What if Jesus never gave the church its rules? Matthew 18 reveals something more human: communities adapting old traditions to meet new problems.
There’s a phrase in Matthew’s Gospel that probably doesn’t sound strange at all to modern Christians: “Tell it to the church.” Jesus is supposedly explaining how believers should resolve conflicts, and involving the church seems perfectly reasonable. Except there’s a problem. When Jesus was alive, there was no Christian Church as a separate institution. So why is Matthew’s Jesus giving instructions about how such a church should operate?
That little historical wrinkle opens a much bigger conversation about how Scripture was actually created. What if Matthew wasn’t recording a timeless rule handed down from heaven? What if he was preserving a solution developed by Christians decades later as they struggled to hold their own community together? If so, the passage doesn’t show us God delivering a finished moral blueprint. It shows us human beings seeking, adapting, and creating new rules when the old answers weren’t enough. And if they had permission to do that, maybe we do too.
So, let’s dive into that… in this episode of Afterthoughts!
