Persecution Ahead
PERSECUTION AHEAD
MATTHEW 10:16-23
We are to reckon on difficulty and rejection in the Christian life.
While the charge of 10:5-15 relates to the immediate mission of the Twelve, that of 10:16ff. looks forward to a later period, to their ministry in the period between AD 30 and 70. This section is parallel in part to 24:9-14; it is valuable for the degree of light it sheds on the Palestinian disciples’ largely unchronicled mission to the Jews during these years (cf. Galatians 2:7-9). Their defense was to lie not in force but in wisdom and innocence (cf. Romans 16:19); the animals mentioned in 10:16 served as standard symbols for the qualities indicated.
The “councils” of 10:17 are “sanhedrins” (Gk. synedria)—mainly the local sanhedrins rather than the supreme Sanhedrin at Jerusalem (although it was by the latter that James the Lord’s brother was sentenced to death in AD 62)—and the flogging inflicted in synagogues would be the “forty stripes save one” (cf. 2. Corinthians 11:24; Deuteronomy 25:3). The “governors and kings” of 10:18 might be Roman governors and Jewish kings (like Herod Agrippa, whose action against James the son of Zebedee and Peter is recorded in Acts 12:1-4).
The general sense of 10:18b-20 is illustrated by the earlier Christian martyrologies, where Christians on trial for their faith exhibit a ready eloquence in reply and defense which astonishes their accusers.(cf. also Acts 4:13; 1 Peter 3:15f.). The warning about domestic division (10:21) is repeated in 10:35f. (cf. also Mark 13:12). With 10:22 we should compare Tacitus’ description of Christians as “a class of men loathed for their vices” and especially for their “hatred of the human race” (Annals 15:44).
With 10:23a compare the action of Paul and Barnabas in Acts 14:5f.,19f. The interpretation of 10:23b has been a debated issue for long and the debate continues (one interpretation supplied the main foundation of Albert Schweitzer’s solution to the Quest of the Historical Jesus) but in the context the coming of the Son of Man can scarcely be dissociated from the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 (see notes on 16:27f.; 24:3ff.). That this is Matthew’s intention is more likely than the view which dissociates it from 10:16-22 and attaches it to 10:5-15, as though the Twelve on their immediate mission were Jesus’ forerunners, preparing for his coming to the “towns of Israel” which they visited in advance of him (cf. Luke 10:1, where the seventy are sent “into every town and place where he himself was about to come”).