B (29:08)
Well, a couple things I'll say. One, one is that there are hundreds of things like this in Matthew, but most of them, most of them are not very interesting. They're just like, you know, misspellings and things. But textual scholars who do this for a living, they're, they're professional people. This is what I did my first 20 years of my career. I was really studying the New Testament for these kinds of variants. And it's a, it's a, it's a difficult job, Let me just say. That's one thing. The other thing is there's another passage that many people have talked about as being an addition to Matthew. It's a very important two verses. It's the final two verses of Matthew's Gospel. And so the end of Matthew, unlike Mark, in Mark's account, when Jesus dies, he's buried third day, the women go to the tomb. They're told, go tell the disciples that he'll meet them in Galilee. And they don't go and they don't tell anybody. It ends with them not telling anybody. In Matthew's Gospel, the disciples do learn that Jesus is going to meet them in Galilee. They do go up there and they meet him and he gives them a farewell. He gives them a farewell. The farewell. The final bit is chapter 28, verses 16 through 20. But many people, including textual scholars, sometimes have argued that the final two verses were not originally in Matthew. The final two verses say, Jesus is talking to his disciples and he gives them the great commission. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always to the end of the age. Okay, so some people have said this great commission did not originally end the Gospel of Matthew, that somebody added it later. First thing to say is that, that every manuscript we have has the last two verses. So that if somebody did add these verses, it would not be a textual. If somebody did add it, we would not call it a textual variant because there are no texts that are lacking it. All the texts have it. But. So it would be what we would call an interpolation where somebody has added something, somebody's added a text, and it's found in all of our manuscripts. Okay. But they added it after the author produced it. So that. That is entirely. That's entirely possible. It is worth noting that some church fathers quote Descent of Matthew, but do not quote the final two verses, 19 and 20, the Great Commission. So Eusebius, the church father of the 4th century, actually quotes this passage, but doesn't quote the last two verses. And so people say, so Eusebius didn't have these last two verses. I think that's a misguided judgment because church fathers are always just quoting the part that they're interested in quoting. They never quote everything. And so we don't really have good textual evidence or any textual evidence. But there are two reasons that people have said this does not belong to Matthew. One is it mentions the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That's the Trinity. Matthew didn't know about a Trinity. And you don't get the Trinity in the New Testament. Here you get it Father, Son and Spirit. So that's a. That's an important concern that one has to look at carefully. My view is that it doesn't have any relevance to this situation because Matthew does not state the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is not just that you have a Father, Son and Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is that those three are completely equal in every way. They're of the same substance, and they're different people, but there's only one God. That's the doctrine of Trinity. And Matthew says nothing about that. He just mentions Father, Son and Spirit. And early in Christianity, people acknowledged that there was a Father, Son and Spirit. So I don't think that's a compelling argument. The other argument that people use is that here Jesus tells his disciples to go preach to the Gentiles. But throughout Matthew's Gospel, he's always telling them, don't go to the Gentiles. And so it seems like a contradiction because Matthew says, don't go only to the house of Israel when he sends out the disciples. And now all of a sudden he say, go to the nations. So people say, well, that's a contradiction then. So it probably wasn't in Matthew. Again, I don't think that's convincing either because Matthew's point is that the message that Jesus brings was to be taken to the Jews. His ministry was to Jews, his apostles were to go to Jews. But at the end of the Gospel, the Jewish people reject him. Chapter 27, verse 25. At Jesus trial it says all the people cried out his blood be upon us and our children. It doesn't say all the crowd, it uses the word that you would use for the Jewish people cry out his blood be upon us and our children, taking the responsibility upon themselves. So that the Jewish people are shown in Matthew, whatever you think of this historically in Matthew they're being portrayed as rejecting Jesus and therefore the message now is to go out to all the nations, to all the peoples. So I don't think it's a contradiction with the rest of Matthew. I think it's very intentional. In any event, this, this is a very interesting passage that some people think does not belong to Matthew, but, but many others, including me, think does belong.