Matius 5:11

5:11 “Blessed are you when people ¹  insult you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil things about you falsely ²  on account of me.

Matius 16:20

16:20 Then he instructed his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ. ³ 

Matius 23:3

23:3 Therefore pay attention to what they tell you and do it. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they teach. ⁴ 

Matius 24:26

24:26 So then, if someone ⁵  says to you, ‘Look, he is in the wilderness,’ ⁶  do not go out, or ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe him.

Matius 27:64

27:64 So give orders to secure the tomb until the third day. Otherwise his disciples may come and steal his body ⁷  and say to the people, ‘He has been raised from the dead,’ and the last deception will be worse than the first.”

[5:11]  ¹ tn Grk “when they insult you.” The third person pronoun (here implied in the verb ὀνειδίσωσιν [ojneidiswsin]) has no specific referent, but refers to people in general.

[5:11]  ² tc Although ψευδόμενοι (yeudomenoi, “bearing witness falsely”) could be a motivated reading, clarifying that the disciples are unjustly persecuted, its lack in only D it sy^s Tert does not help its case. Since the Western text is known for numerous free alterations, without corroborative evidence the shorter reading must be judged as secondary.

[16:20]  ³ tc Most mss (א² C W Ï lat bo) have “Jesus, the Christ” (᾿Ιησοῦς ὁ Χριστός, Ihsou" Jo Cristo") here, while D has “Christ Jesus” (ὁ Χριστὸς ᾿Ιησοῦς). On the one hand, this is a much harder reading than the mere Χριστός, because the name Jesus was already well known for the disciples’ master – both to them and to others. Whether he was the Messiah is the real focus of the passage. But this is surely too hard a reading: There are no other texts in which the Lord tells his disciples not to disclose his personal name. Further, it is plainly a motivated reading in that scribes had the proclivity to add ᾿Ιησοῦς to Χριστός or to κύριος (kurio", “Lord”), regardless of whether such was appropriate to the context. In this instance it clearly is not, and it only reveals that scribes sometimes, if not often, did not think about the larger interpretive consequences of their alterations to the text. Further, the shorter reading is well supported by א* B L Δ Θ Ë^1,13 565 700 1424 al it sa.

[16:20]  tn Or “Messiah”; both “Christ” (Greek) and “Messiah” (Hebrew and Aramaic) mean “one who has been anointed.”

[16:20]  sn See the note on Christ in 1:16.

[23:3]  ⁴ tn Grk “for they say and do not do.”

[24:26]  ⁵ tn Grk “they say.” The third person plural is used here as an indefinite and translated “someone” (ExSyn 402).

[24:26]  ⁶ tn Or “in the desert.”

[27:64]  ⁷ tn Grk “him.”