How Not to Read the Great Commission

I guess all of us develop pet peeves in our area of specialty, whatever that area may be. Mine is when people use bad Greek to misinterpret Scripture, especially the Great Commission. I encountered my pet peeve the other day as I was preparing a Sunday School lesson for junior high students and found this in the material:

"Most of us are familiar with the Great Commission [Matt. 28:18-20] . . . Did you know that the beginning of the command is best translated from the Greek to the English to read, 'As you go, make disciples'? . . . Sometimes we read it to mean go and take a mission trip somewhere far away . . . This was not the meaning Jesus was trying to teach. Jesus was trying to teach us that wherever life takes us (and for you it just happens to include your school campus), we are to make disciples."

One problem is that he is wrong about the Greek. He has probably taken a class in Greek before, which allowed him to see that the word for "go" is a participle, which would in ordinary circumstances mean "as you go." What he didn't take into account is that the participle is part of a very specific grammatical construction that Matthew always and without exception uses to make the participle into a direct command. Thankfully, the translators of your Bible did know about this, which is why they translated it as "Go". I will personally write you a check for $20 if you own a print Bible that translates it "as you go."

The bigger problem is that this is a place where getting it right really matters. If Jesus meant, "As you go," then Christians don't really have to worry about going out of our way to tell anyone the Good News of Christ; we just need to tell people if they happen to cross paths with us (which, of course, is also true since our own nation is included in "all nations"). But as it truly is written we have a responsibility to go places where we usually would not go so that we can fulfill the specific purpose of making disciples. After all, we all agree that Jesus said "make disciples of all nations". Which one of us is going to just happen to stumble across an isolated tribe in the rain forest as we go about our daily business?

Here are some rules when you hear someone talk about Greek or Hebrew in the Bible:
1. Know their credentials. Just because someone brings up Greek doesn't mean they know a lot about it.
2. If a preacher or teacher uses Greek or Hebrew to bring a fuller meaning to the passage, he might be right. If he uses Greek or Hebrew to bring a different meaning to the passage, he is probably wrong.
3. You should buy several English Bible translations if you don't have them already. (Notice I said "translations", not "paraphrases"; you don't need The Message.) If you don't know Greek or Hebrew, the best way to get closer to the original meaning is to compare different translations to each other. If a preacher or a commentary writer translates a verse in a way that none of your English Bibles' translators did, trust your Bible.

Thanks for reading my rant. I hope it was at least a little bit helpful.