The Smallest Mustard Seed—Matthew 13:32 -- By: W. Harold Mare

Journal: Grace Journal
Volume: GJ 09:3 (Fall 1968)
Article: The Smallest Mustard Seed—Matthew 13:32
Author: W. Harold Mare


The Smallest Mustard Seed—Matthew 13:32

W. Harold Mare

Professor of New Testament Language and Literature
Covenant Theological Seminary

[This paper was presented at the Thirteenth General Meeting of the Midwestern Section of the E.T.S., April 19, 1968, in response to a paper by Dr. Daniel Fuller entitled, “Benjamin Warfield’s View of Faith and History” (Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society, Vol. 11, No. 2 [Spring 1968], pp. 75–83). Dr. Fuller rejects Warfield’s views of Biblical inerrancy and believes that Jesus “deliberately accommodated his language in non-revelational matters to the way the original readers viewed the world about them, so as to enhance the communication of revelational truth.” For example, he insists that “although the mustard seed is not really the smallest of all seeds, yet Jesus referred to it as such because to the Jewish mind of Jesus’ day, as is indicated by several passages from the Talmud, the mustard seed denoted the smallest thing the eye could detect” (p. 81).]

It is to be recognized that the Bible is not intended to be a text book on science but rather is a written revelation of God’s redemptive history, involving the fulfillment of that redemptive plan in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

However, presupposing a God of truth who has revealed a rational and inerrant written communication to his rational creature, man, we have the right to expect that this communication, the Bible, when touching on science and secular, historical matters will express such material accurately and meaningfully.

How, then, for example, is the statement of Jesus in Matthew 13:32 to be understood, a verse which sets forth the mustard seed as being “the least of all the seeds”? Is this statement scientifically accurate, the phrase seeming to express in the language and understanding of that day the fact that the mustard seed was the smallest seed, a statement which might well be disputed by a modern day botanist?1

The Greek text of Matthew 13:32 which is to be examined in the light of the linguistic and historical sitz im leben is as follows:

o2 mikroteron men estin pantōn tōn spermatōn, otan de auxēthēi, meizon tōn lachanōn estin kai ginetai dendron, ēōste elthein ta peteina tou ouranou kai kataskēnoun en tois kladois autou.

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