Luke 5:36

And he spake also a parable unto them: no man rendeth a piece from a new garment and putteth it upon an old garment; else he will rend the new, and also the piece from the new will not agree with the old. And no man putteth new wine into old wineskins; else the new wine will burst the skins, and itself will be spilled, and the skins will perish. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no man having drunk old wine desireth new; for he saith, The old is good.

There are three comparisons: (1) new cloth on an old garment, (2) new wine in old wineskins, and (3) no man having drunk old wine desires new. The meaning is very similar in all three, and they stress Jesus' unwillingness to make the ceremonial fasts of the Old Testament a large feature of the new kingdom, the necessity of finding new "wineskins" (disciples) who would be able to receive his new teaching (as in the call of Matthew), and Jesus' understanding of the fact that many of John's disciples (though not all) would prefer the old ways to the new methods of the approaching kingdom.

The variations between Matthew and Luke derive from Luke's fuller report. Whereas Matthew mentioned patching the old garment with "new cloth," Luke has the fuller account of the "new cloth" having been rent from a "new garment." Matthew abbreviated the discussion, even omitting altogether the third analogy given by Luke. Regarding the fundamental reasons for such variations, they resulted from:

(a) The fact that Jesus himself varied his parables, illustrations, and teachings from place to place and time to time. There is no more unfounded assumption possible than the premise of some in the critical schools to the effect that Jesus gave, for example, the beatitudes, or the prayer he taught the disciples to pray, in one form only and upon only one occasion. Never! In a ministry that lasted perhaps fifty months and covered literally hundreds of villages and cities, it is absolutely mandatory to assume that Jesus' teachings were frequently varied as to their exact words. The opposite view is disproved by the variations reported in the sacred Gospels as well as by the common practice of speakers in all generations. Anyone following the speeches of a candidate for public office has observed the variations which always mark "the speech" given in many different localities. Common sense demands the supposition that Jesus' teaching, repeated hundreds of times, made use of countless variations and subtle changes to bring out additional truth or avoid the inevitable misunderstandings that would have resulted from a robot-like repetition of the same words over and over. The view that Jesus taught always in the same "verbatim et literatim" style is preposterous. Even when he quoted the inspired prophets of the Old Testament, he did nothing like that.

(b) Another source of variations in the Gospels was in the choice of materials by sacred authors, some selecting parables, some sayings, etc., not found in the others; and also in the particular stress or emphasis intended by the authors. They also wrote from diverse viewpoints. John gave the seven great signs; Matthew the seven great woes against the Pharisees; and Luke a vast body of material of particular interest to Gentiles, etc., etc. The diversity in the Gospels is so extensive as to deny, absolutely, any possibility of their being in any sense copies one of another.

Inherent in the threefold analogies of the kingdom Jesus gave at Matthew's dinner party is the fact of the "newness" of the kingdom of Christ. It was not to be merely a patch imposed upon Judaism, nor a mere refilling of old forms with vital new truth. "New wine ... new garment ..." Here was a glimpse of the truth stressed by the apostles, "Behold all things are become new!" (2 Corinthians 5:17).