Davis and Allison on Matthew 16:19

19. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Cf. Isa 22.22; 1.18 and 3.7 (Jesus has the keys of Death and Hades as well as the key of David); 3 Bar. 11.2 (the angel Michael is the ‘holder of the keys of the kingdom of Heaven’); 3 En. 18.18 (‘Anapi’el YHH the prince keeps the keys of the palaces of the heaven of Arabot); 48 C 3 (Metatron has the keys to the treasure chamber of heaven). Heaven was conceived of as having gates or doors . . . . and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. C. 18.18 and Jn 20.23. Peter is the authoritative teacher without peer. He has the power to declare what is permitted and what is not permitted. Cf. 23.13: ‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut people out of the kingdom. For you do not go in nor allow those who want to go in to do so’. Here, as the context proves, the scribes shut the door to the kingdom by issuing false doctrine. The image is closely related to 16.19, and the inference lies near to hand that just as the kingdom itself is taken from the Jewish leaders and given to the church (21.43), so are the keys of the kingdom taken from the scribes and Pharisees and given to Peter. Supportive of this is the broader context of Peter’s confession. In the immediately preceding 16.5-12 Jesus warns: ‘Beware of the leaven of the scribes and Pharisees.’ Matthew takes this to be about the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees. It would make good sense for the evangelist, in the very next paragraph, to tell a story in which Jesus replaces the Jewish academy with his own ‘chief rabbi’. (W.D. Davis and Dale C. Allison, Matthew: A Shorter Commentary [London: T&T Clark International, 2004], 270-71)