Alfeyev Met. Hilarion - Jesus Christ His Life and Teaching, Vol. 2 - the Sermon on the Mount

T he present volume continues our series of studies dedicated to the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.

In the first volume, we laid out the general principles on which the whole series would be built, as well as information concerning the four Gospels, which are the primary source of information about Jesus life and teaching. We also talked about the main directions in which modern New Testament studies is developing, paying attention to the need to take a critical approach to its findings and achievements. Then, we examined the opening chapters of the four Gospels, including the narratives of Jesus birth, his baptism by John, his temptation in the wilderness, his going out to preach, and the calling of his disciples. Individual chapters of the book were dedicated to Jesus prophetic ministry, the beginning of the conflict between him and the Pharisees, and also a description of some of the most characteristic features of his personality and character.

The present volume is dedicated to the Sermon on the Mount, which contains the quintessence of Jesus Christs moral teaching. Regardless of the fact that different theories exist regarding the sermons origins (there is the opinion that the Sermon is a collection of sayings uttered at various times), we shall examine it as a single coherent textin the form in which it has reached us.

The Sermon on the Mount occupies a special place in the Gospel of Matthew. It follows the story of Jesus embarking upon his ministry, and precedes the narratives of his miracles and parables. Its very position in this Gospel, and in the entire corpus of the four Gospels, compels one to see in it a sort of spiritual and moral program that is further uncovered on the pages of the New Testament.

The Sermon on the Mount is the longest of all of Jesus speeches contained in the Synoptic Gospels. This also compels one to distinguish it from other didactic material as a discourse that possesses independent significance. At the same time, the Sermon on the Mount cannot be examined in isolation from the Gospel of Matthew as a whole, from the other books of the New Testament, or even from Old Testament moral law, to which it is directly connected. Moreover, it should not be examined separately from the subsequent church tradition, in which it has a rich history of interpretation and practical application.

All these considerations lie at the basis of the exegetical method that will be consistently applied to each section of the Sermon of the Mount in the present book. First of all, we will examine the text of the Sermon itself, noting, where necessary, the extant textual variants in the manuscript tradition, as well as parallels to the verses of the Sermon of the Mount in the other Gospels. In cases where a topic laid out in the Sermon is developed in more detail in other teachings of Jesus, the readers attention will be called to these teachings and their interpretation.

Special attention will be paid to Old Testament parallels to the Sermon on the Mount, particularly to texts that the Sermon directly refers to, comments upon, expands on, or enriches. The Sermons genetic dependence on Old Testament texts makes it necessary in some cases to refer to Jewish concepts that were the likely prototypes of the Greek terms and expressions used in the Sermon.

The Sermon on the Mount, Carl Heinrich Bloch, 1877

As for the subsequent Jewish tradition as reflected in rabbinical literature, The main problem seems to us to be that rabbinical literature belongs to a tradition that consciously opposes itself to Christianity. This tradition is the direct heir and successor to the teaching of the Pharisees and scribes, which Jesus harshly criticized, including in the Sermon on the Mount.

In contrast, the subsequent Christian tradition became the fertile ground in which the seeds sown by Jesus put forth abundant shoots. Already the first generations of Christians, including the apostle Paul and the authors of the Catholic Epistles of the New Testament in the second half of the first century, as well as the apostolic fathers in the second century, were engaged in the systematic interpretation of Jesus spiritual and moral teaching. This work was continued by the church fathers of the third, fourth, and subsequent centuries. Even today, their interpretations are of great help to anyone who wishes to understand how the Sermon on the Mount can be lived out in the community of those who follow Jesus, who perceive his teaching not as abstract moralizing or an unattainable ideal, but as a guide to action.

The works of contemporary scholars dedicated to the text of the Sermon on the Mount and its theological interpretation will be referred to insofar as doing so would be necessary for attaining a better understanding of certain passages.

We have not set ourselves the task of giving an exhaustive analysis of the views of ancient and modern commentators on the Sermon on the Mount. It is much more important for us to understand how the Sermon on the Mount can be applied in contemporary conditions.

Very often, modern commentaries on Jesus sayings are reduced to attempts to understand what he could have had in mind when he uttered certain things in his own historical context. For all the importance of finding the original meaning that Jesus teachings could have had for his original audience, their significance is not at all limited to this meaning. In limiting the meaning of Jesus words solely to the historical circumstances in which these words were pronounced, the scholar inevitably creates a distance between their supposed meaning in those circumstances and their practical application in other circumstances. Yet, in expounding his teachings, Jesus did not simply have something in mind: he was inviting a response. And this response must be expressed in very concrete actions on the practical levelin actions that are conditioned by neither historical era nor circumstance.

The present volume, which is a continuation of the volume The Beginning of the Gospel, is in turn a prologue to the study of Jesus miracles and parables. The next two books in the series Jesus Christ: His Life and Teaching will be dedicated to these two topics.

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Jesus Christ: His Life and Teaching, vol. 1, The Beginning of the Gospel (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2018).

See, in particular, Hans Dieter Betz, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount, trans. L. L. Welborn (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1985), 42.

Exegesis (Greek exgsis): interpretation, explanation; exegetics: the science of interpretation; exegetical: connected with interpretation.Ed.

As a rule, classical rabbinical literature is understood to refer to the corpus of texts originating from the rabbinical academies of Palestine and Babylonia in the first millennium after Christ. This corpus includes standard texts (the Mishnah and Talmud, as well as the Tosefta), commentaries (midrashim), Aramaic translations (targumim) of biblical books, the responsa of the Geonim (written responses by the Jewish spiritual leaders of the late sixth century to the mid-eleventh century to questions sent to them from diaspora communities), and collections of prayers.