Sermon on the Mount

Here are both versions of the beatitudes, side by side so that we can see for ourselves. Notice that Matthew’s version includes these five beatitudes which are absent from Luke’s version. And the beatitudes they share are still different, depending on which gospel you’re looking at. For instance, in Luke it’s the “poor” who are blessed, but in Matthew it’s the “poor in spirit”. In Luke it’s the “hungry now” who are blessed, but in Matthew it’s those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness.” And so, whereas in Matthew the qualities commended are essentially spiritual and ethical, in Luke there’s nothing to suggest that “poor” or “hungry” are to be understood as anything other than literally poor and hungry. Several attempts have been made to explain why these differences exist.

Differences:

The great Saint Augustine suggested that the differences are due to their being two different sermons uttered by Jesus at two different times and places. And we’ll see in a moment that’s what Pastor Winger thinks as well. Others, like the reformer John Calvin, have argued that Matthew and Luke preserve two versions of what was the same basic historical sermon of Jesus.

Most scholars, though, believe that Matthew creatively shaped and interpreted material passed on to him by early Christian communities. On this view, the Sermon on the Mount is a literary construct. It was composed by Matthew through some combination of rearranging and copying sources, embellishing those sources, and maybe even just plain creating some of the sayings material himself.

And so the impression given by Matthew that the sermon was delivered on a single occasion is, in fact, not historical. The situation with the Sermon on the Plain—that’s Luke’s counterpart to the Sermon on the Mount—is more complicated, with scholars disagreeing on whether it’s based on Jesus’s sayings collected in an earlier sayings source, or whether instead Luke took Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and embodied part of it to form his own sermon.

Either way, though, whether Luke was drawing from Matthew directly or from common, independent source material, or whether he also created sayings material himself, the upshot is the same: in their present forms, the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain are literary creations of the evangelists

And so Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman authors in general weren’t expected to quote long speeches word-for-word. After all, how could they know what was said? With perhaps an occasional exception, there were no stenographers making exact transcripts. But if they didn’t have stenographers, how did ancient writers record speeches? Well, when discussing this topic, it’s almost obligatory to give a certain quote by Thucydides, so let’s go ahead and do that now. Thucydides was an Athenian general who wrote a history of the Peloponnesian war in the late fifth century BCE, and he explains the situation as he saw it: (quote) “With reference to the speeches in this history”—that’s Thucydides’ history—“…it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions…” (unquote) Although no ancient author is quite as explicit as Thucydides on this point, several of them do make briefer comments that indicate the approximate nature of their speeches.

This is not to say that verbatim recall is always impossible. It seems reasonable to imagine that, for instance, short, pithy sayings such as proverbs might sometimes be preserved in verbatim memory. But Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is the longest uninterrupted monologue anywhere in the Synoptic Gospels! And Luke’s sermon on the plain, while perhaps short by comparison, nevertheless spans a solid 29 verses, which of course far too long to memorize on a single hearing.

And the problem runs even deeper than that, because the disciples almost certainly didn’t write the gospels. Whether or not they might have used eyewitness sources, the gospel writers themselves are anonymous. And so when we use the traditional names—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—it’s only for convenience’s sake. What this means is that when Matthew and Luke were writing Jesus’s discourses and sayings, they were either drawing from sources, maybe making some of it up, or some combination of the two. As Christopher Tuckett puts it: “Unless one is prepared to argue that Matthew invented his gospel de novo, then Matthew…must have been heavily dependent on earlier sources and traditions. The same applies to Luke in material which is peculiar to his gospel.” And the invention of speeches is not without precedent in first-century Palestine.

This is thanks to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, whose Greek writings were composed at roughly the same time as many of the New Testament writings, in particular the Gospels. Josephus’s works have shed important light on the same Jewish matrix of early Christianity, and his testimony, coming from a Palestinian Jew, has been without equal for the period concerned.
When we look to Josephus, we find that he has heavily embellished the speeches he recorded, and he even sometimes just completely made them up. We can illustrate Josephus’s penchant for free composition by comparing his Antiquities in its early chapters with its primary written sources. And you can see here on the slide that Craig Keener has kindly provided references for some specific examples, which, again, you can look up if you like. And it’s not just Josephus.

Consider Philo of Alexandria, another Hellenistic Jewish writer. He lived from about 15 BCE to 45 CE, and he left an extensive body of literary works. Unlike Josephus, Philo was an Alexandrian. He was nowhere near the Jerusalem temple, and so his Jewish religion was very different from that of Josephus.

And in large part since he’s able to provide this unique perspective, his writings are likewise of fundamental importance for the understanding of early Christianity. When we turn to his writings, we find that he often paraphrases and expands or abbreviates the biblical text. As an example, let’s look at his book, Life of Moses. The current consensus is that it belongs among the apologetic and historical works of Philo, and in fact Philo even tells us straight out that he is writing a biography of Moses.

Yet this supposed biography is packed with creative fictions. Erich Gruen explains: “Philo’s powers of invention were not negligible. In re-creating the education of Moses…Philo has Moses not only learn arithmetic, geometry, music, and hieroglyphics from erudite Egyptians but progress through the rest of the curriculum, presumably rhetoric, literature, and philosophy, with Greek teachers.

Most scholars have advocated for what’s called Markan priority, which is just a fancy term for the view that Mark wrote first and that Matthew and Luke copied from Mark. Unfortunately, scholars do sometimes overstate the case for Markan priority. Just to give one example, we can take a look at this infamous quote from Vincent Taylor from 1952, where he declares that “in a modern commentary, it is no longer necessary to prove the priority of Mark”.

Verbatim repetition all but proves that the synoptic gospel writers copied from each other, even if we can’t always be sure who copied from whom. And yeah, there is a lot of verbatim copying going on between the synoptics. For instance, take a look here at an excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, which has a very close parallel in Luke chapter 11. Each of these two passages shares over 70% of its exact words with the other one, including a sequence of 23 words uninterrupted and exactly the same! On the other hand, Matthew—or, whoever was doing the copying—has treated his sources rather freely. In the community discourse, he has shortened the narrative introduction so that it has become much less colourful, dropped the declaration in Mark 9.

Contradiction in the Missionary Discourse

If we look earlier in Matthew’s mission discourse, we’ll find another parallel with Mark shown here which isn’t quite so exact. In Mark’s version, Jesus instructs the disciples when preparing for their missionary journey that they may take only staff, sandals, and a single tunic. But by comparison, Matthew deletes the reference to bread, expands the monetary references, and flatly contradicts the instructions regarding sandals and staff. Note that Matthew’s stipulation about the staff is found also in Luke 9:3. Various solutions have been proposed for the apparent contradiction, of which Mark Strauss has helpfully surveyed a few of them.

Matthew 7:7-11 with Luke 11:9-13, and that’s not the only example. The verbal agreement between Matthew 6.24 and Luke 16.13 is also nearly perfect, with 27 out of 28 words being shared, and in precisely the same order. This too would seem to indicate that one or both of them were copying written sources, rather than simply sharing a common oral tradition. In conclusion, there seems to be some very strong evidence that the Sermon on the Mount is Matthew’s literary creation. And we’ve seen several reasons for thinking this is the case.