Jump to The gist Going deeper In the modern world The tidbit This week
Matthew 16:13–20 · Majority Standard Bible
When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, He questioned His disciples: “Who do people pronounce Me, the Son of Man, to be?”
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?” Jesus asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by My Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
Then He commanded His disciples not to tell anyone that He was Jesus the Christ.
The gist
He asks what the public thinks, gets four respectable answers, and then asks the same question again with one word changed. Everything in this book has been walking toward that word.
Going deeper
Fifty-one weeks of this book have been an answer to the first question. This is the second one.
Start with the shape of it, because Matthew has built the scene as a hinge. The first question is about other people: who do people say? And the answers are not insults. John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets — these are the highest categories available. The crowd has placed Him in the top rank of everything it knows, and every one of the answers is wrong.
Then the second question, and the Greek does something the English struggles to show. But what about you? — the pronoun is expressed, which in Greek it does not need to be, and therefore carries emphasis. But you — who do you say that I am?
And it is plural. He asks all of them. Peter answers alone, but the question was not put to Peter; it was put to the Twelve, and eleven of them said nothing.
Peter’s answer opens with a pronoun of his own — You are the Christ — matching the emphatic you he was asked with. And every noun in his sentence carries the article: the Christ, the Son of the living God. Not a christ among others. Not a son in the way the psalms call Israel a son. The last phrase is a present participle: the God who is living, now.
Christ’s reply names him with his father’s name — Simon son of Jonah — and says the answer did not come from him. This was not revealed to you by flesh and blood. The verb for revealed is the one behind the word apocalypse: to uncover, to take the lid off. Peter did not work it out. It was uncovered for him.
Which is worth pausing on before anything else in the verse that follows. The single greatest confession in the Gospels is, by Christ’s own account, not an achievement. It is something Peter received and then said out loud.
And then verse 18, which is among the most argued-over sentences in the whole of Scripture, and which this book will handle by giving you the words and the one Father whose comment on it can be verified exactly.
You are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church.
Here is what the Greek prints, and no more. Peter is Petros, a masculine noun. Rock is petra, a feminine noun, and it appears here in the case governed by “on.” They are two different words with two different lexical entries and two different genders, and they are obviously related — the standard public-domain lexicon defines each in terms of the other, which is to say it asserts their kinship and does not draw a distinction between them. (The sharper contrast sometimes quoted, that one word means a boulder and the other a pebble, comes from a modern copyrighted dictionary and is not printed here.)
That is the raw material. What the Church’s greatest expositor of Matthew did with it can be quoted exactly, and it has been checked against two independent editions:
“And I say unto you, You are Peter, and upon this rock will I build my Church; that is, on the faith of his confession. Hereby He signifies that many were now on the point of believing, and raises his spirit, and makes him a shepherd.”
On the faith of his confession. Those are St John Chrysostom’s own words, and they are the reading this book prints.
Two further details in the verse, both factual. The gates of Hades are the grammatical subject of the verb — the gates are the ones doing the failing to prevail, which is a curious picture: gates are not usually what attacks. And the thing they will not prevail against is referred to with a feminine pronoun, which could grammatically point either to the church or to the rock, since both nouns are feminine. The Greek does not settle it. Neither will this entry.
Then the keys, and one honest note about verse 19. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven — the Greek is not a simple future. It is a future form of the verb “to be” joined to a perfect participle, which is a construction, not a simple tense, and grammarians have argued for a century about how to render it. Some read it as “shall have been bound,” making heaven’s act prior and earth’s declarative. The words are as described; the conclusion is contested, and a devotional book has no business pretending otherwise.
And then verse 20, which is where Book One ends.
Then He commanded His disciples not to tell anyone that He was Jesus the Christ.
The right answer has finally been spoken out loud, by the right person, and the immediate instruction is: say nothing. Not because it is false. Because they do not yet know what it means — which the next paragraph of Matthew proves, when Christ explains that the Christ must be killed, and Peter, still glowing from the blessing, takes Him aside to correct Him, and is told Get behind Me, Satan.
Six verses. Blessed are you, and then Satan. The same man, the same day.
In the modern world
The first question in this passage is the one most people can answer at length. Who do people say? Everyone has views about Jesus of Nazareth — the teacher, the reformer, the moral genius, the misunderstood radical. Those are this century’s version of John the Baptist, Elijah and Jeremiah: high categories, respectfully offered, and all of them a way of not answering.
Because the second question cannot be answered by anyone else on your behalf. It is asked in the plural and it is answered in the singular, which is exactly how it works — you can stand in a room full of people who believe, and the question is still addressed to you, and their answer is not yours.
And what Christ says about the answer is worth more than it usually gets. He does not congratulate Peter on his insight. He tells him it was not his insight. Which means that anyone who is waiting until they can reason their way to this before they say it has misunderstood the mechanism — the confession does not come at the end of the working out. It is given, and then said, and the understanding comes limping along afterwards, sometimes six verses later and sometimes years.
Peter proves that within the same conversation. He is right about who Christ is and completely wrong about what that entails, and he is not stripped of the blessing for it. The blessing and the rebuke both stand.
The tidbit
He asks the question at Caesarea Philippi — the furthest north He ever goes, well outside Galilee, in Gentile country. Of all the places to ask who He is, He picks the one furthest from the temple.
This week
The passage turns on one word changed between two questions, and only the second one is addressed to you. Answering the first in writing is what makes the difference audible — most people can produce the public answers fluently and have never once said their own out loud. So the week does both, in order, and saves the second for the last day of the book.
On the first day, answer the first question. Write down, honestly, who you would say people think Jesus is — including the version you would give at a dinner party where nobody was religious.
Then, on the last day of this book, answer the second one. Out loud, in your own words, addressed to Him rather than about Him. Not the creed, though the creed is true. Your sentence.
It might look like this. The first answer, given honestly: a good teacher; a myth some people find useful; the reason my mother was happy; someone I would rather not raise at this particular table. The second answer is none of those, and it is not the creed either. It might be nine words long. It might be You are the one I could not get away from.
That is the whole of what Book One has been for. It is called Come and See because that is what He said to the first two men who followed Him, and this is where the seeing gets a name.
And then — as He told them — say nothing for a while, and turn the page. The next book is called Follow Me.
Scripture: Matthew 16:13–20, Majority Standard Bible (Byzantine Majority Text). The MSB’s own section heading “Peter’s Confession of Christ” begins at verse 13 and runs to verse 20, with the next heading, “Christ’s Passion Foretold,” at verse 21. The unit is printed whole: Christ’s reply to Peter is one continuous speech from verse 17 to verse 19, and verse 20 is the scene’s closing frame. At verse 13 the Byzantine text includes “Me” — “who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am” — where the critical text does not; the MSB follows the Byzantine, which is why the identification is explicit in the question itself. biblehub.com/msb/matthew/16.htm biblehub.com/text/matthew/16-13.htm
Greek, as printed in the interlinear. At verse 15 Hymeis (“you”) is expressed and is plural — the question is put to all the disciples, though one answers. At verse 16 Peter’s Sy (“You”) is likewise expressed, and all four substantives carry the article: ho Christos, ho Huios tou Theou tou zōntos, the last a present active participle, “the living [God].” At verse 17 “revealed” is apekalypsen (Strong’s 601), aorist indicative active, the verb from which apocalypse is formed; “Simon Bar-Jonah” is printed as two vocatives, the second an untranslated Aramaic patronymic. biblehub.com/interlinear/matthew/16-15.htm biblehub.com/interlinear/matthew/16-16.htm biblehub.com/interlinear/matthew/16-17.htm
Greek at verse 18, reported as printed and without inference. “Peter” is Petros, Strong’s 4074, parsed Noun – Nominative Masculine Singular. “Rock” is petra, Strong’s 4073, parsed Noun – Dative Feminine Singular. The public-domain lexical entries define each in terms of the other — Strong’s gives Petros as “a (piece of) rock (larger than lithos); as a name, Petrus, an apostle,” and petra as “feminine of the same as Petros; a (mass of) rock” — and therefore assert their kinship rather than a contrast between them. The frequently quoted contrast between a large rock and a small stone appears on the same page under a modern copyrighted entry and is not reproduced here. “Will prevail against” is katischysousin (2729), future indicative active, third person plural, with “the gates” (pylai, 4439) as its subject; its object is a feminine pronoun whose antecedent could grammatically be either “church” or “rock,” both being feminine nouns — the Greek does not disambiguate it. biblehub.com/interlinear/matthew/16-18.htm biblehub.com/greek/4074.htm biblehub.com/greek/4073.htm
Greek at verse 19. “Will be bound” and “will be loosed” are each a future indicative of the verb “to be” (estai) joined to a perfect participle, middle or passive (dedemenon, lelymenon). The interlinear parses the two words separately and attaches no syntactic label. Some grammarians read the construction as a periphrastic future perfect — “shall have been bound” — and others do not; the reading is contested and no conclusion is asserted above. “Keys” (kleidas) is plural. biblehub.com/interlinear/matthew/16-19.htm
St John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Homily 54. (NPNF Series 1, Vol. 10). Cited by homily number only: the discussion runs on past these verses through Peter’s rebuke at Matthew 16:22–23 and into a moral exhortation. The quotation above was checked against two independent editions of the NPNF text and is identical in both apart from modernised pronouns. (Readers checking the New Advent page should note that its printed scripture line, “MATT. XIV. 13,” is a typographical error for Matthew 16:13; the lemma quoted beneath it is unmistakably Matthew 16.) www.newadvent.org/fathers/200154.htm www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf110.iii.LII.html
On the Aramaic. The New Testament itself records the underlying name at John 1:42, where Christ says “you shall be called Kēphas” — and the evangelist adds, in Greek, “which is translated Petros.” That much is textual and is stated above by implication. The further and very commonly repeated argument about what happens to the wordplay when the saying is retroverted into Aramaic could not be sourced to anything other than confessional advocacy on both sides, and is not asserted here. biblehub.com/interlinear/john/1-42.htm
Claims about the rock face at Caesarea Philippi, and the popular identification of the grotto of Pan there as the “gates of Hades” to which Christ was gesturing, could not be sourced and are not asserted above. The sanctuary at that site is archaeologically attested; that Christ was pointing at it, and that anyone in the first century called it a gate of Hades, is not.
Fifty-one more like it
If one week changed how you read that passage, Come and See has fifty-one others, each given the same treatment.