Disciple Is A Verb

[For a sermon that explains the substance of this essay (and why it matters) in plain language, click here.]

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The following essay considers the implications of a commonly accepted mistranslation of the Great Commission text for developing a misguided folk-missiology throughout many evangelical circles.

In a word: Jesus did not command his disciples to “make disciples of all the nations.” He commanded them to “disciple all the nations.” There is a world of difference in the natural reading of these two renderings, a difference that can indeed create two entirely different visions of the Church’s way of being in the world. I offer the following as a starting point for reflection on what may be regarded as an alternative vision to the the Great Commission based on an accurate rendering of its grammar.

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1.     The Grammar of Discipleship

μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη (Mt. 28:19).

A cursory survey on the literature coming out of Protestant circles, both popular and academic, will quickly reveal The Great Commission in Matthew 28 to be a foundational text for how Protestants understand God’s global mission the Church’s role in it. But as it often happens with the most familiar texts of Scripture, the Great Commission is more often invoked than it is investigated, much less understood. It is regularly cited as the rationale or basis for any number of applications on the assumption that it is already well understood. But this is a mistake.

The importance of the Great Commission with regard to the topic of discipleship is undoubtedly due to (1) its unique placement at the closing of Matthew’s Gospel after Christ’s resurrection (the only post-resurrection appearance and address to his disciples in Matthew), (2) the universal claims of claims of his authority (“all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”), (3) and the corresponding universal scope of the role given his disciples (“disciple all the nations”) in perpetuity (“behold, I am with you always till the end of the age”). Given the obvious ecclesiological and missiological significance of the Great Commission text, it is surprising that the majority of English translations have erred on the side of imprecision in their rendering of the imperative (“disciple”), presumably for the sake of readability in light of the unique verbal usage of the word. It is, however, precisely because of its unique usage in the Great Commission text that precision should, it seems, be regarded as paramount. 

The majority of modern English translations render the imperative clause in the Great Commission to read thus: “Make disciples of all the nations…” (Mt. 28:19; cf. ESV, NASB, NIV, NLT, NRSV). In Greek, the word “make” is not present, and therefore “disciples” is not the object of the verb (command). Below are three reasons a translation that preserves the grammatical integrity of Jesus’ command in Matthew 28:19 is preferable. 

1. The uniqueness of the verbal form of disciple, μαθητεύω: to disciple.

In the New Testament the word “disciple” is found in its nominal form 285 times in 276 verses (BibleWorks). By contrast, it is only found twice in its participial form (Mt. 13:52; Acts 14:21) and twice in its (purely) verbal form: first, in Matthew’s burial account when Joseph of Arimathea, who “was discipled by Jesus” (Mt. 27:57, ἐμαθητεύθη, aorist passive indicative), procured Jesus’ body as those “who had followed Jesus from Galilee” now “watched from afar” (Mt. 27:55); the second and last time in the Great Commission text, which is the only time it is used in its specifically imperatival form in the entire New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew spends 28 chapters describing the identity of Jesus’ followers as “disciples,” and when it comes time for them be commissioned, the author transforms his usage of the word that had defined their identity in the Gospel into a command that defines their mission.^[1]

2. The use of the verb μαθητεύω, despite the availability of alternative options

There is no reason to think Koine Greek had no way of communicating the idea of people “making” other people something they otherwise were not by use of the word ordinarily translated make (pοιέω). There is precedent for this usage of pοιέω to communicate this idea in Matthew’s own Gospel account: καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς δεῦτε ὀ opίσω μου, καὶ pοιήσω ὑμᾶς ἁλιεῖς ἀνθρώπων. (“And he said to them, ‘Follow me, ‘and I will make you fishers of men’”, Mt. 4:19). Another example of this construction in Matthew’s Gospel comes in a context that (tellingly) demonstrates the great potential for human-on-human malformation in the effort to “make converts”: Οὐαὶ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι ὑποκριταί, ὅτι περιάγετε τὴν θάλασσαν καὶ τὴν ξηρὰν ποιῆσαι ἕνα προσήλυτον, καὶ ὅταν γένηται ποιεῖτε αὐτὸν υἱὸν γεέννης διπλότερον ὑμῶν. (“Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross the sea and dry land to make one convert (or proselyte / προσήλυτον), and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves”, Mt. 23:15). 

3. Preserving the inner-logic of a sentence in translation depends on its grammar

The majority of the aforementioned English translations of Matthew 28:19 construe the verb-object relationship in some variant form the following: “make disciples of all nations.” The problem with this translation is that it construes the grammar of the Great Commission in a way that significantly alters its possible range of meanings and applications. Namely, it renders “disciples” as the object of the imperative “make,” which is then modified by the partitive genitive phrase, “of all the nations.” But in the grammar of the original text the imperative is not “make” and the object of the imperative is not “disciples.” Rather, the imperative is “disciple” (μαθητεύσατε) and the object of the imperative is “all the nations” (πάντα τὰ ἔθνη).

Translating texts from one language to another involves more than just finding the best lexical or conceptual equivalents of individual words or ideas. Preserving the grammar and syntax in translation is often critical for maintaining the inner-logic that dictates how words in a sentence relate one to another. “Feed all the visitors” and “make food of all the visitors,” for example, do not have the same range of implications and outcomes, say, for a cannibalistic tribe receiving written orders from their chief.

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Disciple the Nations

A translation that preserves the grammatical integrity of Jesus’ command would simply read as follows: “disciple all the nations…” (μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, cf. YLT; The New Testament: A Translation by David Bentley Hart). There are any number of implications that follow from turning the verb/command into the object of the verb/command in this text, not least of which is how it informs the way “baptizing” is understood to modify the verb. In Greek, the participles “baptizing…and teaching…” are not modifying the object of the verb “make” (suggesting they indicate how to make something out of the nations) but “disciple” (how to disciple the nations). In other words, the question is not What qualifies as a disciple? but rather What qualifies discipling? If the question is What qualifies a disciple? then the answer will have to draw a hard line between a disciple and not-a-disciple. That line, for many, is baptism.

The implications of translating Jesus’ command “make disciples of all nations” instead of “disciple the nations” is like the difference between being instructed to “make potatoes” and “water the plants,” or the difference between what Paul and Apollos did in Corinth and what God did in Corinth: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6-7). The former is focused on the product of discipleship, the latter on its process; the natural measure of success in the former is determined by the quantity of disciples made, the latter by the quality of discipling. The former orients the Church to valuing disciples, thus valuing non-disciples only according to their potential for becoming such. The latter orients the Church valuing the nations and therefore sets out to disciple them.

It is not hard, therefore, to imagine how the general concept of discipleship is understood among denominations that practice “believer’s baptism” (such as my own, the C&MA) to consist of two distinct components that are, practically speaking, unequal in importance and priority—first: Christian conversion (baptism), second: Christian education (teaching). Of first importance in the “making” process is getting people over the hard line of conversion—from not-a-disciple to a disciple—the mark of which is baptism. Second, then, is educating them in matters of faith and practice. This second component of discipleship, it is safe to say, is generally regarded to be less important, presumably because the failure to sufficiently educate a person with the status of “disciple” (or “Christian”—the conflation of these terms is common, and telling) does not bear the same consequences as the failure to convert a person into that status.

Given the observation above from Jesus’ “prophetic woes” in Matthew 23, it worth serious consideration that the only time Matthew (or the rest of the New Testament authors) refers to “making converts” is to describe the extensive proselyting efforts of Scribes and Pharisees that results in converting people into “twice [the] child[ren] of hell” they are (Mt. 23:15). While conversion is a legitimate concept to describe a person coming into the faith, only Jesus can determine who is truly his disciple, or not (cf. Jn. 8:31). The Church’s job is not to make that determination but to do what Jesus commanded to do, trusting that he will accomplish his will through it. As such, the place of conversion in relation to the Church’s responsibility to disciple the nations must not be unduly reified into (one of) the terms of discipleship such that it gets conflated or confused with the meaning and function of baptism. 

If the question the Great Commission implicitly raises is not What qualifies a disciple? but rather What qualifies discipling? then the answer is it provides is concerned with the action of the discipling community, not the status of a would-be disciple. It qualifies what constitutes a true discipling community and only derivatively what constitutes true disciple.

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The Setting of Discipleship & The Journey of Disciples

The first post-Easter worship gathering was 65-mile miles away from where Jesus was, and where the disciples were, on Easter morning—Jerusalem, just outside the city gates (Heb. 13:12). The two Marys came to “see the tomb” where Jesus had been laid to earth but instead saw an angel descend from heaven. The angel said, in effect, come and see nothing, then go and tell his disciples something: the tomb is empty, the Lord is risen. Not just that, he told them to tell them to go to Galilee—they had a meeting—and Jesus was already on his way. He was going before them, so they would see him upon arrival. So the two Marys went to tell them, and on their way they saw Jesus. He met them on the road. They worshiped him, and he sent them to go with the same instructions. This time he called “his disciples” “my brothers.” He had never called them that before. So Jesus’ disciples-become-brothers left the Holy City, walked 65 miles to hear a three verse sending sermon, after which they would have to walk 65 miles back to go to the people to whom they were sent. That is a 130-mile detour to go from point A to point A. Why would Jesus tell them to go and meet him there instead of stay and meet him here?

Two reasons seem likely. First, he met them on the mountain. Neither Jesus nor the angel had said anything about where exactly in Galilee they would see him, just that they would see him there—in a 1,341 square mile region with a population ranging anywhere from four hundred thousand to three million.[2] Presumably, then, “the mountain to which Jesus directed them” (τὸ ὄρος οὗ ἐτάξατο αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς) either refers to (1) a detail left out in the instruction to the Marys that Matthew included here (i.e., that he indicated which mountain to meet them and instructed her to tell them) or (2) to a mountain of some special significance they would have intuitively expected to meet him (like a person receiving an invitation from the President to “come see me at the House in D.C.” and thus going to the White House to meet him). The latter is more plausible.

In fact, the most natural reading of the phrase “where Jesus instructed them” (οὗ ἐτάξατο αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς) is not, in effect, “where Jesus instructed them to meet him” (referring to a future meeting) but simply “where Jesus instructed (or appointed) them” (a past meeting). The word “instructed” or “appointed” (ἐτάξατο—3^rd person aorist indicative, though most translations take liberties in rendering it in the perfect aspect, e.g, “had directed”) means to “bring about order” or “put in place” and often refers to being “put under someone’s command” (BDAG), as in the examples in BDAG of the man who has soldiers “under [him], who says to this man go and he goes…” (Mt. 8:9’ Lk. 7:8)[3]

So the disciples, in all likelihood, went to the mountain in Galilee, the original point A, the place they were first organized, where they first gathered as a distinct group of disciples, and precisely as those gathered around a new teaching with authority: “Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’” (Matt. 5:1-3 ESV). Jesus met them on the mountain where he began discipling them, no doubt because it situated them in the proper frame of reference for understanding the commission they were about to receive—to disciple all the nations—recapitulating Jesus’ way of discipling them as a principle model for discipling others. It was there that he first taught them to obey all he commanded, and thus provided the “curriculum” for teaching others to obey all he commanded.

The second reason has less to do with where he met them and more to do with where he did not meet them. They had to leave Jerusalem to receive the Great Commission because they would have to leave Jerusalem to fulfill the Great Commission. In other words, Jerusalem, the holy city of the Jewish dynasty, was not going to be the center toward which God’s kingdom purposes would be directed, but rather the center from which God’s kingdom purposes would be directed (cf. Acts 1:4, 8).  This, it is safe to say, was a disorienting prospect.

Prior to his death and resurrection, there is no shortage of evidence suggesting the disciples’ expectation of Jesus as the Christ (or Messiah) and Jesus’ expectations of himself as such were, quite literally, worlds apart, particularly with regard to the promised “kingdom” that they were expecting and Jesus was inaugurating.[4] Their vision of the kingdom was rightly bound to Israel’s history but wrongly restricted by historical precedent. Their model king was David, who had first established the borders of the Promise Land, and they simply did not have the categories to understand where much of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom fit. Their categories were bound by precedent and thus could not open to promise. In a word, they were right about the Man, wrong about the mission, right about the Christ, wrong about the kingdom (see especially Mt. 16:13-28).[5] 

Jesus’ claim of universal authority corresponded with a commission of universal scope. If “all authority in heaven and on earth” had been given to Jesus, “all the nations” of the earth had been given to the reign of his kingdom. But his kingdom did not advance through colonial expansion. It was a kingdom that somehow fit within all nations that nevertheless belonged to Him, something more like cities scattered on the hills (Mt. 5:14) than nations trampled underfoot (Ps. 47:3; 63:80). In Frederick Bruner’s words, “’All nations’ deparochializes disciples and makes them world persons; and it ecumenicalizes them and introduces them to the worldwide church” (Bruner, 819).

Jesus had described such a vision the first time they met on that mountain in “Galilee of the nations,” as the prophet Isaiah referred to it, describing the eschatological setting in which “a child” would be born, “a Son” would be given, the “increase of [whose] government and of peace there [would] be no end,” indeed, in whose single name the “Mighty God” of creation would be known in an altogether new way as “Everlasting Father,” “Prince of Peace,” and “Wonderful Counselor” (Isa. 9:1-7). It is fitting, then, that on this mount in Galilee, where they first were taught to pray, scandalously if not seemingly blasphemously (Jn. 10:31-39), “Our Father…”, that they would be sent to “all the nations, baptizing them in the name,” echoing what Isaiah described, “of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

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[1] The myriad of questions that could arise about the unique usage of form of this word, especially given the context in which it is used, not to mention the tremendous influence the Great Commission has on Christian thought and practice throughout the English-speaking world, should be grounds enough for preserving its grammatical integrity. But the questions can never be answered if they are never asked.

[2] Bible Dictionaries Hastings’ Dictionary of the New Testament > Galilee

[3] So, e.g., Davies and Allison, 3:681. Contra France, 1110, who argues we would have expected to see διδάσκω (to teach) instead of τάσσω on the basis that the mountain in Galilee where he first “taught” them (i.e., the Sermon on the Mount) would have more naturally been described in such terms (teaching). But (a) Matthew may very well be intentionally framing the scene in terms authority—the kind of peaceful authority had had demonstrated over them from the day he began to nevertheless teach them as one with authority (e.g, “you have heard it said…but I say…”, Mt. 5:21ff)—the full extent of which they are about to hear him announce (“all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Mt. 28:18); and (b), oddly enough, he also argues against the notion that Matthew is suggesting they had been instructed to meet them at a particular mountain, recognizing such a rendering cannot be justified in Greek, so he just suggests it was a general mountain in Galilee they went to where they waited “for Jesus to take the initiative to meet with them.” Such an assumption may be an attempt to be conservative in interpretation, but it does not do justice to the humanity of the characters. It is safe to assume they, like any real human being given such general instructions, would have gone to the place would have gone to the meeting place most significant in shared memory of both parties involved.

[4] E.g., the disciples arguing over who would be “greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 18:1-3); James and John attempting to secure coregent positions of power by “grant[ing them] to sit, one at [his] right hand and one at [his] left” once he assumed the throne in the pattern of Gentile rulers (Mk. 10:35-45); or, most emphatically (and ironically), Simon Peter, the first of the disciples to explicitly name Jesus as the Messiah, “the Christ” (Mt. 16:16)—and so Jesus names his the “Rock” (Peter)—only to turn around and “rebuke” Jesus when he revealed the job description he was bound to precisely as the Christ (“From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised”; Mt. 16:21)—and so Jesus, in turn, names him “Satan” (“Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man”; Mt. 16:23).

[5] And if there were any doubt that confusions still persisted after the resurrection (and the Great Commission for that matter), the disciples’ question and Jesus’ answer in the opening of Acts seems make clear that they were still confused and provide insight into the nature of their confusions. Acts begins with a summary of Jesus’ ministry to the disciples prior to his ascension, indicating that he “appear[ed] to them during forty days…speaking about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3) and telling them to wait for the promised of the Father—“you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:4-5). The first words out of the disciples’ mouths, directly following this summary, we are told, “when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1:6). The confusion, it seems, is that they could not distinguish the “kingdom of God” as Jesus taught had described it from the “kingdom of Israel” as they had expected it. So Jesus, instead of answering their misguided question and all its inherent assumptions, responded thus, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:6-8).