Matthew 28 Footnotes

28:11-15 Though Matthew has been accused of inventing this story, it is still of great evidential value for the empty tomb, since it attests to polemics between Jews and Christians regarding the issue. Clearly the Jewish response to the Christian proclamation of the resurrection was that the disciples stole the body while the guards were asleep. (It would serve no purpose for Matthew to invent this charge, even if he invented the posting of the guard.) This means that the better responses of denying that Jesus was ever buried in the tomb or that the tomb still contained the body were not available to early opponents of the church. The known location of Jesus’s burial site and the fact that it was empty are the best explanation for this Jewish charge.

28:17 All the resurrection narratives record the doubt of some of the characters at one point or another. The early church preserved in its tradition the fact that the apostles were not expecting the resurrection, despite repeated predictions of it by Jesus himself. This can only be a historical reminiscence, and it corroborates the disciples’ later faith in the resurrection. That is, the actual appearance of the resurrected Jesus best accounts for the historical facts that the disciples initially did not believe Christ had risen and that they later were convinced he had.

28:18 This is probably an allusion to Dn 7:13-14 and indicates that Jesus now began his messianic reign (Php 2:9-11). Absolute authority was given to Jesus by the Father (1Co 15:27-28). This does not detract from the full divinity of Christ, since the subordination of the Son to the Father has to do with their respective roles, not their natures. Thus the baptismal formula in Mt 28:19 treats the Father, Son, and Spirit as equals.

28:19 Some claim that the later difficulty of the church in accepting a Gentile mission is evidence that Jesus never issued this command. But the slowness of the disciples to grasp and implement the words of Jesus was not unusual (15:17; 16:9; Mk 9:32); they experienced a process of growth in obedience as any other group might have. Furthermore, the main problem in Acts and Paul’s letters is not whether there ought to be a Gentile mission but under what conditions that mission ought to be carried out.