Sending out of the Twelve

Jesus sends the Twelve out two by two, which is both practical and legal, since two witnesses were required to establish anything, and he gives them authority over impure spirits.

The travel instructions are unusually specific and they amount to deliberate vulnerability. Take nothing for the journey except a staff. No bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra shirt. Matthew's version is stricter still and excludes the staff.

What that produces is a group of men entirely dependent on hospitality, arriving in villages with nothing to offer and nothing to fall back on. In a culture where receiving a traveller was a serious obligation, it also makes the response of each household a test in itself.

The instruction about which house to stay in is a small piece of realism: whatever house you enter, stay there until you leave that town. Moving to better accommodation once a more prosperous host offers it was evidently a temptation, and it is closed off.

Where they are not welcomed, they are to shake the dust off their feet as they leave, which was what a Jew did on returning from Gentile territory. Performing that gesture in a Jewish village is a strong statement.

Matthew's longer version adds instructions that clearly reach beyond this short tour, including warnings about being handed over to councils, flogged in synagogues and brought before governors and kings, which did not happen on this trip and did happen later. It also contains some of the hardest sayings anywhere: I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. A man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a person's enemies will be the members of their own household.

Alongside that is the reassurance about sparrows, two of which were sold for a penny, and about the hairs on a head being numbered.

What they actually do is summarised in one sentence. They went out and preached that people should repent, and they drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.

The anointing with oil is worth noticing because nothing in his own practice involves it. Oil was an ordinary medical treatment in that world, and the disciples are combining a normal remedy with what they had been given.

Two by two also meant nobody travelled alone through country where robbery on the roads was common and a stranger arriving after dark had no standing at all. The pairings are not listed, though the names of the Twelve are given elsewhere in pairs, and Peter with Andrew and James with John are the obvious ones.

How long they were away is unknown. When they come back they report everything they had done and taught, and the reception is immediate and exhausting: so many people are coming and going that they do not even have a chance to eat, which is why he takes them away by boat to a quiet place and the crowd follows on foot around the shore.