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Mat_28:10. Μὴ φοβεῖσθε · ὑπάγετε , ἀπαγγ .] Asyndeton, the matter being pressing, urgent.
τοῖς ἀδελφοῖς μου ] He thus designates His disciples (comp. on Joh_20:17; Justin, c. Tr. 106), not πρὸς τιμὴν αὐτῶν (Euthymius Zigabenus), for which there was no occasion, but in view of that conception of Him as a superhuman being which had so profoundly impressed the women prostrate at His feet.
ἵνα ] does not state the purport of the order involved in ἀπαγγ . (de Wette; there is nothing whatever of the nature of an order about ἀπαγ .), but the idea is: take word to my brethren (namely, about my resurrection, about your having seen me, about my having spoken to you, and what I said), in order that (as soon as they receive these tidings from you) they may proceed to Galilee, Mat_26:32.
κἀκεῖ με ὄψονται ] is not to be regarded as dependent on ἵνα , but: and there they shall see me. This repetition of the directions about going to Galilee (Mat_28:7), to which latter our evangelist gives considerable prominence as the scene of the new reunion (Mat_28:16 ff.), cannot be characterized as superfluous (de Wette, Bruno Bauer), or even as poor and meaningless (Keim), betraying the hand of a later editor, but is intended to be express and emphatic; comp. Steinmeyer. With the exception of John 21, the other canonical Gospels, in which, however, we cannot include the spurious conclusion of Mark, make no mention of any appearance of the risen Lord in Galilee; according to John 20, Jesus remained at least eight days in Jerusalem, as did also His disciples, to whom He there manifested Himself on two occasions, though it would appear from John 21 that the third manifestation took place in Galilee, while Luke, on the other hand (Mat_24:49; Act_1:4; Act_13:31), excludes Galilee altogether, just as Matthew excludes Judaea. To harmonize these divergent accounts is impossible (Strauss, II. p. 558 ff.; Holtzmann, p. 500 f.; Keim); and, with regard to the account of Matthew in particular, it may be observed that it is so far from assuming the manifestations to the disciples in Judaea as having previously occurred (in opposition to Augustine, Olshausen, Krabbe, Ebrard, Lange), that it clearly intends the meeting with the eleven, Mat_28:16 ff., as the first appearance to those latter, and as the one that had been promised by the angel, Mat_28:7, and by Jesus Himself, Mat_28:10. From those divergent accounts, however, it may be fairly inferred that the tradition regarding the appearances of the risen Lord to His disciples assumed a threefold shape: (1) the purely Galilaean, which is that adopted by Matthew; (2) the purely Judaean, which is that of Luke, and also of John with the supplementary ch. 21 left out; (3) the combined form in which the appearances both in Galilee and Judaea are embraced, which is that of John with the supplementary chapter in question included. That Jesus appeared to the disciples both in Jerusalem and in Galilee as well might be already deduced as a legitimate historical inference from the fact of a distinct Judaean and Galilaean tradition having been current; but the matter is placed beyond a doubt by John, if, as we are entitled to assume, the apostle is to be regarded as the author of ch. 21. The next step, of course, is to regard it as an ascertained historical fact that the appearances in Judaea preceded those in Galilee; though, at the same time, it should not be forgotten that Matthew’s account is not merely vague and concise (Bleek), but that it, in fact, ignores the appearances in Judaea altogether,[40] entirely excludes them as being unsuited to the connection; comp. Schleiermacher, L. J. p. 465 f. Now, as this is inconceivable in the case of Matthew the apostle, we are bound to infer from our narrative that this is another of those passages in our Gospel which show traces of other than apostolic authorship. See Introd. § 2.
[40] Rud. Hofmann (de Berg Galiläa, 1856), following certain early expositors, has attempted to explain the discrepancies between the various narratives by maintaining that ἡ Γαλιλαία , Matthew 28, is not the country, but a mountain of this name, namely, the northmost of the three peaks of the Mount of Olives. But nowhere in the New Testament do we find such a designation applied to any locality but the well-known province of that name; nor, if we interpret fairly the passages quoted by Hofmann from Tertullian (Apol. 21), Lactantius (iv. 19), and Chrysostom, are we able to find in them any allusion to a mountain called Galilee; and surely it is not to be presumed that anything of a trustworthy nature can be learnt as to the existence of such a mountain from the confusions of a certain corrupt part of the text in the Evang, Nicod. 14; see already, Thilo, ad Cod, Apocr. I. p. 620 f.
REMARK.
It is evident from 1Co_15:5 ff. that, even taking the narratives of all the evangelists together, we would have but an imperfect enumeration of the appearances of Jesus subsequent to His resurrection, Matthew’s account being the most deficient of any. With regard to the appearances themselves, modern criticism, discarding the idea that the death was only apparent (see on Mat_27:50), has treated them partly as subjective creations, either of the intellect (Strauss, Scholten), in its efforts to reconcile the Messianic prophecies and the belief in the Messiah with the fact of His death, or of ecstatic vision (Baur, Strauss, 1864; Holsten, Ewald), and therefore as mere mental phenomena which came to be embodied in certain objective incidents. There are those again who, attributing the appearances in question to some objective influence emanating from Christ Himself, have felt constrained to regard them as real manifestations of His person in the glorified form (Schenkel) in which it emerged from out of death (not from the grave),—a view in which Weisse, Keim, Schweizer substantially concur, inasmuch as Keim, in particular, lays stress on the necessity of “such a telegram from heaven” after the extinction of Christ’s earthly nature, though he considers the question as to whether our Lord also communicated the form of the vision directly or only indirectly, as of but secondary consequence. But all these attempts to treat what has been recorded as an actual fact as though it were based merely on mental phenomena are in opposition in general to the explicit and unhesitating view of all the evangelists and apostles as well as in particular to the uniform reference to the empty grave, and no less uniform use of the expression third day, all classical testimonies which can never be silenced. If, in addition to all this, it be borne in mind that the apostles found in the resurrection of their Lord a living and unfailing source of courage and hope, and of that cheerfulness with which they bore suffering and death,—that the apostolic church generally saw in it the foundation on which its own existence was based,—that Paul, in particular, insists upon it as incontrovertible evidence for, and as an ἀπαρχή of the resurrection of the body (1Co_15:23; Rom_8:11), and as constituting an essential factor in man’s justification (Rom_4:25; Php_3:10), though he is fond of speaking of being buried and raised up with Christ as descriptive of what is essential to the moral standing of the Christian (Rom_6:4; Col_2:12), and can only conceive of the glorified body of the Lord, to which those of believers will one day be conformed (Php_3:21), as no other than that which came forth from the grave and was taken up to heaven,—if, we say, this be borne in mind, not the shadow of an exegetical pretext will be left for construing the resurrection from the grave of one whose body was exempted from corruption (Act_2:31; Act_10:41) into something or other which might be more appropriately described as a resurrection from the cross, and which would therefore require us to suppose that all the apostles and the whole church from the very beginning had been the victims of a delusion. See, in answer to Keim, Schmidt in the Jahrb. f. D. Theol. 1872, p. 413 ff. If this view of the resurrection were adopted, then, in opposition once more to New Testament authority, we should have to identify it with the ascension (comp. on Luk_24:51, Remark); while, on the other hand, it would be necessary to give up the Descensus Christi ad inferos as a second error arising out of that which has just been referred to.