Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Matthew 4:25

"And there followed him great multitudes from Galilee and Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judaea and [from] beyond the Jordan." — Matthew 4:25 (ASV)

This section summarizes Jesus’ spreading of the news of the kingdom. Summaries are common to narrative literature; but the one before us, with its parallel in 9:35–38, has distinctive features. (1) It does not just summarize what has gone before but shows the geographical extent and varied activity of Jesus’ ministry. (2) It therefore sets the stage for the particular discourses and stories that follow and implies that the material presented is but a representative sampling of what was available. (3) It is not a mere chronicle but conveys theological substance.

Jesus’ ministry included teaching, preaching, and healing. Galilee, the district covered, is small (approximately seventy by forty miles), but it had a population of up to three million and over two hundred cities and villages. Jesus “went around doing good” (Acts 10:38). The sheer physical drain must have been enormous. Above all we must recognize that Jesus was an itinerant preacher and teacher who necessarily repeated approximately the same material again and again and faced the same problems, illnesses, and needs again and again.

On Jesus’ teaching in a synagogue, see comment on Mk 1:21. The message Jesus preached was the “good news” (GK 2295) concerning the kingdom, whose nearness had already been announced (3:2; 4:17) and which is the central subject of the Sermon on the Mount (5–7). God was breaking into history with his saving reign in the person of his Son. The healings of various diseases among the people further attest the kingdom’s presence and advance (cf. 11:2–6; Isaiah 35:5–6).

The geographical extent of “Syria” is uncertain. From the perspective of Jesus in Galilee, Syria was to the north. From the Roman viewpoint Syria was a Roman province embracing all Palestine, Galilee excepted, since it was under the independent administration of Herod Antipas at this time. The term “Syria” reflects the extent of the excitement aroused by Jesus’ ministry; if the Roman use of the term is here presumed, it shows his effect on people far beyond the borders of Israel. Two of the areas specifically mentioned (Decapolis and the region across the Jordan) were primarily Gentile areas, a theme Matthew has already been emphasizing .

Jesus healed various types of sick people. In the NT sickness may result directly from a particular sin (e.g., Jn 5:14; 1 Corinthians 11:30) or it may not (e.g., Jn 9:2-3). But both Scripture and Jewish tradition take sickness as resulting from living in a fallen world (cf. on 8:17); the Messianic Age would end such grief (Isaiah 11:1–5; Isaiah 35:5–6). Therefore Jesus’ miracles, dealing with every kind of ailment, not only heralded the kingdom but showed that God had pledged himself to deal with sin at a basic level (cf. 1:21; 8:17).