Does the Bible say, “Make disciples of all people groups”?

Rethinking a common understanding of Matthew 28:19

Jesus commands us to "make disciples of all nations." Today, many understand the phrase "all nations" (panta ta ethne) to mean ethno-linguistic people groups, and therefore, obedience to Jesus' command requires that we make disciples of every unreached people group on the planet.

The concept of nations as ethno-linguistic people groups undoubtedly has produced much good for the kingdom of God since its development in the 1970s. Missionaries have been able to identify many minority groups that had been previously overlooked in various corners of the globe and engage them with the gospel.

But at the same time, as with any example of group think, the Evangelical group think surrounding people groups has produced much confusion and caused many mistakes. These range from those who tend to identify every subculture as a different people group, to those missionaries who feel so strongly called to a specific people group that they refuse to share the gospel with others around them, and also those whose flawed understanding of eschatology has them believing that Jesus will return as soon as every Joshua Project identified people group reaches 3% Christian.

In today's Field Notes post, I do not attempt to deal with every problem associated with thinking in terms of people groups. I simply want to ask the question: What did Matthew (and Jesus) mean by panta ta ethne?

Here, I must admit that I should do much more work than can be done in this short post. The biblical scholar in me almost will not let me write this. Yet, I want to make a start at organizing some thoughts to which I can return later, if the Lord allows, and perhaps hear some feedback from readers to further spur or refine this thinking.

A brief history of the people group concept

Before talking about Matthew, we should first answer the question, "When did we start talking about people groups?" The origin of the people groups concept in missiology has become a legend that has now been passed down from generation to generation. The story focuses on the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. The congress, organized through the monumental influence of Billy Graham, sought to define for Christians more clearly what remained in the task of world evangelization.

At the time, the gospel had been proclaimed in each country on the map. For many, this represented the fulfillment of the Great Commission. Disciples had been made in every nation-state upon the earth.

But at the Lausanne Congress, missiologist Ralph Winter, speaking on cross-cultural communication, redefined the task of missions. Although there are many steps that can be traced leading up to Winter's address and there would be many important developments after it, without a doubt his address changed the trajectory of Evangelical missions, away from a focus on political and geographical boundaries and toward a focus on ethno-linguistic people groups.

Eventually, the Joshua Project would seek to catalogue every people group on the planet and categorize each as either reached or unreached and engaged or unengaged. While both their way of cataloguing different groups and categorizing the unreached remain controversial for many, in general their database has become fundamental for missions strategy and funding for many organizations and churches.

Today, we live in a world of people groups, and we define missions around this concept developed by Ralph Winter.

The Resulting Semantic Anachronism

What even is a nation? We should all recognize that there are different ways of conceptualizing a "nation." We might define a nation based upon a number of different unifying factors: language, culture, customs, ethnicity, shared history, kinship, or political unity.

Those of us who grew up in American public schools daily pledged allegiance to a flag that represented "one nation under God." When saying the Pledge of Allegiance, we identified ourselves as the nation of America, unified through our shared history and political unity. But of course, America is a nation that is made up of many nations, e pluribus unum.

And this was exactly the point of Ralph Winter and others: the way we most commonly use the word "nation" today in English — the people belonging to a particular country — is not the same way it was used in the Bible. Essentially, Winter was seeking to correct a semantic anachronism — where a later meaning of a word is used to understand an earlier usage of that word. To correct this semantic anachronism, Winter pointed the way toward nations as ethno-linguistic people groups.

While a biblical argument can certainly be made for taking the gospel to each unique language (e.g., Dan 7:14; Rev 5:9), the identification of panta ta ethne in Matthew 28:19 with people groups needs to be seriously questioned. In some circles, it has essentially become missiological orthodoxy that Matthew 28:19 means reach every unreached ethno-linguistic people group. While that may remain an application of the text, when we begin to say that this modern concept of people groups is the meaning of panta ta ethne, we too are committing the exegetical fallacy of semantic anachronism.

How would Matthew define ta ethne?

Matthew uses the word ethnos (singular) in his gospel quite regularly. In most instances, it appears in the plural indicating "the nations" or "the gentiles" in contrast with the Jews (Matt 4:15; 6:32; 10:5, 18; 12:18, 21; 20:19, 25). This usage changes slightly in Matthew 24. Here the phrase "all the nations" becomes prominent. Disciples will be "hated by all nations" (Matt 24:9), but the gospel must be proclaimed "as a testimony to all nations" (Matt 24:14). "All the nations will be gathered" before Jesus in judgment (Matt 25:32). Then, of course, the disciples must "make disciples of all nations" (Matt 28:19).

"The nations" from Matthew 4–20 identifies all non-Jewish nations as a singular yet diverse unit in contrast with the Jewish nation. But in Matthew 24–28, the focus shifts toward all of the particular nations among the nations/gentiles.

While that usage is helpful, it still does not answer how Matthew conceptualizes the concept of nations in Jesus' words. One clue could come from the word's usage in other Greek texts. We can quickly get such a summary from the standard Greek lexicon known as BDAG. BDAG explains that an ethnos is, first and foremost, "a body of persons united by kinship, culture, and common traditions." While it would be beneficial to track down all the references cited by BDAG in support of this definition, for today's post we will just take BDAG at its word.

The emphasis on kinship is one that is largely missing in today's conversations about ethno-linguistic people groups. Of course, one reason anthropologists and missiologists catalogue people groups based on languages rather than kinship is because languages can easily be observed and catalogued, but kinship (unless we were to add DNA to the concept) has been lost to time or perhaps only preserved in legend.

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start

In the worldview of Jews during the Second Temple period, kinship was not an irrelevant concept, and we only have to read Matthew 1 to verify that claim. Kinship is, in fact, so important to Matthew that he chooses to begin his entire gospel by tracing Jesus' genealogy. Jesus' kin is fundamental to understanding who he is. He is the son of Abraham and David.

Of course, the emphasis on Abraham takes us directly back to the first book of the Bible. The worldview of Second Temple Judaism was founded upon the cornerstone of the book of Genesis, and it does not take long to see that Genesis is simply a collection of extended genealogies. The toledot formula (And these are the records of...) is the primary organizing principle of the book.

Matthew begins his book as a sort of continuation of Genesis by starting with a genealogy. Undoubtedly, Matthew expects us to know that Abraham emerges in Genesis 12 from the confusion and scattering of the nations in Genesis 10–11. In these chapters we see the importance of both kinship and language. God confused languages, thus scattering the peoples across the face of the earth, but the basis of this scattering was kinship, since kinship is the organizing principle of the Table of Nations in Genesis 10. 

From Noah's three sons came seventy nations. Each nation could be identified on the basis of kinship. Thus nations received their names from the names of their progenitorial heads (e.g., Canaan and the Canaanites).

We could debate whether Moses intended to record every nation upon the earth in these seventy nations or if the number seventy was meant to symbolically represent all the nations upon the earth, since seven represents the completeness of creation. But whether Moses intended it or not, there developed a common Jewish understanding that the peoples of the earth were divided into seventy nations, and some sources even add, based on Babel, that the seventy nations speak seventy languages (e.g., 3 Enoch 3–4).

Additionally, it is no accident that Genesis ends with Jacob's family consisting of seventy persons (Gen 46). This is the mathematical representation of the final clause of the Abrahamic promises in Genesis 12:3 — "all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you." The nation that descends from Abraham has been chosen in order to bring God's blessing to all nations, and we might ask, "Which nations?" All seventy of the nations scattered in Genesis 10–11.

Such blessing is foreshadowed by Joseph's role as the savior of all nations (Gen 41:57), but it is confirmed in the fact that Jacob multiplies in a way consistent with his election. Genesis ends with the nation of Israel, in one sense, poised to be a blessing to all seventy nations, and it is likely a concept continued later in Moses' appointment of seventy elders over Israel (Num 11:16).

The meaning and the significance of panta ta ethne

Most notably, the pattern continues in the New Testament in Luke. Jesus first sends out the Twelve (Luke 9), but then follows up by sending out the seventy-two (Luke 10). Some manuscripts have Jesus sending out seventy. The discrepancy may be explained by two different ways of numbering the nations. While there are seventy nations in Genesis 10, if one was to add Israel herself and Edom, who descends from Esau, there would be seventy-two. So, whichever number is correct, the point remains that Jesus seems to be preparing a missionary force to proclaim the gospel "first to the Jew, and also to the Greek" (Rom 1:16).

Based on all these lines of evidence, I think a strong case can be made for Matthew understanding panta ta ethne as all seventy nations descended from Noah. The organizing principle of these nations is, therefore, kinship with language closely related because of Babel. Whether Matthew believed there were only seventy nations and languages or he simply saw the concept as representative of the whole, the conclusion is the same: Christ sent his disciples to make disciples of everyone everywhere.

At the very least, Matthew did not have in mind the 17,445 ethno-linguistic people groups catalogued by Joshua Project. He would not have even understood the concept. While we may apply the command to make disciples of all nations to these ethno-linguistic people groups, and while unreached people group data can help us see areas of greatest needs, we should avoid equating faithfulness to the Great Commission with making disciples of our modern concept of people groups. We should be careful to maintain a distinction between the meaning of panta ta ethne and its significance.