In whose name is baptism to be performed?

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 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.

The data are consistent within each source and inconsistent between them. Every baptism actually performed in Acts uses a christological formula: Peter at Pentecost commands baptism *epi tō onomati Iēsou Christou* (Acts 2:38); the Samaritans are baptized *eis to onoma tou kyriou Iēsou* (8:16); Cornelius's household *en tō onomati Iēsou Christou* (10:48); the Ephesian disciples *eis to onoma tou kyriou Iēsou* (19:5). Four instances, varying prepositions, one consistent object — Jesus alone. Matthew 28:19, by contrast, has the risen Christ command baptism *eis to onoma tou patros kai tou hyiou kai tou hagiou pneumatos* — the threefold formula. If the Matthean Great Commission preserves Jesus's actual instruction, the apostolic practice in Acts uniformly departs from it.

The text-critical wrinkle is genuine but must be stated carefully. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing before Nicaea, repeatedly cites Matthew 28:19 in a short form — "Go and make disciples of all nations in my name" (*en tō onomati mou*) — omitting the triadic clause. Conybeare catalogued these citations in 1901 and argued the triadic formula was a post-Nicene liturgical insertion. The difficulty is that no extant Greek manuscript, and no version, lacks the triadic clause; the entire documentary tradition, including the early papyri and the major uncials, reads the full formula. Eusebius's short citations are most plausibly explained as loose paraphrase keyed to the missionary thrust of the verse rather than as testimony to a different Vorlage, and Ferguson and the Davies-Allison commentary treat the interpolation thesis as unproven. So the strong form of the textual argument — that the triadic clause is demonstrably a forgery — overreaches.

The more durable critical point is developmental. Even granting the triadic formula as original to Matthew, Matthew was composed c. 80-90 CE, and its wording reflects the catechetical and liturgical practice of the Matthean community, not necessarily the earliest baptismal rite. The *Didache* preserves both: it prescribes triadic baptism (7.1, 7.3) yet in 9.5 restricts the eucharist to those "baptized into the name of the Lord," suggesting the two formulas coexisted and that the christological form was older. Hurtado and Dunn both treat Jesus-name baptism as the primitive practice, with the triadic formula crystallizing as trinitarian devotion matured. On this reading Acts is the more reliable witness to first-generation practice and Matthew 28:19 retrojects a later liturgical idiom onto the risen Jesus.

The traditional harmonization, given its best form by Carson, holds that "in the name of" denotes coming under the authority and ownership of the one named, so that baptism into Jesus is implicitly baptism into the triune God of whom Jesus is the Son — the formulas differ in wording but not in referent, and Acts may simply use shorthand for the fuller rite. This is theologically coherent and the phrase *eis to onoma* does carry the sense of transfer of allegiance. Its weakness is the importation of developed trinitarian theology into pre-Nicene narrative: it assumes precisely the equivalence between Jesus-name and triadic baptism that the historical sequence calls into question, and it cannot explain why Luke, who knew the Great Commission tradition, never once depicts the apostles using the triadic words.

The result is a partial harmonization. The two formulas can be reconciled as successive stages of a single developing tradition, and "in the name of" can bear an allegiance sense in both — but only on the critical concession that Matthew 28:19's triadic wording is the church's liturgical voice rather than a verbatim dominical command.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable as a development, not as a single uniform apostolic practice — the surface contradiction is real and resolves only by dating the triadic formula late.