The Messengers Receive Both Authority and Warning

Matthew mentions “his twelve disciples” for the first time here as though the reader already knows the group; he never narrates their choosing. The number matches the tribes of Israel, and Jesus later promises the twelve thrones “judging the twelve tribes” (19:28).

This is the only time Matthew uses the word “apostles”, those sent. In Jewish law an agent, a shaliach, acted with the full authority of the one who sent him. “The first” is stated outright, and Peter heads every list of the twelve in the New Testament.

Bartholomew is a family name, “son of Talmai”, and he is often identified with John’s Nathanael, though only by tradition. Thomas is Aramaic for “twin”. Of the three Gospel lists, only this one puts Matthew after Thomas, and Luke has “Judas the brother of James” where Matthew has Thaddaeus.

“Canaanite” has nothing to do with Canaan. It renders an Aramaic word for “zealous”, which is why Luke calls the same man “Simon called Zelotes” (Luke 6:15). Iscariot may mean “man of Kerioth”, a town in southern Judah (Joshua 15:25), which would make Judas the one Judean among Galileans.

The Samaritans traced back to the northern kingdom mixed with peoples the Assyrians resettled there (2 Kings 17:24), and they worshipped on Mount Gerizim rather than at Jerusalem. This is the only mention of them in Matthew. “The way of the Gentiles” means the roads out to Gentile towns.

The phrase comes back word for word when Jesus answers the Canaanite woman: “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (15:24). Jeremiah 50:6 had said, “My people hath been lost sheep: their shepherds have caused them to go astray.”

“As ye go” is a present participle: the preaching happens on the road, not after arrival. The message is a single sentence, the one John announced in 3:2 and Jesus in 4:17. Now it is in a third set of mouths, twelve at once.

The four commands run in almost the same order as the mighty works just recorded in chapters 8 and 9: sickness, leprosy, a dead girl, demons. “Freely” means as a gift, without charge. Elisha’s servant Gehazi took payment from Naaman after a healing and went away a leper (2 Kings 5:20–27).

Gold, silver and copper, the three metals of coinage, in descending order of value. “Purses” are belts or girdles, whose folds served as a money pouch. The ban covers taking money along, not only earning it.

The “scrip” is a traveller’s or beggar’s bag; wandering Cynic philosophers carried one as their badge, so the twelve are not to look like them. Mark allows sandals and a staff (Mark 6:8–9); Matthew’s list is stricter. Paul’s letter to Timothy quotes the workman saying as Scripture, in Luke’s wording (1 Timothy 5:18).

“Worthy” here means fit or suitable, a household known in the town. “There abide” rules out trading up to a better host; Luke adds, “Go not from house to house” (Luke 10:7). Hospitality to travellers was a sacred duty, as Abraham’s tent at Mamre shows (Genesis 18).

The greeting was the Hebrew shalom, “peace”, and Luke gives the words: “Peace be to this house” (Luke 10:5). Some manuscripts of Matthew add those words here. “Salute” is the greeting verb of 5:47.

Peace is spoken of almost as a thing that goes out, rests on a house, or comes back to the sender. In Hebrew thought a spoken blessing had that kind of reality; Isaac could not take back the blessing once given to Jacob (Genesis 27:33).

Later Jewish sources speak of shaking off the dust of Gentile lands before coming home to the land of Israel. The gesture treats an unwelcoming Israelite town as foreign soil. Paul and Barnabas do exactly this at Antioch in Pisidia (Acts 13:51).

Sodom’s best known crime was against guests: the men of the city surrounded Lot’s house to seize the two messengers he had taken in (Genesis 19:4–5). A town that refuses Jesus’ messengers is set beside it. “More tolerable” means more bearable, a comparison of degrees.

The Greek word for “wise” is the one the Septuagint uses when it calls the serpent in Eden “more subtil” than any beast (Genesis 3:1). “Harmless” is akeraios, literally unmixed, like wine not watered down. The “I” in “I send you” is emphatic.

“Councils” are local Jewish courts, and synagogues could administer flogging under Deuteronomy 25:3, which set the limit at forty stripes. Paul says he received “forty stripes save one” five times (2 Corinthians 11:24). The danger begins close to home.

“Governors” were Roman officials such as Pilate, whom Matthew calls “the governor” (27:2), and later Felix and Festus. “Kings” include the Herods; Paul stood before Agrippa (Acts 26). The words look well beyond this first short tour.

“Take no thought” is the same anxious verb as in 6:25. When Moses protested that he was slow of speech, the LORD answered, “I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say” (Exodus 4:12). The promise here is for the dock, the hour of being handed over.

“The Spirit of your Father” is a phrase found nowhere else in the New Testament. It is the only place in Matthew where the Spirit is promised to speak through the disciples. The Spirit here works as counsel for the defence.

“Deliver up” is the same verb used of Judas in verse 4, “who also betrayed him”. What happens to the master will happen inside the disciples’ own families. Children rising against parents inverts the fifth commandment, which the law protected with the death penalty (Exodus 21:15).

“For my name’s sake” makes the name itself the charge. Around 112, the Roman governor Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan asking whether Christians should be punished for “the name itself” even without other crimes. The last clause is repeated word for word in 24:13.

One of the hardest sayings in the Gospel. Albert Schweitzer read it as Jesus expecting the end before the mission finished; others take the coming as the resurrection, the fall of Jerusalem in 70, or a mission to Israel still unfinished at the end of time. Flight, meanwhile, is plainly allowed.

A proverb from the classroom and the household: the student is not above the teacher, nor the slave above the owner. Jesus uses it again at the Last Supper in John 13:16, after washing the disciples’ feet. Luke places it among sayings on blind guides (Luke 6:40).

Baal-zebub, “lord of flies”, was the god of Ekron (2 Kings 1:2). The Greek spelling Beelzebul may mean “lord of the dwelling”, which gives a pun with “master of the house” in the same sentence. The charge was first made in 9:34 in plainer words.

The first of three “fear not” commands in this paragraph (verses 26, 28 and 31). The same proverb about hidden things appears in other settings, of hypocrisy in Luke 12:2 and of a lamp in Mark 4:22. Here it works as a promise: suppressed truth does not stay suppressed.

Houses had flat roofs, used for work, sleep and talk, and a voice from a roof carried across a whole village. Isaiah 22:1 pictures a city that has “gone up to the housetops” in a crisis. What was spoken in private teaching is to be proclaimed where everyone can hear.

Most readers take “him which is able to destroy” as God, not the devil, since the devil is never said to cast into Gehenna. Isaiah 8:12–13 has the same shape: “neither fear ye their fear... Sanctify the LORD of hosts himself; and let him be your fear.”

Sparrows were the cheapest birds in the market. Luke says five went for two farthings (Luke 12:6), as though the fifth were thrown in free. This “farthing” is the assarion, a different coin from the one in 5:26. The Greek has no verb in the last phrase: literally “without your Father”.

“Not one hair of his head” fall to the ground was the oath of protection over Jonathan (1 Samuel 14:45). In 5:36 no one could change the colour of a single hair; here each one is counted. Care is measured at the scale where no human bothers to count.

“Of more value” is the verb used in 6:26 for being “much better” than the birds. This is the third “fear not”, and the argument runs from lesser to greater again: if sparrows, then surely you.

“Confess me” is literally “confess in me”, an Aramaic turn of phrase that Luke preserves too (Luke 12:8). The scene is a courtroom: the one who speaks up for Jesus on earth has Jesus speaking for him before the Father.

“Deny” is the verb Peter will act out three times in the high priest’s courtyard, ending with an oath: “I know not the man” (26:72). The warning is given to the twelve, and Peter was among those who heard it.

“Think not that I am come” repeats, in the Greek, the opening of 5:17, where Jesus denied coming to destroy the law. The sword is the short blade, the machaira. Luke’s parallel says “division” instead (Luke 12:51).

In Israel a bride went to live in her husband’s family house, so a daughter in law and her mother in law shared a roof and a kitchen. The list comes from Micah 7:6, where it describes the young turning on the old in a society so corrupt that no friend could be trusted.

The line finishes Micah 7:6. The next verse of Micah, not quoted, reads “Therefore I will look unto the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation.” The household, which in chapter 9 was the place of healing, here becomes a place of danger.

Luke’s version says “hate” father and mother (Luke 14:26), a Semitic way of saying “love less”, as when Leah was “hated” beside Rachel (Genesis 29:31). Matthew gives the sense plainly: “more than me”.

The first mention of the cross in Matthew, before Jesus has said a word about his own death. The condemned carried the crossbeam to the place of execution. Jews of the time knew the sight; after the revolt at Herod’s death the Roman governor Varus crucified two thousand men.

“Life” is psyche, the same word translated “soul” in verse 28. The paradox turns on two kinds of finding and losing. Jesus repeats it after Peter’s confession (16:25), in a slightly different form, when the cross is no longer an image but a prediction.

The Mishnah states the principle behind this: “a man’s agent is as himself.” How an envoy was treated was how the sender was treated, as when David’s ambassadors had half their beards shaved and David went to war over it (2 Samuel 10:4–7).

“In the name of a prophet” means because he is a prophet. The widow of Zarephath fed Elijah and her son was given back to her (1 Kings 17); the Shunammite built Elisha a room and her son was raised (2 Kings 4). Both received a prophet’s reward.

In a hot land, water drawn cold from a deep well or cistern was a real gift. “Little ones” is Matthew’s phrase for disciples of no standing, taken up again in 18:6–14. “In no wise” translates a double negative in the Greek, the strongest denial the language has.