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In the rich young ruler pericope, Jesus enumerates a list of commandments from the Decalogue. Matthew's list has six items ending with 'love thy neighbor as thyself' as number six. Mark's list also has six items but ends with 'honour thy father and mother' as number six and adds a non-Decalogue 'defraud not.' Luke's list has only five items and drops the parental commandment entirely from the sixth position. Three evangelists, three different versions of which commandment Jesus put sixth.
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Cited passages
He said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but one, that is, God. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which ones?” Jesus said, “ ‘You shall not murder.’ ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ ‘You shall not steal.’ ‘You shall not offer false testimony.’ ‘Honor your father and your mother.’ And, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
Cited passages
You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not give false testimony,’ ‘Do not defraud,’ ‘Honor your father and mother.’ ”
Cited passages
You know the commandments: ‘Don’t commit adultery,’ ‘Don’t murder,’ ‘Don’t steal,’ ‘Don’t give false testimony,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother.’ ”
Examining the tension
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.
All three Synoptics narrate the same encounter — a wealthy inquirer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus directs him to the commandments, then tells him to sell his possessions. The pericope is one of the most securely attested triple-tradition units, and its parallel structure rules out the suggestion that these are three separate interviews. The divergence is therefore an editorial one, and it falls precisely where Markan priority predicts: on the wording and ordering of the commandment list.
Mark 10:19 reads: 'Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and thy mother.' Two features are striking. First, Mark places adultery before murder, inverting the Masoretic order (Exod 20:13-16; Deut 5:17-20) where murder comes first. Interestingly, this adultery-first sequence matches the order found in the major LXX manuscripts (Vaticanus, Alexandrinus) at Deut 5 and in Luke's parallel, in Romans 13:9, James 2:11, and Philo — suggesting a recognized Hellenistic-Jewish catechetical tradition rather than a slip. Second, Mark inserts 'Defraud not' (mē aposterēsēs), which is not part of the Decalogue at all. Joel Marcus in the Anchor Yale Bible Mark treats it as reflecting either an expansion of the tenth commandment on coveting (the LXX of Deut 24:14 uses the cognate verb of withholding a laborer's wage) or an echo of Sirach 4:1. Because the wealthy man's besetting sin turns out to be his possessions, the addition is thematically pointed: Mark frames defrauding as the live moral issue.
Matthew 19:18-19 cleans Mark up. He drops the non-Decalogue 'defraud not,' restores something nearer the canonical order, and appends 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' (Lev 19:18) as a climactic sixth item. This is characteristic Matthean redaction: Davies and Allison note that Matthew repeatedly elevates the love command (cf. Matt 22:39-40, where it becomes one of the two commandments on which 'all the law and the prophets' hang). The addition telescopes the rich-man episode forward into Matthew's later Great Commandment debate, giving the Gospel a coherent ethical spine. 'Love thy neighbour' is not in Mark or Luke here; it is Matthew's theological signature.
Luke 18:20 shortens the list to five and tightens the order toward the standard sequence, omitting both 'defraud not' and the love command. Fitzmyer reads this as Luke's habitual stylistic compression of Markan material. The result is three lists that diverge in length, order, and content at the sixth slot — neighbor-love (Matthew), parental honor (Mark), or nothing (Luke).
The standard harmonization, found in Archer and in Blomberg's NAC Matthew, is that Jesus gave a partial, representative selection that each evangelist reports loosely, none claiming a verbatim transcript. That is true as far as it goes, and it correctly identifies that no list purports to be exhaustive. But it does not address the actual data point: the same source material has been reordered and supplemented in divergent directions. The 'different occasions' move fails outright because the surrounding narrative is demonstrably the single Markan pericope, edited. What remains is ordinary redaction — Matthew and Luke reshaping Mark to serve distinct catechetical and theological aims. This is not an error so much as a window into how the evangelists handled tradition.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable as to the historical gist (no list claims completeness), but the divergence is real and is best explained as redaction, not as three independent reports.
Sources for this reading