Is it OK to call someone father?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward reconciliation

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The fifth commandment — "Honor your father and your mother" — appears in both the Exodus (20:12) and Deuteronomy (5:16) versions of the Decalogue, and Ephesians 6:2 cites it as "the first commandment with a promise." Honoring (Hebrew kabbēd, LXX tima) one's father requires identifying someone as one's father. Matthew 23:9 reads, in Greek, "And call no one your father on the earth, for one is your Father, the heavenly one" (kai patera mē kalesēte hymōn epi tēs gēs). Taken absolutely, the Matthean Jesus appears to forbid precisely the cognitive identification the Decalogue presupposes.

The leading harmonization, defended by R. T. France and Craig Blomberg, observes that Matthew 23:8-10 is a tightly structured triad of religious honorifics — "rabbi" (v. 8), "father" (v. 9), and "instructor/teacher" (kathēgētēs, v. 10) — directed against the status-seeking of the scribes and Pharisees (23:5-7) who "love the place of honor" and being called "rabbi." The Aramaic abba and Hebrew av were indeed used as honorifics for revered teachers and sages; rabbinic literature preserves the title Abba applied to certain authorities, and the patriarchs of the schools were spoken of in quasi-paternal terms. On this reading, "father" in v. 9 belongs to the semantic field of religious authority, not biological parentage. France, in the NICNT, argues the passage targets pretensions of spiritual paternity. Davies and Allison, in the ICC, agree that an absolute reading is overstated and that the polemic is aimed at claimants to religious authority. This contextual harmonization is strong: the verse stands inside an explicit list of teacher-titles, and the contrast term is the unique fatherhood of God, a religious rather than familial category.

What keeps the tension from fully dissolving is the Matthean formulation itself. The text says "call no one your father on the earth" (epi tēs gēs), a universalizing phrase, rather than "call no teacher father." Ulrich Luz, in the Hermeneia volume, notes that Matthew is deliberately maximalist in his anti-hierarchical rhetoric: the sayings function to flatten ecclesial structure within the community of those who are all "brothers" (adelphoi, v. 8), not merely to proscribe one professional title. The harmonization therefore succeeds at the level of authorial intent and semantic domain but requires the reader to supply the restriction "as a religious honorific," which the surface grammar leaves open. The early reception confirms the ambiguity: the Didache and later writers wrestled with the scope of such sayings, and the church never applied the prohibition to domestic usage, reading it — rightly, on the contextual analysis — as a critique of religious pretension.

Critically assessed, then, the two texts do not in fact issue contradictory commands once their domains are distinguished. The Decalogue governs kinship duty; Matthew 23:9 governs the politics of religious title-claiming and the community's relation to the one heavenly Father. They speak past each other rather than against each other. The residual difficulty is purely verbal — Matthew's chosen wording is broader than his evident target — which is why the harmonization is best classed as partial rather than complete.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable on a contextual reading; the apparent contradiction is largely an artifact of the saying's deliberately sweeping phrasing.