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Matthew 10:5-6 and 15:24 have Jesus restrict his and his disciples' mission to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" — explicitly forbidding any approach to Gentiles or Samaritans. Matthew 28:19 and Mark 16:15 reverse this completely, commanding the disciples to teach "all nations" and preach to "every creature." Acts and Paul then turn the gospel-to-Gentiles into the organizing program of the early movement. The pre-Easter Jesus restricts the mission; the post-Easter Jesus universalizes it.
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Cited passages
Jesus sent these twelve out, and commanded them, saying, “Don’t go among the Gentiles, and don’t enter into any city of the Samaritans. Rather, go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
But he answered, “I wasn’t sent to anyone but the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Cited passages
Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
He said to them, “Go into all the world, and preach the Good News to the whole creation.
They therefore, when they had testified and spoken the word of the Lord, returned to Jerusalem, and preached the Good News to many villages of the Samaritans.
They, being sent on their way by the assembly, passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria, declaring the conversion of the Gentiles. They caused great joy to all the brothers.
Notes on manuscript readings that bear on this passage — where the surviving witnesses differ over what the text says. Presented for transparency as the textual critic’s description, not as GEBible’s conclusion about the tension.
Examining the tension
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: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
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.
This is less a single contradiction than the editorial fault line running the length of Matthew's Gospel, and critical scholarship (Davies and Allison; Luz; Meier) treats it as one of the clearest windows into Matthean redaction and the social history of the early movement. Two bodies of text stand in tension. In the mission discourse Jesus restricts the disciples' outreach: "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matt 10:5-6); and to the Canaanite woman he says of himself, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matt 15:24). Against these stand the Great Commission, "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations" (Matt 28:19), the universal command of Mark 16:15, and the entire Gentile program of Acts and Paul.
The strongest harmonization is the salvation-historical or "phased-mission" argument (Blomberg; Carson; Köstenberger): Jesus restricted the pre-resurrection mission to Israel because God's redemptive plan unfolded in sequence — to Israel first, then, after the resurrection, to the nations — but always intended the eventual Gentile mission, foreshadowed even in Matthew (the magi of ch. 2, the centurion of 8:5-13, the Canaanite woman herself, who in the end is helped). This is a coherent theological scheme; it matches Paul's own "to the Jew first, and also to the Greek" (Rom 1:16), and on its own terms it renders the restrictive and universal sayings compatible as two stages of one design rather than flat contradictions. To that extent the tension is genuinely, if partially, harmonizable: a single program can have a temporally bounded first phase.
Two problems keep the harmonization from being complete. First, Matt 15:24 is not phrased as a temporary measure. Jesus tells a Gentile petitioner to her face that he was "not sent" except to Israel, with no qualifier about phases or sequence; the restriction is stated as the scope of his commission, and the woman prevails only by accepting the position of a "dog" who may eat the crumbs. The saying preserves an older, sharply particularist Jewish-Christian tradition that Matthew has not smoothed over. Second, one of the universalizing prooftexts is textually compromised. Mark 16:15 belongs to the Longer Ending of Mark (16:9-20), which is absent from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, unattested in the Sinaitic Syriac and the oldest Armenian and Georgian witnesses, marked with obeli or noted as doubtful in numerous later manuscripts, and unknown to Eusebius and Jerome as part of many copies. The consensus of textual criticism (Metzger; the Alands; Ehrman) is that it is a second-century scribal addition; the original Mark almost certainly ended at 16:8. Citing Mark 16:15 as Jesus' own command is citing a verse the earliest Gospel did not contain.
The critical reconstruction (Meier; Sanders; Fredriksen) frames the whole picture historically: the Jesus movement began as a Jewish renewal movement oriented to the restoration of Israel — which is why the restrictive sayings survived — and only became a programmatic Gentile mission in the wake of Paul and the post-70 reconfiguration of the church. The evangelists then retrojected the universal mandate onto the risen Jesus to authorize a Gentile mission already underway, which is why the universalizing material clusters at the post-resurrection seams (Matt 28; the secondary Markan ending). Matthew thereby preserves both layers side by side: an older restrictive tradition embedded in the ministry, and a redactional universalism appended at the close.
Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable as a salvation-historical sequence, but the harmonization is strained by the unqualified exclusivity of Matt 15:24 and undercut by the secondary, text-critically spurious status of Mark 16:15.
Sources for this reading