Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Matthew 27:40

And saying, Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest [it] in three days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.

40. Thou that destroyest the temple ] This is the mockery of the Jewish populace, who have caught up the charges brought against Jesus before the Sanhedrin. The taunts of the soldiers are named by St Luke alone: “If thou be the King of the Jews, save thyself” (Mat 23:37).

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

Thou that destroyest the temple … – Meaning, Thou that didst boast that thou couldst do it. This was one of the things that had been falsely charged on him. It was intended for painful sarcasm and derision. If he could destroy the temple, they thought he might easily come down from the cross.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

Verse 40. Thou that destroyest] Who didst pretend that thou couldst have destroyed the temple, and built it up again in three days. This malicious torturing of our Lord’s words has been noticed before. Cruelty is obliged to take refuge in lies, in order to vindicate its infamous proceedings.

If thou be the Son of God] Or rather, A son of God, i.e. a peculiar favourite of the Most-High; not , THE Son of God. “It is not to be conceived,” says a learned man, “that every passenger who was going to the city had a competent knowledge of Christ’s supernatural conception by the Holy Spirit, or an adequate comprehension of his character as the Messiah, and (‘ ) THE SON OF GOD. There is not a single passiage where Jesus is designed to be pointed out as the MESSIAH, THE SON OF GOD, where the article is omitted: nor, on the other hand, is this designation ever specified without the article, thus, ‘ . See Mt 16:16; Mt 26:63; Mt 28:19.”

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

And saying, thou that destroyest the temple,…. The Vulgate Latin, and Munster’s Hebrew Gospel, read, “the temple of God”; and add “ah!” here, as in Mr 15:29, and so Beza says it is read in a certain copy. They refer to the charge of the false witnesses against him, who misrepresenting his words in Joh 2:19, declared that he gave out that he was able to destroy the temple of Jerusalem, and rebuild it in three days time; wherefore it is added,

and buildest it in three days, save thyself. They reproach him with it, and suggest, that these were vain and empty boasts of his; for if he was able to do any thing of that kind, he need not hang upon the tree, but could easily save himself:

if thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross. The Jews themselves say a that the following words were said to Jesus on the cross,

“if thou be the Son of God, why dost thou not deliver thyself out of our hands?”

As Satan before them, they put an “if” upon the sonship of Christ: and seeing his followers believed in him as the Son of God, and he had owned himself to be so before the sanhedrim, they require a sign of it by his power, and to do that which they believed no mere man in his situation could do; which shows, that they had no other notion of the Son of God, but that he was a divine person: but his sonship was not to be declared by his coming down from the cross, which he could have easily effected, but by a much greater instance of power, even by his resurrection from the dead; and no other but that sign was to be given to that wicked and perverse generation.

a Toldos Jesu, p. 17.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

If thou art the Son of God ( ). More exactly, “If thou art a son of God,” the very language of the devil to Jesus (Mt 4:3) in the early temptations, now hurled at Jesus under the devil’s prompting as he hung upon the Cross. There is allusion, of course, to the claim of Jesus under oath before the Sanhedrin “the Son of God” ( ) and a repetition of the misrepresentation of his words about the temple of his body. It is a pitiful picture of human depravity and failure in the presence of Christ dying for sinners.

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

40. Thou who destroyedst the temple. They charge Christ with teaching falsehood, because, now that it is called for, he does not actually display the power to which he laid claim. But if their unbridled propensity to cursing had not deprived them of sense and reason, they would shortly afterwards have perceived clearly the truth of his statement. Christ had said,

Destroy this temple, and after three days I will raise it up, (Joh 2:19😉

but now they indulge in a premature triumph, and do not wait for the three days that would elapse from the commencement of its destruction. Such is the daring presumption of wicked men, when, under the pretense of the cross, they endeavor to cut them off from the hope of the future life. “Where,” say they, “is that immortal glory of which weak and credulous men are accustomed to boast? while the greater part of them are mean and despised, some are slenderly provided with food, others drag out a wretched life, amidst uninterrupted disease; others are driven about in flight, or in banishment; others pine away in prisons, and others are burnt and reduced to ashes?” Thus are they blinded by the present corruption of our outward man, so as to imagine that the hope of the future restoration of life is vain and foolish but our duty is to wait for the proper season of the promised building, and not to take it ill if we are now crucified with Christ, that we may afterwards be partakers of his resurrection, (Rom 6:5.)

If thou art the Son of God. Wicked men demand from Christ such a proof of His power that, by proving himself to be the Son of God, he may cease to be the Son of God. He had clothed himself with human flesh, and had descended into the world, on this condition, that, by the sacrifice of his death, he might reconcile men to God the Father. So then, in order to prove himself to be the Son of God, it was necessary that he should hang on the cross. And now those wicked men affirm that the Redeemer will not be recognized as the Son of God, unless he come clown from the cross, and thus disobey the command of his Father, and, leaving incomplete the expiation of sins, divest himself of the office which God had assigned to him. But let us learn from it to confirm our faith by considering that the Son of God determined to remain nailed to the cross for the sake of our salvation, until he had endured most cruel torments of the flesh, and dreadful anguish of soul, and even death itself. And lest we should come to tempt God in a manner similar to that in which those men tempted him, let us allow God to conceal his power, whenever it pleases Him to do so, that he may afterwards display it at his pleasure at the proper time and place. The same kind of depravity appears in the other objection which immediately follows: —

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

(40) Thou that destroyest the temple.Our Lord had not been formally condemned on this charge, the evidence being insufficient, but it had clearly impressed itself on the minds of the people, and was probably that which most worked upon them to demand His death. The other words, If thou be the Son of God, referred to the actual condemnation on the ground of blasphemy (Mat. 26:64-65). We may reverently think of the form of the taunt as having recalled that of the Temptation in the Wilderness. Then, as now, the words If thou be the Son of God were as a challenge from the Power of Evil. Now, as then, they were met by the strength of Faith. To accept the challenge would have been to show that He did not trust the Father, just as it would have been not faith, but want of faith, to have cast Himself from the pinnacle of the Temple, and therefore to disown His Sonship in the very act of claiming it.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

40. Thou that destroyest Our Saviour’s real words did not express the destroying the temple, but rebuilding it if they destroyed it. There is a beautiful innocence in the words, which they have to pervert before they can make them condemnable. See note on Mat 26:21. Save thyself Here is their strong argument. The people who had shouted but a day or two ago, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” now plainly see their mistake. If this man were divine, the Messiah, the Son of God, he would certainly never have been caught and crucified. So the chief priests are after all right, and this man is an impostor. See note on Mat 26:51. The fact that he is crucified is proof that he ought to be crucified. So are men worshippers of success. Come down from the cross All his miracles, his lessons, and the perfection of his character, go for nothing unless he perform this test miracle. Let him show his superiority over his enemies, assert his power, and save his own life. If he does not, then he is so far from being the Messiah that he is justly crucified for maintaining himself to be so.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Mat 27:40 , Euthymius Zigabenus. We should not fail to notice the parallelism in both the clauses (in opposition to Fritzsche, who puts a comma merely after , and supposes that in both instances the imperative is conditioned by ), , . . . being parallel to . ., and to .

, . . .] is an allusion to Mat 26:61 . For the use of the present participle in a characterizing sense ( the destroyer , etc.), comp. Mat 23:37 . The allegation of the witnesses, Mat 26:61 , had come to be a matter of public talk, which is scarcely to be wondered at considering the extraordinary nature of it.

Observe, moreover, that here the emphasis is on (comp. Mat 4:3 ), while in Mat 27:43 it is on .

Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary

40 And saying, Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.

Ver. 40. And saying, Thou that, &c. ] Dogs will be barking at the moon (as these dead dogs do here at the Sun of righteousness), At peragit cursus surda Diana suos. Christ goes on with the work, nothing retarded by their jeers and buffooneries. Didicit ille maledicere et ego contemnere, said he in Tacitus, Non tantum habemus otii, P. C., said Augustus to the senate, when they informed him of what such and such had said against him, We are not at leisure to listen to every slight slander raised of us. And of Severus the emperor it is recorded, that his care was, what was to be done by him, not what was said or censured of him. a “Do well and hear ill,” is written upon heaven’s gates, said that martyr. Railers are to be reckoned kill-Christs: words may more afflict than blows, Psa 42:3 ; Psa 42:10 . As “with a murdering weapon in my bones,” &c.

a , . Dio.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

40. ] Notice the characterizing present participle, as , ch. Mat 4:3 : thou puller down of.

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament