Jump to The gist Going deeper In the modern world The tidbit This week
Matthew 7:13–14 · Majority Standard Bible
The Sermon on the Mount is nearly over. He has just given the rule about doing to others what you would have them do to you, and said that this is the Law and the Prophets. Then, with no transition at all, this.
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.
But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.
The gist
Two verses, and four of their words repay everything you can bring to them. Both words for the wide road occur nowhere else in the New Testament. The word for the narrow one is the root of the word this book’s readers know as tribulation. And the first word of verse 14 is different in the text this volume prints from the text the King James translators used.
Going deeper
A word about the range first, because for once it needs no correcting.
Elsewhere in this volume the printed range has repeatedly had to be widened to match the MSB’s own printed unit. Here the translation’s unit is already exactly these two verses: the heading The Narrow Gate stands above verse 13, and the next heading, A Tree and Its Fruit, stands above verse 15. The Cambridge Bible independently labels the same block “The narrow entrance to the Kingdom, 13, 14.”
(One dissent worth recording: Jamieson-Fausset-Brown treats verse 13 as opening a much larger unit, printing his lemma as “Mt 7:13-29. Conclusion and Effect of the Sermon on the Mount.” That is a commentator’s structural judgement, not the translation’s.)
Now the first word of verse 14, where the text this book prints differs from the one behind most older English Bibles.
The Byzantine Majority Text and the Greek text of the Orthodox Church read ti — “How!” Nestle, Westcott–Hort, Tischendorf and both editions of the Textus Receptus read hoti — “because.”
That is not a small difference. On hoti, verse 14 is a statement, giving a second reason for entering the narrow gate: because the gate is narrow. On ti, it is an exclamation: How narrow is the gate, and how constricted the way! The Greek Orthodox edition marks it by closing the verse with an exclamation point — the only one of the nine editions to do so.
And the MSB is quietly on that side. Its rendering, “But small is the gate,” carries the footnote ”Literally How small” — a note that only makes sense if the text behind it reads ti.
The commentators divide, and one division is worth flagging carefully. Meyer prints Ti and glosses it “how strait is the gate!” The Pulpit Commentary concedes that “how” is “much easier, as avoiding the difficulty of the connexion of this verse with the preceding,” and then judges hoti “probably right.”
And Bengel settles it in a line: “The true reading is undoubtedly, hoti πλατεῖα — hoti στενή… BECAUSE broad — BECAUSE straight.” That is Bengel’s own editorial judgement, and it is not the Byzantine reading. A reader should not be left with the impression that the Majority Text stands behind him here; it does not.
There is a second textual point at verse 13, and it changes the picture in the mind. Westcott–Hort omit the words “is the gate” from the first half — reading simply wide and spacious is the way. Westcott and Hort omit them; Tischendorf and the modern critical line bracket them. Nestle 1904, the Byzantine text, the Orthodox text and both Receptus editions print them, and the MSB footnotes the omission.
Which means: on the text this book prints there are two gates and two ways, in strict antithesis. On Westcott–Hort there is only one gate in the whole saying — the narrow one — and the contrast is between a narrow gate and a broad road. The Pulpit Commentary quotes Westcott and Hort’s own defence of that reading, and their argument is worth having, in their words rather than his: ”It was natural to scribes to set ver. 13 in precisely antithetic contrast to ver. 14; but the sense gains in force if there is no mention of two gates.”
Now the vocabulary, which is where these two verses are unusually rich.
Both words for the wide road are New Testament hapax legomena. Platys, “wide,” occurs once — here. Eurychōros, “spacious,” occurs once — here. Neither is ever used again in Scripture. The broad way gets two adjectives of its own and then the language drops them and never picks them up.
(A caution, since the concordance invites an error: the counts printed for platys include a different word, the feminine noun for a street. The adjective occurs once.)
Narrow at both verses is stenos, and it occurs three times in the New Testament — twice here and once in the Lucan parallel. But the lexicons picture it two different ways and the difference is worth keeping. Strong’s derives it from the base of the verb to stand, and glosses “narrow, from obstacles standing close about” — narrowness produced from outside, by things pressing in. HELPS gives instead “the closely-defined path God ordains to travel on to gain His approval.” One is a gorge; the other is a surveyed line. This book prints both and blends neither.
And then the word that does the most work. Narrow in the second half of verse 14 is a different word: tethlimmenē, from thlibō, and it is a perfect passive participle — a way that has been compressed and stands compressed.
The root sense in the lexicons is mechanical before it is ever emotional. Strong’s: “to crowd.” HELPS: “properly, rub together, constrict (compress), i.e. pressed together.” Thayer’s first gloss is to press, as grapes, and on this phrase he gives: “a compressed way, i.e. narrow, straitened, contracted.”
And HELPS states plainly that this verb is the root of thlipsis — the New Testament word for tribulation. So the narrow way is not merely a small road. It is, in the word’s own family, the pressed way: the same root that gives Scripture its word for affliction. Ellicott sees the picture exactly: “pressed, or hemmed in between walls or rocks, like the pathway in a mountain gorge.”
Then the destination of the other road. Apōleia, destruction, occurs eighteen times, and Ellicott is unusually careful with it — more careful than most modern treatments:
“So far as they go, the word implies, not annihilation, but waste (Matthew 26:8; Mark 14:4), perdition, i.e., the loss of all that makes existence precious.”
And he does not stop there:
“On the other hand, the fact of the waste, the loss, the perdition, does not absolutely exclude the possibility of deliverance. The lost sheep was found; the exiled son, perishing with hunger, was brought back to his father’s house.”
HELPS agrees on the philology, glossing it as loss of well-being rather than of being.
Now the shape of the image, on which the commentators genuinely differ — and the honest thing is that one of them says so outright.
The Expositor’s Greek Testament puts the question and declines to answer it:
“The allegory also is obscure from its brevity. Is the gate at the beginning or end of the way, or are gate and way practically one, the way narrow because it passes through a narrow doorway?”
Vincent answers it flatly: “Note that the gate is not at the end, but at the beginning of the road.” Jamieson-Fausset-Brown argues the same way against those who put the gate last, on the ground that roads usually terminate in a gate but that reading “would make our Lord’s words to have a very inverted and unnatural form as they stand.” The Pulpit Commentary takes the gate as the entrance to a road that may be long: “here, ‘through the narrow gate’ into apparently the (perhaps long) road which takes us at last to full salvation.”
Ellicott collapses the distinction — “The way and the gate are alike the way of obedience and holiness, and the gate is to be reached not without pain and effort” — and then makes the turn an Orthodox reader will want:
“He Himself is the ‘way’ (John 14:6), or with a slight variation of the imagery, He is the ‘door,’ or gate, by which His sheep enter into the fold (John 10:7). Only we must remember that His being thus the ‘way’ and the ‘gate’ does not mean that we can find, in union with Him, a substitute for holiness, but indicates simply how we are to attain to it.”
Then the hardest clause in the passage: only a few find it.
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown refuses to soften it and says why:
“The great Teacher says it, and says it as ‘One having authority.’ To the supposed injustice or harshness of this He never once adverts. He leaves it to be inferred that such a course righteously, naturally, necessarily so ends. But whether men see this or no, here He lays down the law of the kingdom, and leaves it with us.”
Ellicott faces it differently, and his paragraph is the most careful thing written on this verse by anyone consulted. It must be quoted whole, because its argument lives in a clause that is easy to cut:
“The sad contrast between the many and the few runs through all our Lord’s teaching… The picture is a dark one, and yet it represents but too faithfully the impression made, I do not say on Calvinist or even Christian, but on any ethical teacher, by the actual state of mankind around us. They are, for the most part, unconscious of the greatness of their lives, and of the interests at stake in them. If there is any wider hope, it is found in hints and suggestions of the possibilities of the future… in the fact that the words used are emphatically present; in the belief that the short span of this life is not necessarily the whole of the discipline of a soul made for eternity.”
The words used are emphatically present. That is the whole of his answer: the saying describes how things stand, not how they will finally be counted. It is the nearest any commentator consulted comes to warning against reading few as a statistic — and it should be said plainly that none of them issues such a warning outright.
Chrysostom does something better than an argument. He turns the count into a call:
“Now in saying, ‘Few there be that find it,’ here again He both declared the carelessness of the generality, and instructed His hearers not to regard the felicities of the many, but the labors of the few.”
And he gives the sentence that this whole book is named after the far side of:
“Let it not then bewilder us, when many things spring up hence, that turn to our vexation. For the way is strait, and the gate narrow, but not the city.”
In the modern world
Begin with the word that is doing the most work, because it changes what is being described.
The way is not narrow in the sense of mean, or small-minded, or restrictive of joy — the sense the word has acquired in ordinary English, where a narrow person is a diminished one. In the Greek it is pressed: the participle is passive and perfect, a road that has been compressed and stays compressed, and it is built on the root that gives Scripture its word for tribulation.
So the promise attached to the narrow way is not that it will feel confining. It is that it will be hard, in the specific way that pressure is hard. Chrysostom’s answer to that is the one worth carrying: the way is strait and the gate is narrow — but not the city. The constriction is the road, not the destination.
Then the arithmetic, which is where most readers actually get stuck, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a comfortable one.
Only a few find it is a hard sentence, and this book will not soften it by pretending the commentators do. Jamieson-Fausset-Brown is right that Christ never once adverts to the apparent harshness. But two things can be said honestly.
The first is Ellicott’s, and it is a point of grammar: the words are present tense. The saying describes the state of the road now, not a final tally of the saved. That is not a loophole; it is a description of what the sentence is actually doing.
The second is Chrysostom’s, and it is more useful because it is a redirection. The verse is not given so that you can estimate the proportion. It is given so that you will stop measuring yourself against the many — “not to regard the felicities of the many, but the labors of the few.” The moment the sentence becomes a head-count, it has stopped doing what it was said for.
And notice the verb attached to the narrow way: few find it. The wide gate is not found; it is simply entered, because it is already where everyone is standing. The Pulpit Commentary makes the connection back to verse 7, seek, and ye shall find. The narrow one has to be looked for.
Which is the practical form of this passage, and it is unglamorous. Not: choose the hard thing because it is hard. Rather: the default is a road, and you are on it unless you went looking. Wide, spacious, already populated, requiring nothing of you — the two adjectives Christ gives it are the only two times either word appears in the New Testament, as if the language itself had nothing more to say about it.
The narrow gate has to be entered deliberately, and the entering is a single act — the imperative in verse 13 is aorist, one decisive step — while the way that follows is a long compression.
One last thing, and it belongs at the end of this volume.
Fifty-two weeks ago this book opened with two men being told to follow Me, and everything between has been an account of what that costs: the cross taken up, the hand on the plough, the seventy sent out, the towel and the basin, the debt cancelled seventy-seven times, the cup of cold water, the coin held up in the temple. Every one of those is this gate. The narrow way is not a separate discipline alongside the commandments. It is what obeying them turns out to feel like from inside.
And the sentence to leave the volume on is Chrysostom’s, because it answers the only real objection. Strait road, narrow gate — but not the city.
The tidbit
The wide road is described with two adjectives, wide and spacious, and each of them occurs exactly once in the whole New Testament. Neither is ever used again, of anything.
Meanwhile the word for narrow occurs three times — twice in these two verses and once in Luke’s version of the same saying — and the word for gate occurs ten times, three of them here. The vocabulary of the broad way is used up in a single sentence. The vocabulary of the narrow one keeps being needed.
This week
The wide road is not chosen; it is simply where a life goes when nothing is decided. The narrow one has to be found, and the verb is deliberate. So the week asks for one thing you actually sought out and would not otherwise have had — which is the only evidence available that anything has been entered rather than drifted into.
On the first day, find out which road you are on by a test that does not flatter anyone. Not am I a good person — ask instead: what in my life did I have to go looking for?
The wide way requires no searching. It is where you already are: the default schedule, the default opinions, the default use of an evening. The narrow one is found, and the verb is deliberate. Write down one thing in your life that is there because you sought it out and would not otherwise have had. If the list is empty, that is the finding.
Then, for the rest of the week, take the two verbs apart. Enter is one act; the gate is entered once. The way is a long compression. Most people are trying to do the second thing without having done the first — attempting the discipline of the narrow road while never having made the single decision at its head. Ask which of the two you are actually missing, because the remedies are different.
It might look like this. The list of what you had to go looking for: the parish, which I drove around to find. Fr Michael, whom I asked for. The Wednesday service. This book. Four things — and everything else about the week, the schedule and the opinions and what becomes of the evenings, arrived without being sought at all. That is not a condemnation. It is the map.
And when the pressing comes this week — and the word means exactly that, the same root as tribulation — say Chrysostom’s sentence to yourself, in his own words. The way is strait, and the gate narrow, but not the city.
That is the last word of this volume, and the third begins on the other side of it.
Scripture: Matthew 7:13–14, Majority Standard Bible (Byzantine Majority Text). The MSB’s own section heading “The Narrow Gate” stands above verse 13, carries the cross-reference “(Luke 13:22–30)”, and the next heading, “A Tree and Its Fruit,” stands above verse 15 — so the translation’s printed unit is exactly these two verses, and unlike several entries in this volume this range needed no widening. The Cambridge Bible independently labels the block “(c) The narrow entrance to the Kingdom, 13, 14” Jamieson-Fausset-Brown dissents, printing his lemma as “Mt 7:13-29. Conclusion and Effect of the Sermon on the Mount,” and that dissent is recorded above. The MSB’s footnotes on the unit read: at verse 13, “WH does not include is the gate”; at verse 14, “Literally How small.” biblehub.com/msb/matthew/7.htm
Text at verse 14, and here the Byzantine text differs from the Received Text. The Byzantine Majority Text and the Greek text of the Orthodox Church read ti, “how” — making the verse an exclamation; the SBL text, Nestle, Westcott–Hort, Tischendorf and both editions of the Textus Receptus read hoti, “because” — making it a statement of reason. The Greek Orthodox edition alone of the nine closes the verse with an exclamation mark. The MSB’s footnote, “Literally How small,” indicates that its base text reads with the Byzantine. Meyer prints the exclamatory reading; the Pulpit Commentary concedes it is “much easier” and prefers the other; and Bengel argues at length that “the true reading is undoubtedly” the causal one — a judgement of his own which is expressly not the Byzantine reading, and which is identified as such above so that no reader takes the Majority Text to stand behind him. Meyer also names and rejects a third rendering, “why,” which is Fritzsche’s and is not printed here. biblehub.com/text/matthew/7-14.htm
Text at verse 13. Westcott–Hort omit the words rendered “is the gate,” leaving only one gate in the saying; Westcott and Hort alone omit them; Tischendorf and the modern critical line bracket them; and Nestle 1904, the Byzantine text, the Orthodox text and both Receptus editions all print them unbracketed — so Nestle stands with the Byzantine here, giving two gates and two ways in strict antithesis. The MSB footnotes the omission. The defence of the shorter reading quoted above is Westcott and Hort’s own, quoted at length by the Pulpit Commentary; the words are theirs and not the Pulpit editor’s. A further difference of no consequence: the Byzantine and both Receptus editions read a second-aorist imperative where the others read a first-aorist ending. biblehub.com/text/matthew/7-13.htm
Greek, as printed in the lexical pages. “Narrow” at both verses is stenos (Strong’s 4728), three New Testament occurrences — Matthew 7:13, 7:14 and Luke 13:24. Strong’s and HELPS picture it differently and are not blended above: Strong’s derives it from the base of histēmi and glosses “narrow (from obstacles standing close about),” while HELPS gives “the closely-defined path God ordains to travel on to gain His approval.” “Narrow” in the second half of verse 14 is a different word, tethlimmenē — the perfect passive participle of thlibō (2346), ten occurrences; Strong’s gives the root as “to crowd,” HELPS as “rub together, constrict (compress),” and Thayer’s first sense is to press as grapes, with “a compressed way, i.e. narrow, straitened, contracted” at this verse. HELPS states that this verb is the root of thlipsis, the word for tribulation, and that link is printed above on its authority. A parenthesis in Thayer’s entry came through the source consulted corrupted and nothing from it is used. “Wide” is platys (4116) and “spacious” is eurychōros (2149), and each page prints a single New Testament occurrence, both at Matthew 7:13 — so both are hapax legomena. A caution: the translation counts displayed on the page for the first of those two words include a separate feminine noun meaning a street, and the figure there must not be read as the adjective’s. “Destruction” is apōleia (684), eighteen occurrences. “Gate” is pylē (4439), ten occurrences, three of them in these two verses. biblehub.com/greek/4728.htm biblehub.com/greek/2346.htm biblehub.com/greek/4439.htm biblehub.com/greek/4116.htm biblehub.com/greek/2149.htm biblehub.com/greek/684.htm
On the shape of the image the commentators differ, and one of them says the passage is obscure. The Expositor’s Greek Testament puts the question — gate at the beginning, gate at the end, or gate and way one thing — and leaves it open; Vincent, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown and the Pulpit Commentary all put the gate at the beginning, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown arguing expressly against the alternative; Ellicott treats gate and way as one and turns to John 14:6 and John 10:7, with the guard quoted above. Ellicott’s careful note on “destruction” is quoted at length because his qualification — that the word implies waste rather than annihilation, and that waste “does not absolutely exclude the possibility of deliverance” — is regularly dropped when he is cited. biblehub.com/commentaries/matthew/7-13.htm biblehub.com/commentaries/matthew/7-14.htm
On “few there be that find it.” Jamieson-Fausset-Brown’s refusal to soften it and Ellicott’s long paragraph are both quoted as attributed. Ellicott’s paragraph is printed at length deliberately: his argument turns on the clause “the words used are emphatically present,” which a shorter quotation loses entirely. It should be said plainly that no commentator consulted issues an explicit warning against reading “few” as a statistic; the nearest approaches are Ellicott’s grammatical point and Chrysostom’s redirection, and both are given above as what they are. Neither Vincent nor the Expositor’s Greek Testament has a note at verse 14 on the page consulted, and nothing is attributed to either there.
Two attributions that are easy to get wrong, and are handled here. The allegory of the little door quoted by both Vincent and Ellicott is not theirs: it belongs to the Pinax, or Tablet, of Cebes — a pagan Greek work which they each quote in a different English rendering — one ending “true culture,” the other “true discipline.” They are one source in two translations, not two independent witnesses, and neither rendering is printed above. The four lines of verse that close Barnes’s note are Isaac Watts’s, quoted by Barnes, and are likewise not printed above. The Pulpit Commentary also quotes a definition of life from Bishop Westcott, and that phrase is Westcott’s.
St John Chrysostom, Homily 23 on Matthew. Public domain (NPNF Series 1, Vol. 10). Its printed lemma is “Matt. VII. 1” — “Judge not” — so a reader working from the lemma alone would never look here for the narrow gate; but the homily runs the length of Matthew 7:1 to 7:20 and expounds these verses within it. The boundary is confirmed at the upper end: Homily 24 is lemma’d at Matthew 7:21. The lemma of the preceding homily could not be resolved on the page consulted and is not cited. The Pulpit Commentary quotes Chrysostom’s sentence about the city in a different English rendering from the standard translation; the wording printed above is the standard one, checked directly. The phrase “violent men take it by force,” which stands beside the passage quoted, is Chrysostom quoting Matthew 11:12 and is not printed above as his. www.newadvent.org/fathers/200123.htm www.newadvent.org/fathers/200124.htm
A claim looked for and verified absent. The connection between this passage and the “Two Ways” of the Didache is very widely made, and a dedicated search of both commentary pages found no mention of the Didache, of the Epistle of Barnabas, or of Deuteronomy 30, Jeremiah 21, Psalm 1 or Proverbs. That is a confirmed absence rather than a failure to find, and the connection is therefore not made above. The bare phrase “two ways” does appear on the page — the Expositor’s Greek Testament heads its note with it and Matthew Henry writes that “there are but two ways” — but neither is a reference to the Didache’s catechesis, and the distinction is recorded here so that a reader who checks the page is not misled. The one ancient parallel the commentators do cite is the pagan allegory of Cebes, noted above. Gill separately cites the Jewish canons on the widths of private and public roads, and the Pulpit Commentary a line from Ecclesiasticus; neither is used above.
Fifty-one more like it
If one week changed how you read that passage, Follow Me has fifty-one others, each given the same treatment.