Thanks Andrew. In response: I’m not sure that there is such a big difference between the two interpretations (‘storming the gates’/’powers of death’) which might seem to compete in Matthew 16:13-23. Also I have personally never seen the passage as saying something rather more limited about demonic deliverance specifically.

Rather, I would see the passage as saying that a larger field of ministry is now facilitated, based on Peter’s recognition that Jesus is ‘the Christ, the son of the living God’. Peter, the small rock, can now become part of the bigger rock on which Jesus will build his church. Jesus is now released to complete his journey to suffering and death, because Peter has been given this revelation.

The larger field of ministry is to do with a new relationship with the powers of death. My interpretation will differ from yours here, but as I see it, the death and resurrection of Jesus will mean that death, a principle as well as a physical reality, will not only be unable to destroy the church, but the church will have the power to undo the work of death. This has already been demonstrated through Jesus himself in the new exodus miracles - which were the Isaianic accompaniment of life in the desert to the people on pilgrimage to Zion.

The keys to bind and loose, which are now to be seen in the light of “the keys of death and Hades” - Revelation 1:18, and which are not unconnected with the rabbinic keys of forbidding and permitting, are part of this provision which will be given to Peter. The use of the keys has yet to be fully authorised through Jesus’s own forthcoming death and resurrection, as alluded to in Matthew 16:21-28.

So ‘storming the gates of hell’ may be a bit of Pentecostal rhetoric, but it is not so far removed from the understanding of ‘prevailing against the powers of death - pulai hadou’ as it might seem. The former interpretation provides, I think, a better perspective on the relationship of the church, as Jesus planned it, to pulai hadou; for incorrectly understood, the interpretation of the latter provided by you might seem to present the church as an embattled survivor, besieged by pulai hadou and hunkered down in its fortified spiritual citadel. The picture Jesus provides in his own ministry however is more proactive, and confidently places itself in the midst of the territory of pulai hadou, easily overcoming their power, though eventually at great personal cost.

This view takes a broader view of the meaning of Hades than you are likely to feel comfortable with, and links this with the background picture of life overcoming death through the desert imagery in Isaiah’s second exodus. I think this is the NT fulfilment which Matthew is, covertly and cryptically perhaps, preparing us for.

The model and plumbline in both cases is what we have already seen of Jesus’s ministry in Matthew’s gospel, which is uniformly of a proactive and confident demonstration through Jesus of what he intends the disciples to receive and exercise themselves, in a relationship to the world which confidently expects growth, fruitfulness and geographic expansion of the kingdom whose authority was to be found in Jesus himself.