Mission order
The mission command (also called baptismal command and, more rarely, mission command or mission order) is the commission that Jesus Christ gave his disciples after his resurrection , according to the biblical record . The mission for missionary work is at the end of the Gospel of Matthew ( Mt 28 : 19-20 EU ). According to Christian self-understanding, it is a justification for mission and for baptism .
Text of the New Testament mission command
“ 16 The eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain that Jesus had named them. 17 And when they saw Jesus, they bowed down before him. But some had doubts. 18 So Jesus came up to them and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go to all peoples, and make all men my disciples; baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 and teach them to obey all I have commanded you. Be certain: I am with you every day until the end of the world. "
Parallel passages are: Mk 16.15–18 EU , Lk 24.47–49 EU , Joh 20.21 EU and Acts 1.4–8 EU .
Language and understandings
The text of the missionary order is in a form of ancient Greek , the koine . The activity “make disciples” is formulated as the imperative aorist , the other three (walking, baptizing, teaching) as participles. The linguistic construction allows for different understandings: going there as a prerequisite, baptisms and teaching as the implementation of “making disciples”; or: baptisms and teachings as concretizations of “going there and making disciples”.
Textual historical considerations
The text is in the tradition of the Jewish and Old Testament broadcasting narratives with a narrative introduction, statement of authority, mandate and assurance. The relationship with the parallel passages Lk 24,47–49 EU and Joh 20,21 EU indicates a common tradition. The statement "on the mountain that Jesus had named them" should also come from this tradition, since Matthew did not mention anything of such an instruction before. This also applies to the addition “But some had doubts”, which is one of the essential resurrection traditions, but seems a bit out of place here.
Linguistically, the chronological assignment of baptism and teaching is unclear; for baptism is performed only once; teaching begins - in the first generation of baptized adults we are talking about - before baptism and continues thereafter. This linguistic ambiguity leads some authors to suspect that baptism was only added later in the surrounding text (before or through Matthew). The beginning and the end of the text, perhaps without “to the end of the world”, were probably the first form of the story that Matthew had before him. It is unclear when the middle section with the actual shipment order was added. It is conceivable that it was, at least partially, first designed by Matthew and that it arises from a review of observed missionary activity. Barnabas and Paul had evangelized outside of Israel and Judea even before the Gospel of Matthew was written down.
For baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, there is a variant handed down from Eusebius at the beginning of the 4th century, which only reads "in my name", which is considered by some authors to be the older version. However, Eusebius never uses the word "baptize". On the other hand, Didache (1st century), Irenäus von Lyon (2nd century) and Tertullian (3rd century) - as well as all previously known manuscripts of the Matthew passage - already pass on the Trinitarian formula. Individual non-trinitarian theologians consider the text to be an insertion from the 4th century, which, however , is consistently rejected by scientific text criticism .
reception
Church reception
The structure of the baptismal command in Mt 28:19 is described as triadic or trinitarian, depending on whether one already sees echoes of a theology of the Trinity. According to research consensus, this structure is a novelty, since a. There is only a single formula in Acts. This is mostly explained as a takeover from liturgical practice or already theological reflection of Galilean Christians; occasionally an introduction by the text author himself is accepted. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries church fathers like Cyprian or Origen cited the missionary order to justify lawful baptism, to point out that the commandments were kept and to distinguish this practice from deviating, possibly heretized tendencies. From the fourth century onwards, the text of the baptismal formula was also used increasingly for elaborations and defenses of the theology of the Trinity , as well as the triadic formulas in 1 Cor 12.3–6 ELB and 2 Cor 13.13 ELB , the more definite formulation in Joh 16, 26 ELB and vaguer passages also cited by church fathers such as Rom 11,36 EU . While there were initially, also in the area of the earliest Christian theological literature, diverse possibilities of expression for the speech of Father, Son and St. Gives spirit, that of Mt 28:19 will soon be particularly formative a. a. with the influential theologians Irenaeus of Lyons , Tertullian and Origen on this topic . The relevance of the position in terms of reception history also depends on the a. by Basil as closely rated connection "of baptismal [...] creed and doxology " together.
In the Middle Ages, different groups tried to interpret the missionary command to the letter and to practice the Vita Apostolica .
Another point of view was later represented by the Pietists , the Moravian Brethren , the Methodists and the Baptists , who viewed the commission as a personal mandate for internal and external mission.
From an evangelical point of view, the New Testament missionary mandate requires the dissemination of teaching and baptism. Although this commission was originally only given to the eleven apostles, evangelical theology has interpreted it to mean that Christians should do missionary work anytime and anywhere, as this is the fulfillment of the contract between Abraham and God ( Gen 12.3 EU ). The mission command is often related to the earlier mission mandate from Matthew 10 ( Mt 10,5-42 EU ), where the mandate is restricted to proselytizing believers of the Jewish religion, about which Jesus speaks as lost sheep in the house of Israel .
Critical reception
In 2000, the German philosopher and critic of religion Herbert Schnädelbach sparked a debate about Christianity and the missionary order associated with it with an article in the newspaper Die Zeit . Schnädelbach lined up the order of mission in a chain of seven birth defects of Christianity : original sin , justification as a bloody legal trade, the order of mission, Christian anti-Judaism , Christian eschatology , the import of Platonism and the handling of historical truth. Once Christianity has left its seven birth defects behind, there will be almost nothing left of it; above all, it would then hardly be possible to distinguish it from enlightened Judaism . Anything that is good in Christianity is Jewish anyway.
Further reception
For the mission command as a baptismal formula, see Baptism .
Individual evidence
- ↑ See EJ Schnabel: Urchristliche Mission , Brockhaus, Wuppertal 2003, p. 351.
- ^ Daniel Reid (ed.): The IVP Dictionary of the New Testament. InterVarsity Press, Illinois (USA), 2004, ISBN 0-8308-1787-5
- ↑ Ernst Lohmeyer, Werner Schmauch: The Gospel of Matthew. 2nd edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1958 (without ISBN; series: Critical-exegetical commentary on the New Testament, special volume)
- ^ A textual commentary on the Greek Gospels. ( Memento of the original from April 13, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. P. 477 (PDF; 2.7 MB)
- ↑ e-Catena, Matthew 28 (English)
- ↑ The former e.g. B. already with Ernst Lohmeyer : The Gospel of Matthew. 4th ed., Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1967, p. 414; see. z. B. Gerhard Schneider: The Aspotel history. Vol. 2, Herder, Freiburg 1982, p. 192. The latter is sometimes derived from a passage in Eusebius, cf. but on this already Benjamin Hubbard: Matthean Redaction of Apostolic Commisioning: An Exegesis of Matthew 28: 16-20. Scholars Press, Missoula 1974.
- ↑ See e.g. B. Adolf Martin Ritter: Trinity, I. in: Theologische Realenzyklopädie , Vol. 34, P. 91–99, here 94.
- ↑ Adolf Martin Ritter: Trinität, I. in: Theologische Realenzyklopädie , Vol. 34, p. 96.
- ↑ Herbert Schnädelbach: The curse of Christianity. In: The time. May 11, 2000.
