The Hyperlinked Bible
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Earlier text
Genesis 1:28BSB
God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth."
The Great Commission is the Adamic Commission reissued by the risen Last Adam. The threefold structure of Matthew 28:18-20 deliberately re-speaks Genesis 1:28: (a) "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me" fulfills the dominion / subdue clause now consummated in the exalted Christ (also echoing the universal authority given to the Son of Man in Dan 7:14); (b) "make disciples of all nations" fulfills the be fruitful and multiply / fill the earth clause, now realized spiritually through disciple-making rather than mere biological increase; (c) "I am with you always" re-voices the divine-presence formula that accompanied every patriarchal recommissioning (Gen 26:3, 24; 28:15; Exod 3:12) and that itself flows from the blessing-presence of the original commission. The Text Form is allusive rather than verbatim — there is no citation formula — but the threefold echo is recognized by Beale, Wright, and Köstenberger as the NT's clearest restatement of the creation mandate. Christ the Last Adam succeeds where every prior Adam-figure failed, and through him the commission becomes the church's mission: this is the most important NT use of Gen 1:28 in the canon (Beale's "indirect typological fulfillment").