The Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple

John W. Welch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317016267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

No religious text has influenced the world more than has the New Testament's Sermon on the Mount, and yet this crucial text still begs to be more clearly understood. Why was it written? What unifying theme or purpose holds it all together? Should it be called a sermon? Or is it some other kind of composition? How would its earliest listeners have heard its encoded allusions and systematic program? This book offers new insights into the Sermon on the Mount by seeing it in the shadow of the all-pervasive Temple in Jerusalem, which dominated the religious landscape of the world of Jesus and his earliest disciples. Analyzing Matthew 5-7 in light of biblical and Jewish backgrounds, ritual studies, and oral performances in early Christian worship, this reading coherently integrates every line in the Sermon. It positions the Sermon as the premier Christian mystery.

Chapter 1

The Quest for a Unifying Understanding of the Sermon on the Mount

No text has had greater influence on Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount. It would be hard to overstate the importance of the roles that the Sermon on the Mount has played over the centuries in shaping Christian ethics and in conveying the teachings of Jesus. Known variously as the Great Sermon or the Speech of Speeches, thousands of insightful books and articles have extensively and minutely analyzed its three chapters in the Gospel of Matthew.¹ Without exaggeration, one commentator has rightly noted, “There is no section of the Bible which has been so quoted (by non-Christians as well as Christians), worked over, commented upon, argued about, taken apart and put together, preached and taught, praised and scorned as has the Sermon on the Mount.”²

The intense fascination generated by the Sermon on the Mount derives from a widely held consensus that it is “one of the main biblical texts on which we ground our view of discipleship”³ and that it contains “the pure uncorrupted expression of the will of God as it agrees with the law and prophets, i.e., as it always was.”⁴ Because the Sermon stands close to the beginning of the New Testament and because it is typically among the first biblical passages to be translated into new languages, many people have “their first introduction to the Bible via the Sermon on the Mount.”⁵

Just as this text has long been viewed as critically important to Christian discipleship, its interpretation has been taken up by “an almost endless chain of theologians and philosophers,”⁶ and even today, this vast interest in the Sermon on the Mount “shows no sign of diminution.”⁷ Although entire volumes have been devoted to presenting bibliographies of Sermon on the Mount scholarly materials,⁸ the quantity of this scholarly material “exceeds what even computerized bibliographies can handle.”⁹ The quantity and passion invested into the Sermon on the Mount throughout centuries of study and research caused bibliographer Warren Kissinger to comment:

Like a mighty mountain, the Sermon on the Mount continues to attract persons of different backgrounds and traditions. There is general agreement that the Sermon offers a compendium of the teachings of Jesus, and that it is one of the most lofty and powerful expressions of the essence of the moral life. Gandhi was much impressed by it, and its impact upon him was second only to that of the Bhagavad Gita. Tolstoy came to a new Weltanschauung through his reading and study of it. Claude Montefiore, writing from a liberal Jewish perspective, spoke of the Sermon’s great nobility, significance, and power. Nietzsche was one who did not share this almost universal admiration. For him the Sermon on the Mount represented a significant part of Jesus’ ethics, which was a “slave morality.”¹⁰

Yet, in spite of the Sermon on the Mount’s acclaimed preeminence and apparent simplicity, it has still remained paradoxically inscrutable. What kind of a text is this so-called “sermon”? In fact, the New Testament never calls Matthew 5–7 a “sermon,” and indeed it does not read much like a typical preacher’s sermon. This all leaves readers wondering, What was the original function or purpose of this text? Does it have a unifying coherence, or is it a scrapbook of disjointed sayings? How was it able to generate binding spiritual power, unlike the teachings of the scribes (Matthew 7:29)? Persistent questions such as these have continuously fueled Sermon on the Mount research, powering the relentless and seemingly endless barrage of interpretations and studies. Joachim Jeremias, the renowned Lutheran New Testament scholar from Göttingen, referred wistfully to “the long-debated question of the aim of the Sermon on the Mount,”¹¹ and Georg Strecker, who succeeded him as holder of the Chair of New Testament Studies, struggled to find a solution to what he termed the “problem of the proper exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount.”¹² The work of Warren Kissinger readily recognized “a cluster of problems” surrounding the interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount.¹³ Despite a long history of complicated analysis, the Sermon’s most recent premier commentator, Hans Dieter Betz, observes, “The texts themselves did not put the historical questions to rest, but the facts continued to keep scholars busy.”¹⁴

Indeed, every possible tool of critical scholarship has been brought to bear on the Sermon on the Mount, and yet it still eludes and transcends explanation.

In some circles, the Sermon on the Mount has been examined in great detail by textual critics who specialize in comparing the early New Testament manuscripts in their variant forms. For example, scholars such as Julius Wellhausen, Rudolf Bultmann, Karel Klostermann, C.H. Dodd, and others have asserted that the third beatitude (Matthew 5:5) was not originally part of the text of the Sermon on the Mount since it switches places with the second beatitude in some early Greek manuscripts, while others argue that such a conclusion is unwarranted.¹⁵ Textual variants, even if perhaps insignificant or inconsequential, have been duly noted and exquisitely scrutinized. Was “falsely,” a word which is absent in some manuscripts, a later editorial addition at the end of the phrase “and utter all kinds of evil against you” (Matthew 5:11), or was it originally present? Did the Lord’s Prayer originally end with “deliver us from evil,” or did it go on to end with a doxology, “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever, amen” (Matthew 6:13)? Given the oral tradition that ran concurrent with the reduction of the four New Testament Gospels to writing, can one even rightly speak of an original text?

Likewise, source criticism has yielded a kaleidoscope of possible structural designs¹⁶ and theories of authorship for the Sermon on the Mount. Nevertheless, it remains quite uncertain how, when, why, or by whom this text was written or assembled. For example, some have proposed that Matthew, not Jesus, was personally responsible for writing the five beatitudes in Matthew 5:5, 7–10 that happen to be absent from Luke 6:20–22.¹⁷ Searching for literary and religious influences on this text, the Sermon on the Mount has been combed for traces, however faint, of Jewish or Hellenistic thoughts or idioms. For example, David Flusser, an Orthodox Jewish scholar of Christian origins at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, points out parallels between the Thanksgiving Scroll 18:14–15 from the Dead Sea community and Matthew 5:3–5.¹⁸ Erik Sjöberg expounds at length on the Judaic backgrounds of Matthew 6:22–3, while Betz finds in those same two verses Hellenistic ideas and ancient Greek theories of vision.¹⁹

Related to source criticism is form criticism, by which other scholars have hypothesized that during the centuries between the original speaking and the actual transcribing of the Sermon (or its parts), the Church and its traditions significantly influenced the Sermon’s content and form.²⁰ Altogether, explorations of the Sermon on the Mount’s authorship frequently conclude by expressing the opinion that “the whole section is merely a collection of unrelated sayings of diverse origins, a patchwork, which cannot possibly retain the pre-eminence once accorded to it as the authoritative source for the teaching of Jesus.”²¹

Alternatively, oral analysis of the Sermon on the Mount focuses on this body of teachings more as a harmonic discourse, delivered and received as a speech or performance. This type of analysis recognizes that although the Sermon on the Mount is known today as a written text, it was originally “oral in nature and function,” and thus might have been used to communicate not only through words but through “sense perception.”²² As described by Richard Horsley, Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts, this type of analysis seeks to find and appreciate “the register in which the discourse was recited,”²³ and thereby opens the door for viewing the Sermon in the context of the oral traditions ubiquitous throughout the ancient world. In particular, Horsley and his coauthor Jonathan Draper conclude that, when considered as a single speech or performance, the various pieces of the Sermon on the Mount come together in a manner reminiscent of a “covenantal” structure, the Beatitudes having “the form and function of covenantal blessings, not sapiential macarisms.”²⁴ Rhetorical and literary critical approaches per se, however, have not satisfied everyone. Donald Senior, for example, insists that this type of analysis must be employed with caution, since “attempting to decipher Matthew’s literary and rhetorical strategies without fully engaging the Gospel’s theological convictions will lead interpreters in the wrong direction.”²⁵

Moreover, ...