The Big Idea
There is a sentence in Matthew that almost every branch of the church has claimed as its own charter. Rome heard in it the authority of an office. Luther and Calvin heard the preaching of the gospel. The Anabaptists heard the gathered congregation discerning together. In our own century, a great many believers have heard permission to speak directly to the devil. Four readings, one verse: "Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Matthew 18:18).
Somebody has to be wrong. Possibly everybody is partly right. The only way to find out is to do what we always do at Pleasant Springs: ask who wrote it, who first heard it, and what it originally meant — before we ask what it means for us. We will read the Greek New Testament alongside the ESV, walk the whole field of interpretations with their sources, settle the argument that has run over four Greek words since 1939, and then answer the question this lesson exists for: what would the congregation in Matthew's own church have understood, sitting in a house, hearing this scroll read aloud?
Fair warning: the answer is both more modest and more serious than any of the four popular versions.
First, read the whole paragraph. Verse 18 has been quoted alone so often that most Christians have never seen the four sentences it is attached to. It is not a free-standing promise. It is the hinge in the middle of a procedure.
Greek New Testament — Matthew 18:15–20
18:15 Ἐὰν δὲ ἁμαρτήσῃ εἰς σὲ ὁ ἀδελφός σου, ὕπαγε ἔλεγξον αὐτὸν μεταξὺ σοῦ καὶ αὐτοῦ μόνου. ἐάν σου ἀκούσῃ, ἐκέρδησας τὸν ἀδελφόν σου·
18:16 ἐὰν δὲ μὴ ἀκούσῃ, παράλαβε μετὰ σοῦ ἔτι ἕνα ἢ δύο, ἵνα ἐπὶ στόματος δύο μαρτύρων ἢ τριῶν σταθῇ πᾶν ῥῆμα·
18:17 ἐὰν δὲ παρακούσῃ αὐτῶν, εἰπὲ τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ· ἐὰν δὲ καὶ τῆς ἐκκλησίας παρακούσῃ, ἔστω σοι ὥσπερ ὁ ἐθνικὸς καὶ ὁ τελώνης.
18:18 Ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν· ὅσα ἐὰν δήσητε ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἔσται δεδεμένα ἐν οὐρανῷ, καὶ ὅσα ἐὰν λύσητε ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἔσται λελυμένα ἐν οὐρανῷ.
18:19 Πάλιν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι ἐὰν δύο συμφωνήσωσιν ἐξ ὑμῶν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς περὶ παντὸς πράγματος οὗ ἐὰν αἰτήσωνται, γενήσεται αὐτοῖς παρὰ τοῦ πατρός μου τοῦ ἐν οὐρανοῖς.
18:20 οὗ γάρ εἰσιν δύο ἢ τρεῖς συνηγμένοι εἰς τὸ ἐμὸν ὄνομα, ἐκεῖ εἰμι ἐν μέσῳ αὐτῶν.
English Standard Version
18:15 "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother."
18:16 "But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses."
18:17 "If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector."
18:18 "Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
18:19 "Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven."
18:20 "For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them."
Church tradition from Papias in the early second century onward names Matthew the tax collector (Matthew 9:9; 10:3) as the author of this Gospel — the most thoroughly Jewish of the four, organised around five great discourses. Matthew 18 is the fourth of them, and it is unique: it is the only extended block of teaching in any Gospel devoted to how a congregation handles sin inside its own body.
Two details of Matthew's authorship bear directly on our verse.
And there is a quiet irony in the author. The final step of the procedure is "let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector" — written down by a tax collector, in the Gospel that records Jesus being repeatedly accused of eating with exactly those people (9:10–13; 11:19). Matthew, of all men, knew what Jesus does with someone in that category.
Matthew wrote, most scholars judge, for a largely Jewish-Christian congregation — often located at Antioch — somewhere in the AD 60s to 80s. They were living through the most painful separation of their lives: the parting of the ways between the synagogue and those Jews who confessed Jesus as Messiah.
That single fact transforms the sentence. These people knew exactly what it felt like to be excluded. The synagogue ban was not theory to them. Judaism had two levels of it — נִדּוּי (niddui), a temporary exclusion, and חֵרֶם (ḥerem), full excommunication — and John 9:22 records that in Jesus' own generation anyone confessing him as Christ would be put ἀποσυνάγωγος, "out of the synagogue."
So he hedges the authority four ways: with the Torah's own procedure of private reproof (v.15), with Israel's two-or-three-witness rule from Deuteronomy 19:15 (v.16), with a stated goal that is not justice but recovery — "you have gained your brother" — and finally with the promise that the risen Jesus is personally standing in the room while the verdict is read (v.20).
One more thing about this audience: they had no bishops yet. When Matthew writes "tell it to the church," his first readers do not picture a tribunal of clergy in another city. They picture the room they are sitting in.
"Binding and loosing" was not a phrase Jesus coined. It was in the air, and it was in the air in at least three different ways. Getting the chronology right is the whole game here — and it is exactly where most commentaries go wrong.
To forbid and to permit
In rabbinic legal language, to "bind" a thing is to rule it forbidden and to "loose" it is to rule it permitted. Strack and Billerbeck's great commentary gathered these references, and through that collection this reading passed into nearly every modern commentary on Matthew.
The catch: the Mishnah was compiled around AD 200 and the Talmuds later still — a century and more after Matthew. The idiom may well be older than its earliest surviving witness; legal shorthand usually is. But "may well be" is an argument, not a proof, and it is worth admitting that out loud.
There is one genuinely first-century witness. Josephus writes that under Queen Alexandra the Pharisees held power "to banish and to recall, to loose and to bind" (Jewish War 1.111). Note what that describes: not classroom rulings about permitted foods, but authority over persons — sending away and bringing back.
Reproof, witnesses, and exclusion
Here the parallel is startling, and unlike the rabbinic evidence it is demonstrably older than Matthew. The community at Qumran had a written procedure for confronting a sinning member that runs step for step alongside Matthew 18:
• Damascus Document 9:2–8 — no charge may be brought against a brother unless he has first been reproved, before witnesses, in obedience to Leviticus 19:17. To accuse without first reproving is itself the sin.
• Community Rule 5:24–6:1 — "they shall rebuke one another in truth, humility and charity… let no man bring a charge before the Many unless he has first rebuked him in the presence of witnesses."
• Community Rule 6:24–7:25 — a full penal code of graded exclusions from the community meal, ending in permanent expulsion for the incorrigible.
Lawrence Schiffman showed that at Qumran reproof was not pastoral etiquette but a legal prerequisite for any punishment, formally witnessed and recorded, and derived directly from the command of Leviticus 19:17. Matthew 18:15–17 is that same procedure, in Greek, from the same Levitical root, for a community that met in houses instead of by the Dead Sea.
Binding spirits and loosing their captives
The same two verbs run through the Second-Temple Jewish literature (valuable historical witnesses, not Scripture) in an entirely different sense — and this material is contemporary with or earlier than the New Testament, not later:
• 1 Enoch 10:4–12 — "Bind Asael hand and foot and cast him into the darkness"; the fallen angels bound for seventy generations.
• Jubilees 10:7–11 — the evil spirits bound, a tenth left loose.
• Tobit 3:17; 8:3 — Raphael "bound" the demon Asmodeus.
• Testament of Levi 18:12 — the coming priest "shall bind Beliar" and give his children authority to trample the evil spirits.
• And in the New Testament itself: Jesus binds the strong man before plundering his house (Matthew 12:29); the bent woman is one "whom Satan bound for eighteen years" and who must be loosed (Luke 13:16); Satan is bound with a key and a chain (Revelation 20:1–3).
"Where two or three are gathered"
Verse 20 has a close parallel in the rabbinic saying that "if two sit together and words of Torah pass between them, the Shekhinah — the divine Presence — rests between them" (Mishnah, Avot 3:2). The logic is identical. But watch the substitution: what the rabbis said of God's Presence and the Torah, Matthew's Jesus says of himself and his own name.
That is the engine of verse 18. The assembly's verdict holds in heaven because heaven is standing in the room.
Almost every dispute about this verse is really a dispute about what kind of thing is being bound: a rule, a person, a sin, a spirit, or an office. Here is the whole field. Each view is stated the way its best advocate would state it, followed by the honest objection and the names worth reading. Two of them the evidence supports strongly. Several are partly right. One reverses the sentence.
Halakhic ruling — forbidding and permitting
The case: the rabbinic idiom means exactly this — the schools of Hillel and Shammai were described in these very terms, Shammai binding much on the people and Hillel loosing — and the neuter "whatever things" fits rulings more naturally than people. Matthew's church faced real questions — sabbath, food, marriage, the terms of Gentile inclusion — and Acts 15 shows the apostolic church doing precisely this: "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements" (Acts 15:28). Some things bound, some things loosed.
The problem: the clearest evidence for the idiom is centuries later than Matthew, and the paragraph in front of us is not a doctrinal question at all — it is one brother sinning against another. The neuter argument also cuts less cleanly than it looks: Greek routinely uses neuter forms of people as classes, and D. A. Carson judges that in 18:18 "the context demands that persons are meant."
Church discipline — exclusion and restoration
The case: this is what the paragraph is about. Verses 15–17 are a disciplinary procedure ending in "let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector"; verse 18 ratifies it; verse 19 supplies the quorum. The pre-Christian parallel at Qumran matches step for step. And the apostolic church did exactly this — 1 Corinthians 5:1–5 binds a man, and 2 Corinthians 2:5–11 looses the same man: "you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him."
The problem: by itself it does not explain the neuter "whatever things," nor the same saying in the very different setting of Matthew 16:19.
Forgiving and retaining sins
The case: John 20:23 ("if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven… if you withhold forgiveness, it is withheld") is formally parallel, and the very next paragraph of Matthew 18 is about forgiving seventy-seven times. The church's whole penitential tradition grew from this reading.
The problem: John 20:23 does not contain the words bind or loose. The identification is assumed, not argued. And Matthew elsewhere expects believers to forgive without any authorisation whatsoever (5:23–26; 6:12–15; 18:21–35). If forgiveness required a licence, the parable that follows this passage would make no sense.
Exorcism — binding demons, loosing their captives
The case: this is what the verbs actually mean in the literature closest to Matthew in time — 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, the Testaments — and in the New Testament itself (Matthew 12:29; Luke 13:16; Revelation 20:1–3). In Matthew 16 the promise stands beside "the gates of Hades shall not prevail," and the keys of 16:19 have their counterpart in the key of the abyss (Revelation 20:1) and the keys of Death and Hades (Revelation 1:18). Jesus had already given the Twelve authority over unclean spirits (Matthew 10:1, 8).
The problem: neither Matthew 16 nor Matthew 18 mentions demons, and in chapter 18 the surrounding paragraph is unmistakably about a sinning brother and a congregational hearing. The reading is considerably stronger at 16:19 than at 18:18.
The keys of Peter — jurisdiction and office
The case: Matthew 16:19 is addressed to Peter alone, in the singular, with the keys of Isaiah 22:22 — the steward's key of the house of David, which opens and no one shuts. Matthew does record a personal commission before he records a corporate one.
The problem: Matthew 18:18 repeats the identical promise to the whole assembly in the plural, which is hard to square with a transferable office. The ancients felt the difficulty immediately. Origen insisted the promise belongs "to every one who becomes such as that Peter was" (Commentary on Matthew 12.11), and Tertullian went to the opposite extreme, arguing the gift was Peter's personally and concluding: "the right and arbitrament is the Lord's, not the servant's; God's Himself, not the priest's" (On Modesty 21).
The office of the keys — declaring, not deciding
The case: it takes the Greek construction seriously (see Part Six), and it explains how a fallible assembly can speak with heaven's authority — because it is not speaking on its own. Jerome had already made the point in the fourth century: the minister who binds and looses is like the Levitical priest inspecting a leper (Leviticus 13–14). He does not make the man clean or unclean. He declares what God has already determined.
The problem: it can be pressed until nothing actually happens in the room — which does not fit a text whose previous verse renders a verdict and whose next verse convenes a quorum.
The Rule of Christ — congregational discernment
The case: it fits Matthew's plural verbs and the conspicuous absence of any officer in the passage. The deciding body in Matthew's own text is simply "the church." Acts 15 shows a whole assembly — not one man — reaching a decision.
The problem: a congregation can be as wrong as a bishop. Without the controls of verse 20 and the mercy of verses 12–14 and 21–35, "discernment" becomes majority opinion with a proof text attached.
"I bind you, Satan"
What is right in it: Christ genuinely has given his people authority over the powers (Luke 10:19; Ephesians 6:10–18; James 4:7), and View 4 above shows that the vocabulary really does belong to that world. The instinct that this language touches spiritual conflict is not baseless.
Where it goes wrong: the formula reverses the sentence. Verse 18 does not say heaven ratifies whatever we declare; the Greek points the other way — earth aligns with a verdict already settled in heaven. No believer anywhere in the New Testament says "I bind you, Satan," and Jude 9 pointedly shows the archangel Michael refusing to presume on his own authority in a dispute with the devil, saying instead "the Lord rebuke you." As for "loosing" money or healing — there is nothing in this text to hang it on.
Verse 18 does not use a simple future tense. It uses ἔσται δεδεμένα — the future of "to be" plus a perfect passive participle. Grammarians call this a future perfect periphrastic. Woodenly: "shall be in the state of having been bound in heaven."
Everything turns on whether that perfect carries its normal sense of prior action. If it does, Jesus is saying: whatever you bind on earth will have already been bound in heaven — the church ratifies heaven's decision, not the reverse. If it does not, he is simply promising that heaven will back the church's decision.
Where it stands today. The strongest argument on Mantey's side is not Mantey's. D. A. Carson freely grants that on syntax alone "it seems impossible to reach a firm decision" — plenty of Greek perfects do carry something other than perfect force. Then he asks the better question: why this form and not another? The verb λύω ("loose") has a full set of participles available, so "it is difficult to see why Matthew did not use either the future or the present participle… if that was all he meant." Carson concludes the two verbs "must therefore be rendered 'shall have been bound / loosed.'" The grammarian Nigel Turner reached the same verdict. On the other side, Stanley Porter and other verbal-aspect scholars answer that the Greek perfect encodes state rather than time, so the construction stresses a settled condition without necessarily dating it.
It is worth noting that the Greek-speaking church seems to have heard the fuller force. When Theodoret tells the story of Ambrose barring the emperor Theodosius from communion after the massacre at Thessalonica, he has the emperor sitting in his palace in tears, quoting this very verse: "for me the door of heaven is shut, for I remember the voice of the Lord which plainly says, Whatsoever ye bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven" (Ecclesiastical History 5.17).
What is safe to say. Even on the most cautious reading, this construction will not carry the popular idea that the church issues orders which heaven then obeys. Carson draws the line exactly: the apostle "has no direct pipeline to heaven, still less do his decisions force heaven to comply; but he may be authoritative in binding and loosing because heaven has acted first." The state in heaven is settled. The church's task is to say on earth what is already true in heaven.
Now the payoff. Strip away twenty centuries of church politics and put yourself in that house in Antioch, hearing this scroll read aloud for the first time. You are not asking our questions. You are not wondering who runs the universal church or whether you may command a demon. You have a much more immediate problem: a member of our congregation has wronged another member and will not stop — and we have already been thrown out of one assembly this year.
Here is what you would have heard.
The original sense, in one sentence
To a small, recently-excluded Jewish-Christian congregation, Matthew 18:18 said: when this assembly, following the Torah's own procedure of reproof and witnesses, gathered in the name of the risen Jesus who is standing among you, declares a matter closed or a brother out — or declares him forgiven and back in — that verdict is not a human opinion. It is heaven's verdict, spoken on earth.
The authority is real; it is corporate rather than personal; it is derived rather than autonomous; it is exercised under the Torah's procedures and under the Lord's own presence — and its entire purpose is to gain the brother back, not to win the case. What it did not mean to them: that a church may bind whatever it likes and heaven must comply; that one man holds the keys alone; or that a believer may issue commands to Satan and expect them enforced. Every one of those readings runs against either the plural verbs, the perfect participle, or the parable on either side.
We are not left guessing. Within twenty-five years of the resurrection, the apostolic churches were doing this, and Paul describes both halves of it in letters we still have.
And the range in between is always restorative: "restore him in a spirit of gentleness" (Galatians 6:1); "do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother" (2 Thessalonians 3:14–15); cf. 1 Timothy 1:20; Titus 3:10.
Go deeper
The companion research page carries the full six-stage study, the complete bibliography, and the ancient interpreters in their own words.
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This lesson online: ps-church.com/discipleship/binding-and-loosing
Full research page & bibliography: ps-church.com/deep-research/matthew-18-18
Scripture set in the Greek New Testament and the ESV, per the practice of Pleasant Springs Church. Research grounded in Davies–Allison (ICC), Luz (Hermeneia), France (NICNT), Keener, Nolland, Hagner and Carson (EBC); the 1939 JBL exchange between J. R. Mantey and Henry J. Cadbury; Richard H. Hiers, JBL 104 (1985); Dennis Duling, Forum 3 (1987); Göran Forkman and Lawrence Schiffman on exclusion and reproof at Qumran; and the ancient interpreters read in their own words — Origen, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Augustine, Jerome, Cyprian and Theodoret.