New Testament letter composed under the guise of a presumably lost letter of the Apostle Paul, the Epistle to the Laodiceans. The books of the New Testament were all or nearly all written by Jewish Christians—that is, Jewish disciples of Christ, who lived in the Roman Empire, and under Roman occupation. Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, is frequently thought of as an exception; scholars are divided as to whether Luke was a Gentile or a Hellenistic Jew. A few scholars identify the author of the Gospel of Mark as probably a Gentile, and similarly for
Luke 13 authenticity, for example a majority of the members of the Jesus Seminar voted it authentic. This parable is one of the shorter parables of Jesus. It appears in three of the canonical gospels of the New Testament. The differences between Gospels of Matthew (13:31–32), Mark (4:30–32), and Luke (13:18–19), are minor. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, it is immediately followed by the Parable of the Leaven, which shares this parable's theme of the Kingdom of Heaven growing from small beginnings. A version of the parable also occurs in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas 20. The plant referred to