Craig

Maybe one of the most significant pieces of research I’ve ever done was driven by a deep awareness of the human tendency to read our own preferences and ideas into scripture. And unless we are aware of our own biases, we will often do this with minimal self-awareness.

Whenever we begin with ourselves, we are closing many of the doors through which these ancient wisdom texts can inspire us and guide us down paths we may not have found without guidance.

It also needs to be recognised that all sayings and teachings of Jesus will be rooted in the immediate historical and cultural context of First Century Palestine. They can never mean today what they didn’t mean at the time. Jesus makes reference to Torah, uses phrases known as Hebraisms which can never be interpreted literally, and addresses himself to particular people doing particular things in a unique historical context.

For this reason, when I am studying the New Testament, I always begin by consulting those who are familiar with first century Jewish culture before I allow myself to think more freely.

It’s also vital to remind ourselves that Jesus is not a Christian talking to other Christians; he is a Jew talking to other Jews. He’s also not telling his fellow Jews to do away with Torah. Rather, he’s telling them that he has insight into the heart of Torah, and they would do well to listen to him. In other words Jesus is behaving like a typical rabbi.

Another thing to note is that the Sermon on the Mount is not a sermon. It’s a series of discrete teachings, each of which could be the basis of a sermon, a lecture, a community study, or a personal meditation. 

Had Jesus delivered all verses in Matthew 5–7 in one sitting and on just one occasion, the disciples’ heads would have exploded! There’s simply too much in these chapters to absorb in a single lesson and if we attempt to do so we are treating them as if they were intended as statements of belief rather than perspectives to be grappled with. Every verse is a multifaceted gem, and every line is rooted in Torah and opens up to other passages in the Gospel. 

So the Sermon on the Mount could easily be retitled “A Sampling of Jesus’s Greatest Teachings.” And that would not be uncommon for literature in antiquity. When we understand the beatitudes in this way we also discover that, in many cases, the teachings of contemporary rabbis and of Jesus complement each other. 

So what is the key message of these early chapters in Matthew‘s gospel? The answer is contained in a single phrase: The Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven occurs when people take the words of Jesus to heart and live into them. So the Sermon on the Mount is more of a beginner’s guide to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

In Luke’s Gospel and in John’s, Jesus always speaks of the “Kingdom of God” and never uses the expression “Kingdom of Heaven.” The argument has been made that Matthew uses “Kingdom of Heaven” instead of “Kingdom of God” because, as a Jew, Matthew would not use the name of God in vain and so used “heaven” as a way to say God without saying God. But this can’t be the case because Matthew also uses the expression “Kingdom of God”! Since Matthew also uses “Kingdom of God”, as well as the word God about fifty times, Heaven can’t be a stand-in for God. I conclude that the terms “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Kingdom of God” can be synonymous, but they have different nuances.

Rather, Matthew is setting up a contrast between heaven and earth: heaven is where God’s will is done; heaven is where God rules rather than where the “kings of the earth” who “take toll or tribute” (17:25) hold sway. 

Heaven is a different realm: the real or imagined existence or dimension where God rules and life is as God wants, rather than as humanity has constructed. Which is why Jesus instructs his disciples to pray “Your kingdom come” (6:10) because on earth, the rule of the divine is not fully experienced. 

Simon

I think you’ve got most of the key points there. I grew up in a time where people were trying to explain how the Sermon on the Mount could be the same as the Sermon on the Plain in Luke. ‘Maybe it was a mountain with a plain on the top of it!’ Whereas I think we are acknowledging that there probably were 100 sermons on the mount and 100 sermons on the plain. And what we have in Matthew is more like Jesus’s greatest hits from his ministry in Galilee. And Matthew, as you say, has a particular question that he’s addressing, which is the continuity of Jesus’s life, teaching and ministry with Judaism, which we must presume was very important to Matthew’s readers. So Matthew has Jesus talking about the law, and emphasising continuity with the law much more than the other gospel writers. Given that Jesus was a Jew (his family having come to Galilee from Judea within the previous couple of centuries), it seems plausible that Jesus saw himself as renewing Judaism rather than starting a new religion, and the other gospel writers just choose note to emphasise that continuity because they are concerned with the discontinuity of the inclusion of the gentiles.

Craig

I definitely agree that Jesus didn’t intend to found a new religion. He didn’t need to, because the core purpose of the Judaism we find defined in what we call the Old Testament has every intention of reaching out beyond the Jewish race to the whole of creation.

To be continued…

Craig acknowledges the historian Amy Jill Levine whose work guided him significantly in his comments above.