The way he rebuilt it is a bit complicated but important: Look closely and you will see that there are four phrases in Isaiah 61:1. Jesus reads the first, second, and the fourth, but skips the third, “to heal the broken-hearted.” He leaves that out. Then he pastes in a phrase from Isaiah 58:d, “Let the oppressed go free.” The added phrase fits his theme theologically, but wasn’t in his original reading. He then deletes the end of the next verse, “the day of vengeance of our God” (61:2b). Why all of the cutting and pasting? No one knows for certain, but presumably he deleted “Heal the broken hearted” to avoid over spiritualization of his reading.[1] He added “let the oppressed go free” because it comes from another compatible Jubilee passage, and is thematically linked by the word, “release” (aphesis, “liberate,” “set free”) which is found in both.[2] And he probably deleted the last phrase about the day of God’s vengeance in order to de-emphasize the negative aspects of the reading. The result is that he strengthens the justice portions and weakens the vengeance portions. So, even if one argues that he didn’t pick the text himself, he certainly made it his own.