface and Mark/Luke the cognitive deficit. As psychology this is coherent — people regularly grieve a frightening message they do not fully understand — and it deserves a fair hearing, since the three texts are describing one event and a composite human reaction is not implausible in the abstract. The weakness is that the harmonization must override what the Greek of Mark and Luke actually says. *Agnoeō* and *parakekalymmenon* do not describe partial understanding shadowed by grief; they describe a saying that did not register at all, deliberately veiled. Matthew's text, conversely, contains no trace of incomprehension to balance the grief. The composite picture exists only when one imports each evangelist's distinctive note into the others' silence — which is exactly the move redaction criticism warns against.

The better-attested explanation is directional editorial change. Matthew systematically rehabilitates the disciples relative to his Markan source: where Mark presents them as obtuse, frightened, and hard-hearted, Matthew softens or removes the censure, presenting the Twelve as a comprehending and responsive inner circle who address Jesus as *kyrie* and even worship him. Davies-Allison document this tendency across the Gospel, and it is precisely what one sees here — the Markan and Lukan incomprehension scrubbed and replaced with sober grief. Joseph Tyson's classic study established the blindness/incomprehension of the disciples as a deliberate Markan redactional theme, not incidental reportage; Matthew, finding that theme theologically uncongenial, edits it out. Luke moves in the opposite direction, retaining and even heightening the Markan veiling, possibly to set up the later "opening" of the disciples' understanding after the resurrection (Luke 24:45).

The partial-comprehension harmonization thus papers over a surface conflict while ignoring the documented vector of the editorial work. Matthew and Mark/Luke do not preserve complementary facets of one observation; Matthew has altered the source in a direction consistent with his broader portrait of the Twelve.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, produced by Matthean redaction of Mark.