Three chapters of Matthew have produced dozens of rival readings
The Sermon on the Mount fills only chapters 5 to 7 of Matthew, yet it holds the Beatitudes, the familiar Lord's Prayer and the Golden Rule. Tolstoy and Gandhi admired it, the American civil rights movement drew on it, and one scholar has counted 66 distinct ways of interpreting it.
Matthew places the sermon early in Jesus's ministry, after his baptism, his time in the desert and the calling of four disciples. It opens the first of five long discourses in that Gospel, each closed by a similar formula. Jesus climbs a mountain, sits and teaches, and only comes down in chapter 8. Christians have long honoured the Mount of Beatitudes as the spot, though some favour Mount Arbel or the Horns of Hattin instead. Many theologians read the setting as a deliberate echo of Sinai: Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, called it the new Torah delivered by a new Moses.
The structure is clear even if its underlying plan is argued over. Eight or nine blessings come first; Luke has four, followed by four woes. The Greek word usually translated as blessed can also mean happy, and several blessings borrow from Isaiah 61 and Psalm 37. Images of salt and light follow. The longest block, Matthew 5:17 to 48, known as the Antitheses, sets older teaching beside Jesus's own: the ban on murder is stretched to cover anger and contempt, and retaliation gives way to turning the other cheek and loving enemies. The familiar qualifier about anger without a cause, found in the King James Version, is a later scribal insertion that modern critical texts drop.
Chapter 6 criticises charity, prayer and fasting done for show and warns against anxiety over possessions. Chapter 7 turns to judging others, then states the Golden Rule in a positive form, where the version attributed to the rabbi Hillel in the Talmud was phrased negatively. Craig Blomberg calls it the heart of Jesus's ethics. Three paired images close the sermon: two gates, two trees, two builders.
What it all means is far from settled. Augustine saw the Beatitudes as its centre; Günther Bornkamm built it around the Lord's Prayer; Dale Allison and Glen Stassen found triads. Craig Keener identifies at least 36 interpretations, and Harvey McArthur sorts them into 12 schools, from the Anabaptist habit of applying it literally to readings that limit who must obey it.
Source: Sermon on the Mount
