Gospel translators are afraid to get this one right.
In Matthew 28:17, Jesus appears one last time to his followers and it says in the Greek that they worshipped him and doubted. But ever since the King James Version, translators have refused to offer the public the most accurate reading.
We all know why. Tradition, obviously. And we wouldn’t want to confuse people. It might seem like their doubt would undercut their belief. So they’ve added to “some” to the text for the sake of clarity.
The popular NIV changes it to “but some doubted.”
The more scholarly NRSVUE offers a better, but still inaccurate “but they doubted.”
The text itself isn’t parsing the people (as in some of them doubted). Nor is it trying to suggest that in spite of their belief, they still doubted as if this is some moral failing on the apostles’ part.
The text seems to be making a completely different argument. So rather than mistranslate the passage, let’s engage with its implication: that the people closest to Jesus worshipped him with doubt in their hearts.
Consider how natural it is to be excited and scared. How they would worship Jesus with total faith and also doubt that they, the apostles could pull this off without him.
We might recognize that the presence of doubt wasn’t the opposite of faith for them, but represent the recognizable fear of adopting a countercultural lifestyle. They were committing their lives to a way of being that was both difficult and unpopular! Of course there’d be butterflies and think hey, maybe I’m not up to all of this!
And look what happens to our sense of self when we place faith and doubt as essential opposites, like flip sides of a coin. We learn to take the presence of doubt as the absence of faith. But we don’t do the same thing with other concepts like conviction or ideology. We see these as providing strength for us in the midst of adversity. We overcome it, don’t pretend it doesn’t exist at all.
It isn’t just that doubt is not the opposite of faith, it is necessary for it! How else can we believe, if we don’t test it, if we don’t think there’s a chance we’re wrong?
We don’t need perfect apostles who had nothing to fear about life without Jesus around. Which is good, because that’s also not what we get in the gospels. We get witless blunder after witless blunder.
And what we also get are real people who were scared and wondered if this whole project was going to work. Especially given the fact that they wanted it to be a little different (hint: they wanted to conquer Rome).
The doubt makes it more real. Because that’s how we wrestle with the reality of belief. We need to hold the doubt as present in belief, not an enemy to conquer.