Theologians and many Christians have been calling Matthew 28:19-20 the Great Commission, and a precious few seem to have given the text a sober reflection.  If you think that all Christians have to go into all the world, doing the thing unveiled in Matthew 28:19-20 you are drinking your soup with your nose.  If you believe that the church exists to make hellbound proselytes then we can call you scribe, Pharisee and hypocrite (Matthew 23:15).  I want to expose the illiterate experts’ juvenile quest for commands to support the obsession for ways to Lord it over God’s people.

Eyeballing the text

The idea that believers can pray and approach Bible reading and acquire optimal accuracy was never a serious  road for anyone desiring the office of a bishop.  Once an aspiring bishop realizes that the church and its literature did not stake out ground in the 19th century the much more effective means of reading and understanding the Bible became attractive.  Bishops of most denominations are required to learn biblical Hebrew and Greek.  Biblical studies are juvenile and shallow as long as translations of the last 400 years are the materials in hand.

Grab a grammar hammer not a seer peer

Not even when the witness is authenticated by signs and wonders the most important knowledge in the pipeline is still the text of the New Testament, and the closer one gets to the early manuscripts the healthier the doctrine.  So when evangelism gets described using a model from the life of Messiah Yeshua we have to initiate a rescue using the grammar of the Greek New Testament.

Parts of speech: participles and imperatives

Imperatives are the forms of verbs that we use to (a) tell someone what to do or (b) ask someone to do something.  There is only one imperative in Matthew 28:19-20, yet all the verbs are treated as imperatives.

• Go: a participle, a secondary tense in the sentence
• Teach/disciple: the true grammatical imperative
• Baptizing: a participle, a secondary tense in the sentence
• Teaching: a participle, a secondary tense in the sentence

Punctiliar versus Linear

Punctiliar and linear kinds of action are clearly contained in the aorist and present tenses respectively. We make a genuine meme of these two types with a dot “•” and a line ‘-“.  They represent respectively a finished action and an ongoing action. It is a lazy mentality that wants to conflate the verbs of Matthew 28:19-20 into a package that ignores discipling.  That is the avoidance of textual reality that enables a commitment to a kind of evangelism that serves discriminatory practices exactly as James and his Pharisee allies brought to bear on the church as she began her mission to the Gentiles. 

Sign them up

First, by taking the aorist matheteusate as a foil for indoctrination.  The punctiliar action of matheteusate cannot be contained in teaching a prospective convert the doctrines of the apostles. To make a disciple in one action has to be the act of enrollment. We can sign them up or make them just like us and worse.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves”. (Matthew 23:15)

Using the text before understanding its parts

The present participles for baptizing (baptizontes) and teaching (didaskontes) are not simply separate actions from enrolment. Participle 101 tells us that they are verbal nouns.  They define a condition; they also describe something in the same way an adjective does.  how the enrollment proceeds.  The text, after its constituent parts are properly accounted for brings us to a different conclusion than “Teach all nations, baptizing them… teaching them…”. We have to admit that the goal of Christian outreach – the application of heavenly authority (Matthew 28:18) –  is neither baptism nor teaching.

The opening participle should be treated as the fundamental framework in which discipling all nations takes place.  Having gone into the places we are sent we are to make disciples of all nations, by baptizing them and teaching them.

Vocabulary of verse 19

• Teach is from matheteuô, which does not mean “give lessons”, and it is not describing the kind of things that happens in a classroom. 
• Baptizing is from baptizô, its meaning is clear
• Teaching is from didaskô, its meaning is clear from the cognate noun didaskalos

Christian outreach is not grounded in making proselytes, but in opening the door to a relationship with God the Father through faith in  the crucified and risen Christ.  It is futile to teach unbelievers, persons who have not confessed and believed in Christ.  The looming problem with teaching unregenerate persons the priorities of Christ is that they are incapable of receiving or understanding the things of the kingdom.  There are simply too many rabbit holes involved when one teaches the things of God’s Kingdom to someone who is not enrolled as a believer or follower of Christ.

Surely we recognize that Christ taught his disciples by parables, and we can see that immediately after the resurrection of Christ the disciples still had not grasped the meaning of his death and Resurrection.  So we can scratch the evangelism model that says (a) first show people you care by meeting their earthly needs (b) teach them the doctrines of the church and (c) baptize them (=accept them into church membership).  You can see how all of this avoids the critical intersections of Messianic Majesty.  Nothing is said about Christ dying and rising from the dead, or that grace by means of faith alone brings the lost and condemned into the family of God.  If our fishing or reaping evangelism is to have a face of success it cannot be making proselytes twice as bad as the fishers or reapers

Disciple-making Fancy Grade

• Set him up as a learner: enrol him
• Baptize him
• Teach him what Christ  commanded