Matthew 28

Matthew 28 is the twenty-eighth and final chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. This chapter covers the events around the Resurrection of Jesus and ends with the Great Commission.

Content

The first section, from 28:1-10, covers the visit of Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James to the tomb of Jesus. There an angel descends opening the tomb, and incapacitating the guards. The angel addresses the women, and as they leave the area they encounter the risen Jesus.

In the second section the guards return to Jerusalem, where they report to the priests about the events and the priests bribe the guards to lie about them and tell that the disciples had come and stolen the body.

In the third section Jesus appears to the disciples in Galilee and issues the Great Commission ending with a trinitarian formula that is much disputed by modern scholars.

Sources

Matthew 28 covers the same material as Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20 in the other gospels. As with the rest of Matthew it seems clear that Matthew is adapting what appears in Mark. Unusually the material not from Mark most closely matches the Gospel of John, unlike the rest of the gospel where non-Markan material is often matched in Luke. Some scholars thus believe that the authors of Matthew and John may have been working from a shared source on the resurrection that wasn't used by the other two gospel writers. A variation on the appearance of Jesus to the women does occur in John, but the wording is completely different in Matthew. The meeting with Jesus is a close variation on the meeting on the women's meeting with the angel, and may be based on that text originally from Mark.