Abstract:
In Matthew 10:34 Jesus utters a very difficult saying. He claims that he has not
come to bring peace, but a sword. The form of this saying does not trace back to the
historical Jesus; it is the product of Matthew's redaction of a Q passage which is
found in a more original form in Luke 12:51. What did the evangelist mean when he
wrote that Jesus brought a sword? In the Hebrew scriptures the sword was a
common symbol for the judgement and punishment of God, and in later times it
represented a number of themes associated with the eschaton. It is argued in this
study that Matthew, who was fully immersed in the apocalyptic-eschatological
traditions of his day, probably used the sword motif in Matthew 10:34 to symbolise a
number of important eschatological events.
