The scribe trained for the kingdom
Jesus spends a whole afternoon telling parables, asks the Twelve whether they have followed any of it, and they say yes. What He says next is the last line of the discourse, and He says it about them.
✝️ Matthew 13:51-52 (ESV)
51 "Have you understood all these things?" They said to him, "Yes." 52 And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."
He calls them scribes. Matthew uses that word twenty-two times, and all but a few of them name the men ranged against Jesus. Here He hands the title to the Twelve as a description of what He has made them.
In one sentence: Jesus tells the Twelve they have been discipled into a scribal role that holds the whole Old and New revelation and is sent to spend it.
Key Takeaways
Lessons about Jesus
- Jesus makes scribes. The participle is passive — μαθητευθείς, "having been discipled" — and the chapter says whose work the understanding is: "to you it has been given" (13:11, ESV). Jesus is the one who gives it, and He gives it to people who started the day as fishermen and a tax collector.
- Jesus gives His disciples the whole of what God has said. The storeroom holds new stock and old stock together. He had already put it plainly: "I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17, ESV).
- Jesus puts His disciples in the master's chair. Matthew uses οἰκοδεσπότης, "master of a house," seven times. Twice the text itself makes the master Jesus: in 10:25, and in 13:27, where the master is the sower Jesus names "the Son of Man" (13:37, ESV). The vineyard owner of 21:33 is God by strong implication, since he sends "his son" (21:37, ESV); the owner of 20:1 and 20:11 is God on the usual reading, which the parable leaves to its hearers. At 13:52 the master of the house is the disciple.
Memory verses
✝️ Matthew 13:52 (ESV)
52 And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."
✝️ Matthew 5:17 (ESV)
17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."
✝️ Ezra 7:10 (WEB)
10 For Ezra had set his heart to seek Yahweh's law, and to do it, and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel.
Be Transformed
- Think. Your understanding of Scripture is something God has worked in you — take "it has been given" (13:11) seriously. Thank Him for it by name this week, and go on asking Him for more of it, the way the disciples kept coming back to Jesus for the explanations (13:36; 15:15).
- Attitude. Stop ranking the old stock below the new. If you have quietly settled into the New Testament and left the Old for other people, the householder in this verse has half a storeroom. Read a prophet this month.
- Do. Spend it. The scribe trained for the kingdom "brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (Matthew 13:52, ESV), and the verb is present tense and habitual. Find one person this week who gets something out of your store: a child, a younger believer, someone at your table.
Prayer
Father, You are the God who teaches. You opened the disciples' ears when the crowd's stayed shut, and You have done the same for me — I did not earn a word of what I understand. Thank You for Your Son Jesus, who took twelve ordinary men and made them scribes of Your kingdom. Fill my storeroom, Lord: with the promises You made to Israel and the Gospel You have now revealed, and let me love both halves. Then send me out with my hands full, and make me generous with what You have given. In Jesus' name. Amen.
Study outline
- Who is writing, and to whom. A tax collector writing for readers who knew the Law.
- Where the verse sits. The disciples' "yes" and the "therefore" that answers it.
- What a scribe was. Ezra's office, the first-century profession, and the two scribes in Matthew who belong to Jesus.
- The householder's storeroom. A stocked room, a habitual bringing-out, new and old on one shelf.
- "Has been trained". Who does the discipling.
- "For the kingdom of heaven". A dative the Greek leaves open.
- Why the new was new. The mystery disclosed on the day of rejection.
- What Jesus is making. A stocked disciple sent to spend it.
Who is writing, and to whom
Matthew the tax collector
The early church is unanimous that the tax collector wrote this Gospel. Papias of Hierapolis names him around AD 135 and Irenaeus of Lyons around 175, and no competing tradition survives (ESV Study Bible, introduction to Matthew). That matters for this verse in particular. Matthew records the promise that Jesus makes scribes, and Matthew had no scribal training — Jesus called him off a tax booth (9:9), from the one profession in Galilee more despised than the scribes were respected.
Written for readers who knew the Law
He writes for readers who know the Law and the Prophets. He quotes the Old Testament constantly, opens with a genealogy running back to "the son of Abraham" (1:1, ESV), and writes "the kingdom of heaven" 31 times against 4 uses of "the kingdom of God." Mark and Luke write "the kingdom of God" 14 and 31 times and "the kingdom of heaven" never (counts from the SBLGNT). That circumlocution is what a Jewish readership would expect. So when Jesus reaches for a scribe and a household storeroom to describe His disciples, Matthew's first readers knew both pictures from the inside.
Where the verse sits
Given to the disciples, withheld from the crowd
Matthew 13 is the third of the five long discourses that give this Gospel its shape. The whole chapter is parables, and the chapter tells you why. The disciples ask Jesus outright: "Why do you speak to them in parables?" (13:10, ESV). His answer divides the room.
✝️ Matthew 13:11 (ESV)
11 And he answered them, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given."
Jesus then grounds that division in Isaiah. Matthew 13:14-15 quotes Isaiah 6:9-10 at length — two full verses, thirteen words running unbroken — on ears that hear and never understand. The parables sort hearers who were already sorted.
"Secrets" translates μυστήρια (mystēria, G3466). The ESV Study Bible glosses these as the mysteries of how the kingdom of heaven would operate, revealed to the disciples and withheld from the unresponsive crowd. Six verses on, Jesus tells the Twelve that prophets and righteous people longed to see what they were seeing (13:17).
Why 13:52 follows 13:51
So by verse 51 the disciples are holding something. Jesus asks whether they have understood. They say yes. Then comes Διὰ τοῦτο, "therefore" — and the therefore reaches back to their yes. Because you have understood, here is what you now are.
Verse 52 is itself a parable in miniature ("is like a master of a house"), and is read like any parable, for the point its first hearers would catch.
What a scribe was
Greek γραμματεύς and Hebrew סֹפֵר
The Greek is γραμματεύς (grammateus, "gram-mat-YOOCE", G1122). Behind it stands the Hebrew סֹפֵר (sofer, "so-FARE", H5608a), and the Septuagint uses γραμματεύς to translate it — including for the man who defines the office.
✝️ Ezra 7:6 (WEB)
6 this Ezra went up from Babylon. He was a skilled scribe in the law of Moses, which Yahweh, the God of Israel, had given; and the king granted him all his request, according to Yahweh his God's hand on him.
"Skilled scribe" is סֹפֵר מָהִיר (sofer mahir), which the Septuagint renders γραμματεὺς ταχύς — "a quick scribe," my own rendering of the Greek (Ezra 7:6, Septuagint text from Brenton's edition; no English Brenton is quoted here). Four verses later the Hebrew gives the job description as three infinitives: לִדְרוֹשׁ (lidrosh, to study), וְלַעֲשֹׂת (vela'asot, and to do), וּלְלַמֵּד (ulelammed, and to teach). Ezra studied the Law, obeyed it, and taught it — and the Greek Bible calls him a γραμματεύς for doing so.
A first-century profession
By the first century the office had hardened into a profession. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible notes at Matthew 5:20 that while the term could stretch to cover village clerks who drew up legal documents, in the Gospels it normally means men who were literate, formally trained in the Law of Moses, and teaching it to others. These were respected men, and they worked by citation. The same commentary observes at Matthew 7:29 that a teacher of the period avoided speaking on his own authority and reached for earlier authorities wherever he could.
So the word carries the sense of a credentialed professional: literate, trained, employed to know a text and rule from it. The student word in Greek is μαθητής (mathētēs, G3101), and it is a different word. That is what makes verse 52 the sentence it is — Jesus puts the two together. γραμματεὺς μαθητευθείς. The professional who is also an apprentice. A man with a qualification, sitting under someone else's teaching.
Why "scribes and Pharisees" pairs a trade with a school is taken up in a separate study, Scribes and Pharisees: a Trade and a School.
The 22 Matthew occurrences
A scribe's stock was old by design. Which makes what Matthew does with the word across his Gospel the thing to watch.
γραμματεύς appears 22 times in Matthew. They are with the chief priests when Herod hunts the infant Christ (2:4). They are the benchmark of an insufficient righteousness (5:20). They are the foil for Jesus's own authority in 7:29, the ones who say "this man is blaspheming" (9:3, ESV), the demanders of a sign (12:38), and the addressees of six woes in chapter 23 (23:13, 15, 23, 25, 27, 29). Twice a scribe stands somewhere else. In 8:19 one walks up and says, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go" (ESV). And in 23:34, at the bottom of the woes, Jesus says this:
✝️ Matthew 23:34 (ESV)
34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town,
Jesus has scribes of His own, and He sends them. The Macula linguistic annotation of the Greek New Testament — an open-licensed scholarly dataset, so a considered judgement by its editors — assigns the semantic domain of "religious official" to twenty of Matthew's twenty-two occurrences, and gives 13:52 and 23:34 the domain of "teacher, scholar" instead. Those two verses are exactly the two where the scribe belongs to Jesus.
The householder’s storeroom
θησαυρός = storeroom, not just treasure
θησαυρός (thēsauros, "thay-sow-ROSS", G2344) is the word behind English thesaurus, and it carries two senses: the valuables, and the room they are kept in.
Matthew uses it nine times. Seven of them mean the valuables — treasure in heaven (6:20), the heart's treasure (6:21), the treasure hidden in a field eight verses before ours (13:44). The annotation tags the magi's treasures (2:11) both as valuables and as the chests that held them. It puts 13:52 alone in a different semantic domain, one that contains just two words: θησαυρός and ταμεῖον, "storehouse" — the word Jesus uses for the private room you shut the door of to pray (6:6).
Four translation committees reached the same conclusion independently. The NIV, CSB, NLT and BSB all render it storeroom; the ESV, NKJV, NASB, LSB, KJV, ASV, WEB and YLT keep treasure. Both are inside the word's range. The storeroom reading is the one that makes the picture work — a householder walks into the room where the household's supplies are kept, and carries some out.
That picture has a prerequisite. A storeroom holds what was put in it. This householder has spent years filling shelves, and what he carries out today is the fruit of someone else's harvest and his own long labour of storing.
ἐκβάλλει = he keeps bringing out
ἐκβάλλει (ekballei, G1544) is present tense: he brings out, and goes on bringing out. It is also a surprisingly forceful verb. Matthew uses ἐκβάλλω 28 times, and the great majority of them are violent — casting out demons (8:16; 9:34; 12:28; 17:19), throwing a man into outer darkness (8:12; 22:13; 25:30), driving the traders from the temple (21:12), heaving the son out of the vineyard (21:39).
Five of the 28 carry a quiet sense (9:38; 12:20; 12:35 twice; 13:52), and two of them bear directly on this verse. The first is a commission. "Pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest" (9:38, ESV) — send out is ἐκβάλῃ, and the annotation gives it the same semantic domain it gives 12:35. The second is the sentence ours is built like:
✝️ Matthew 12:35 (ESV)
35 The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil.
Same verb, ἐκβάλλει. Same noun, θησαυρός. Same preposition, ἐκ. Matthew builds 13:52 out of the same three words as 12:35, in a different order, with the kingdom's contents poured in. (The parallel is my own observation, offered for the reader to check in the Greek above; the cross-reference data does not link the two verses.)
Matthew 12:35 comes with a diagnosis attached. Jesus says it while telling the Pharisees that "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" (12:34, ESV). What a man brings out reveals what he has stored. Set 13:52 against that and the storeroom becomes an examination: what comes out of you when you open your mouth about God is an inventory of your shelves.
New and old: time, not condition
καινὰ καὶ παλαιά — new things and old things, in that order.
Matthew has used this pair once before, and it looked like the opposite lesson:
✝️ Matthew 9:16-17 (ESV)
16 No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. 17 Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.
There the new and the old cannot be mixed. Here they sit on the same shelf. The Greek marks the difference.
παλαιός occurs exactly three times in Matthew: 9:16, 9:17, and 13:52 — verified against the SBLGNT morphology, and there are no others. καινός (kainos, G2537) occurs four times: 9:17, 13:52, 26:29, and 27:60. Both passages use both adjectives, and the Macula annotation assigns them different senses in each. At 9:16-17 both carry a Louw-Nida domain of nature and kind (58) — new as a different kind of thing from the old. At 13:52 both carry the domain of time (67) — of a former period against of a recent one.
The wineskins are old because they have perished. The stock in the storeroom is old because it has been there longer. Jesus is making two different points with the same pair of words, and both hold: a religious system worn through will not contain what He is pouring, and everything God has ever said stays on the shelves.
This shows that God does not discard His own words. He made promises to Abraham, gave the Law through Moses, spoke through the prophets, and every one of those is still stock. Jesus said it Himself in the same Gospel: "not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished" (5:18, ESV). The God who speaks keeps what He has spoken.
The commentaries' reading, and a merism
The commentaries consulted here converge: the "new" revelation from Jesus fulfils the "old" promises of the Old Testament (ESV Study Bible), which are read in light of the fuller message of the kingdom (both Cultural Backgrounds Study Bibles), with continuity between the eras and fresh items added (NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible). The NLT Life Application Study Bible adds that the professional teachers of the law were trapped in the old and blind to the new.
That reading is the settled one across every commentary consulted, and I hold it. A live alternative reads καινὰ καὶ παλαιά as a merism — a figure meaning simply everything, so that the point falls on the householder's abundance and generosity. Nothing in the application changes either way; a storeroom of every vintage is still a storeroom to be spent.
"Has been trained": the passive
μαθητευθείς (mathēteutheis, "math-ay-tyoo-THICE", G3100) is an aorist passive participle of μαθητεύω, "to make a disciple." The scribe in this verse has had discipling done to him.
The verb is rare. It occurs four times in the whole New Testament, and three of them are Matthew's:
| Reference | Form | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Matthew 13:52 | μαθητευθείς, aorist passive | the scribe of the kingdom |
| Matthew 27:57 | ἐμαθητεύθη, aorist passive | Joseph of Arimathea |
| Matthew 28:19 | μαθητεύσατε, aorist active imperative | the Eleven, commanded |
| Acts 14:21 | μαθητεύσαντες, aorist active | Paul and Barnabas, in Derbe |
Matthew's Gospel opens this word in the passive and closes it in the active. In 13:52 the disciple is made; in 28:19 the made disciple is sent to make others — "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (ESV). Everything between those two verses is the training.
How much the passive carries
How much the passive itself carries is contested. The passive of this verb can mean simply "became a disciple": the ESV renders the same form at 27:57 "was a disciple of Jesus," the NIV, CSB and NASB render 13:52 "has become a disciple," and the Macula annotation files both verses with ἀκολουθέω, "follow," away from the "make disciples" of 28:19. The grammar allows the reading that someone did the discipling without requiring it. Verse 11 settles who did.
This shows that God is the teacher of His own people. The understanding the Twelve claimed in verse 51 had been handed to them in verse 11 — "to you it has been given" — and the ESV's "has been trained" in verse 52 keeps that in view. Whatever you understand of Scripture, Someone taught it to you. The right response to it is thanks.
"For the kingdom of heaven": the hardest two words
The Greek is a bare dative, τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν, with no preposition at all. Greek can leave the relation unstated. English cannot, so every translation committee has to choose one. Fourteen versions produce eleven wordings and seven different relations:
| Rendering | Versions |
|---|---|
| trained for the kingdom | ESV |
| become a disciple of the kingdom | NASB 1995, NASB 2020, LSB |
| become a disciple in the kingdom | NIV, CSB |
| discipled in the kingdom | BSB |
| made a disciple in the Kingdom | WEB |
| made a disciple to the kingdom | ASV |
| instructed unto the kingdom | KJV |
| taught unto the kyngdome | Tyndale (1526) |
| discipled unto the kingdom | Rotherham |
| instructed concerning the kingdom | NKJV |
| discipled in regard to the reign | YLT |
"Trained for" makes the kingdom the purpose of the training. "Disciple of" makes the kingdom the subject matter. "Disciple in" makes the kingdom the place where it happened. All three are available in the Greek, and the Greek declines to pick.
Read the verse with the dative left open and it says something larger than any single rendering: the kingdom is what he was taught, why he was taught, and where the teaching happened, all at once.
(This site cites YLT and the NKJV only as witnesses to a translation decision — see How to Read the Bible and Fee and Stuart, below.)
Why the new was new: reading this dispensationally
This site reads Scripture dispensationally — God administering His purposes through successive arrangements, with the promises made to Israel staying Israel's (see Dispensationalism and Israel and the Church). Matthew 13 is where that reading does real work on verse 52, because the chapter itself says the contents of the storeroom had been withheld until that day.
Mystery in Matthew 13
Start with the word Jesus uses for them. μυστήριον (mystērion, "moo-STAY-ree-on", G3466) occurs 26 times in the Greek New Testament, and exactly three times in the Gospels — Matthew 13:11, Mark 4:11 and Luke 8:10, which are the same sentence in three accounts. Everywhere else it is Paul (19 times) or Revelation (4). Jesus says the word once, and He says it here.
Israel and the Church works out what the word means, tracing it back to the Aramaic רָז (raz, H7328) of Daniel 2: something God alone knows, which stays unknown until He says it, and which is then plain. Hidden, then disclosed. Matthew says the same thing about these parables in his own voice later in the chapter — Jesus "will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world" (13:35, ESV), which Matthew quotes from Psalm 78:2 and calls fulfilled.
Given on the day of the rejection
Now put that beside what Matthew 12 has just finished doing. The Pharisees conspire to destroy Jesus (12:14). The crowds ask, "Can this be the Son of David?" and the Pharisees answer that He casts out demons by Beelzebul (12:23-24). He warns them about a blasphemy that will not be forgiven (12:31), refuses them a sign beyond Jonah's (12:39), and redefines His family around "whoever does the will of my Father in heaven" (12:50, ESV). Then: "That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea" (13:1, ESV). Matthew dates the parable discourse to the day of the rejection.
The kingdom's shape in the interval
The King has been formally refused, and the kingdom's arrival in glory is therefore deferred. What Jesus discloses in these parables is the shape the kingdom takes in the interval — sown among four soils, growing with weeds in it until a harvest at "the end of the age" (13:39-40), netted good and bad together until angels do the sorting (13:47-50). An interval the Old Testament prophets had not been shown. Hence a mystery, and hence the "new" stock in verse 52.
How firmly each step holds
Two different things are stacked here and they hold differently. That μυστήριον means withheld-then-revealed is lexical and settled; Daniel 2, Colossians 1:26 and Ephesians 3:5 all say it in so many words. That Matthew 13 therefore describes a distinct administration of the kingdom between the rejection and the return is a systematic reading. It is this site's, and the exegesis above supports it, but covenant theologians read the same chapter as the kingdom already inaugurated rather than deferred, and they are reading the same verses. A reader should know which of the two they are being handed.
What it does to the storeroom
Whichever way that question falls, verse 52 refuses to let the disciple drop either half. The old stock is God's word to Israel. The new stock is what He disclosed that afternoon. This site's study of Romans 11 puts the same shape in a heading: two mysteries, "and neither cancels the other".
This shows that God adds without subtracting. He had more to say than He had yet said. That is why the picture is a storeroom: it has room for everything He has ever said.
What Jesus is making
Pull the five words together and the verse describes a person.
A scribe — trained in the Scriptures, able to handle a text. Discipled — trained by Jesus, in the passive, as a gift. Of and for and in the kingdom — its subject, its purpose, its home. A householder with a stocked storeroom — a store filled before it was needed. Who brings out, in the present tense, new and old — spending what God gave him, all of it, on the household in front of him.
Understanding is for the household. The householder in this picture does not open his storeroom to admire the shelves; he carries things out to be eaten. Matthew closes his Gospel with the same movement, now as a command: "teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (28:20, ESV). Paul says the same to Timothy, and the whole of the storeroom is in his sentence — "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17, ESV).
What stays in Galilee and what carries over
Parts of this picture belong to its first hearers. The scribe as a trained profession and the household storeroom are first-century furniture. So is the Twelve's own place: they heard the new stock spoken aloud, what Paul calls "revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit" (Ephesians 3:5, ESV), a position no later disciple holds. Your store is filled from what they received and wrote down. The rest of the verse carries over whole: Jesus still does the discipling, the store still holds both Testaments, and it is still stocked to be spent. Matthew's close, quoted above, hands it on to every disciple the Eleven would make.
This shows that God equips the people He sends. He does not commission and then leave a person to find supplies. He fills the store first, He does the filling Himself, and then He opens the door. So you may teach your children, answer your friend, and open your Bible in front of someone this week with something in your hands — because He put it there.
Discussion questions
-
μαθητευθείς is passive: the scribe has been discipled. The ESV keeps the passive; the NIV and NASB read "has become a disciple." What would the verse claim if Jesus had used the active — "every scribe who has trained himself for the kingdom"? And if Jesus did the training, what does that say about Him?
-
The disciples say "Yes" in verse 51, and Jesus's "therefore" in verse 52 hangs on that yes. Read 13:10-17 and 13:36 alongside it. What had actually happened to these men that made the yes true, and how much of it was their doing?
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Fourteen English versions supply seven different relations for a Greek dative that supplies none (see the table above). If you had to pick one — trained for, disciple of, disciple in — which would you choose, and what does your choice commit you to about what discipleship is?
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Matthew 9:17 says new wine bursts old wineskins. Matthew 13:52 says the householder carries out new and old together. How do you hold those two sentences at once, and where have you seen a church get one of them wrong?
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Jesus uses the word μυστήριον once in the Gospels, at Matthew 13:11, and Matthew dates the whole discourse to "that same day" (13:1) — the day of the confrontations in chapter 12. What does it commit you to if the parables were given because the King had just been refused? What changes if they were not?
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Matthew 12:35 says a man brings out of his treasure what he has stored there. Take that as a question about your own shelves: if someone listened to everything you said about God this month, what would the inventory look like — and which half of the storeroom is thin?
Group study sheet for a 40-minute group: two A4 sheets, or one with the guided path
The point, the passage, the questions and the response, from this study. Print on both sides of two A4 sheets, flipping on the long edge. While this block is open, printing the page prints the sheet; close it to print the study.
The Scribe Trained for the Kingdom
Matthew 13:51-52The point Jesus tells the Twelve they have been discipled into a scribal role that holds the whole Old and New revelation and is sent to spend it.
Ask: what comes to mind when you hear The Scribe Trained for the Kingdom
? Hear a few answers before anyone reads.
Matthew 13:51-52 51Have you understood all these things?” “Yes,” they answered. 52Then He told them, “For this reason, every scribe who has been discipled in the kingdom of heaven is like a homeowner who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”
Also read:
The Scribe Trained for the Kingdom
- Who is writing, and to whom. A tax collector writing for readers who knew the Law.
- Where the verse sits. The disciples' "yes" and the "therefore" that answers it.
- What a scribe was. Ezra's office, the first-century profession, and the two scribes in Matthew who belong to Jesus.
- The householder's storeroom. A stocked room, a habitual bringing-out, new and old on one shelf.
- "Has been trained". Who does the discipling.
- "For the kingdom of heaven". A dative the Greek leaves open.
- Why the new was new. The mystery disclosed on the day of rejection.
- What Jesus is making. A stocked disciple sent to spend it.
The Scribe Trained for the Kingdom
1
The disciples say "Yes" in verse 51, and Jesus's "therefore" in verse 52 hangs on that yes. Read 13:10-17 and 13:36 alongside it. What had actually happened to these men that made the yes true, and how much of it was their doing?
2
Jesus uses the word μυστήριον once in the Gospels, at Matthew 13:11, and Matthew dates the whole discourse to "that same day" (13:1) — the day of the confrontations in chapter 12. What does it commit you to if the parables were given because the King had just been refused? What changes if they were not?
3
Matthew 9:17 says new wine bursts old wineskins. Matthew 13:52 says the householder carries out new and old together. How do you hold those two sentences at once, and where have you seen a church get one of them wrong?
4
Matthew 12:35 says a man brings out of his treasure what he has stored there. Take that as a question about your own shelves: if someone listened to everything you said about God this month, what would the inventory look like — and which half of the storeroom is thin?
5
μαθητευθείς is passive: the scribe has been discipled. The ESV keeps the passive; the NIV and NASB read "has become a disciple." What would the verse claim if Jesus had used the active — "every scribe who has trained himself for the kingdom"? And if Jesus did the training, what does that say about Him?
6
Fourteen English versions supply seven different relations for a Greek dative that supplies none (see the table above). If you had to pick one — trained for, disciple of, disciple in — which would you choose, and what does your choice commit you to about what discipleship is?
The Scribe Trained for the Kingdom
- Think. Your understanding of Scripture is something God has worked in you — take "it has been given" (13:11) seriously. Thank Him for it by name this week, and go on asking Him for more of it, the way the disciples kept coming back to Jesus for the explanations (13:36; 15:15).
- Attitude. Stop ranking the old stock below the new. If you have quietly settled into the New Testament and left the Old for other people, the householder in this verse has half a storeroom. Read a prophet this month.
- Do. Spend it. The scribe trained for the kingdom "brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (Matthew 13:52, ESV), and the verb is present tense and habitual. Find one person this week who gets something out of your store: a child, a younger believer, someone at your table.
And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."
Matthew 13:52 (ESV)Father, You are the God who teaches. You opened the disciples' ears when the crowd's stayed shut, and You have done the same for me — I did not earn a word of what I understand. Thank You for Your Son Jesus, who took twelve ordinary men and made them scribes of Your kingdom. Fill my storeroom, Lord: with the promises You made to Israel and the Gospel You have now revealed, and let me love both halves. Then send me out with my hands full, and make me generous with what You have given. In Jesus' name. Amen.
The Scribe Trained for the Kingdom
Matthew 13:51-52Open Ask: what comes to mind when you hear The Scribe Trained for the Kingdom
? Hear a few answers before anyone reads.
Read it aloud Matthew 13:51-52
1
The disciples say "Yes" in verse 51, and Jesus's "therefore" in verse 52 hangs on that yes. Read 13:10-17 and 13:36 alongside it. What had actually happened to these men that made the yes true, and how much of it was their doing?
2
Jesus uses the word μυστήριον once in the Gospels, at Matthew 13:11, and Matthew dates the whole discourse to "that same day" (13:1) — the day of the confrontations in chapter 12. What does it commit you to if the parables were given because the King had just been refused? What changes if they were not?
3
Matthew 9:17 says new wine bursts old wineskins. Matthew 13:52 says the householder carries out new and old together. How do you hold those two sentences at once, and where have you seen a church get one of them wrong?
4
Matthew 12:35 says a man brings out of his treasure what he has stored there. Take that as a question about your own shelves: if someone listened to everything you said about God this month, what would the inventory look like — and which half of the storeroom is thin?
5
μαθητευθείς is passive: the scribe has been discipled. The ESV keeps the passive; the NIV and NASB read "has become a disciple." What would the verse claim if Jesus had used the active — "every scribe who has trained himself for the kingdom"? And if Jesus did the training, what does that say about Him?
6
Fourteen English versions supply seven different relations for a Greek dative that supplies none (see the table above). If you had to pick one — trained for, disciple of, disciple in — which would you choose, and what does your choice commit you to about what discipleship is?
- Think. Your understanding of Scripture is something God has worked in you — take "it has been given" (13:11) seriously. Thank Him for it by name this week, and go on asking Him for more of it, the way the disciples kept coming back to Jesus for the explanations (13:36; 15:15).
- Attitude. Stop ranking the old stock below the new. If you have quietly settled into the New Testament and left the Old for other people, the householder in this verse has half a storeroom. Read a prophet this month.
- Do. Spend it. The scribe trained for the kingdom "brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (Matthew 13:52, ESV), and the verb is present tense and habitual. Find one person this week who gets something out of your store: a child, a younger believer, someone at your table.
The Scribe Trained for the Kingdom
The point Jesus tells the Twelve they have been discipled into a scribal role that holds the whole Old and New revelation and is sent to spend it.
References & Recommended Reading
Bible texts and original-language data
All open-licence, queried from this repo's
bible-text.db — see references/README.md:
- SBL Greek New Testament (CC BY 4.0) — the Greek text of Matthew quoted and parsed here.
- MACULA Greek Linguistic Datasets (SBLGNT) (CC BY 4.0) — morphology and Louw-Nida semantic domains. Domain assignments are scholarly judgements by the dataset's editors, and are labelled as such wherever this study leans on one.
- World English Bible (public domain) — quotations labelled WEB.
- Westminster Leningrad Codex / unfoldingWord Hebrew Bible (public domain; CC BY-SA 4.0) — the Hebrew of Ezra 7.
- Brenton Septuagint (public domain) — Ezra 7:6, 7:11 in Greek.
- American Standard Version, Berean Standard Bible, King James Version, Tyndale New Testament (1526), Rotherham's Emphasised Bible, Young's Literal Translation — the translation-comparison table.
Translations quoted
Quoted under publishers' permission notices (see copyright):
- The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Crossway, 2016) — this site's default, and the translation of every quotation above unless otherwise labelled.
- NIV, CSB, NKJV, NASB 1995/2020, LSB and NLT renderings of Matthew 13:52 appear in the comparison table only.
Commentary and background
Each cited for a sentence or less, with attribution:
- ESV Study Bible (Crossway, 2016) — introduction to Matthew on authorship and the early testimony of Papias and Irenaeus; notes on 13:10-11 and 13:51-52.
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible and NKJV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan; John H. Walton and Craig S. Keener, eds.) — notes on Matthew 5:20 (what a first-century scribe was), 7:29 (citing earlier authorities), and 13:52.
- NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible (Zondervan) — note on 13:52.
- NLT Life Application Study Bible, Third Edition (Tyndale House, 2019) — note on 13:52.
- CSB Ancient Faith Study Bible (Holman) — translators' footnote at 13:52, "Or every scribe."
- Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth — the exegesis- before-hermeneutics method behind this study, and the rule for parables followed here: find the point the first hearers would have grasped, and leave incidental details alone. Their assessment of the KJV/NKJV textual base and of Young's Literal Translation is why neither is quoted above as a verse's meaning.
On this site
- How to Read the Bible — the method this study follows.
- Original Language Data — where the Greek and Hebrew data above comes from and how to query it yourself.
- Israel and the Church — the site's working-out of μυστήριον from Daniel 2 through Ephesians 3 and Romans 11, which the dispensational section above leans on rather than repeating.
- Glossary: Dispensationalism — the framework named, and the οἰκονομία behind the name.
- Preparing to Teach — Ezra 7:10's study, do, teach, and what Scripture asks of the scribe who teaches others.