The Sermon on the Mount is the moral portrait of Jesus’ own people. Because this portrait doesn’t square with the church, this Sermon turns from instruction to indictment. To those ends—both instruction and indictment—this commentary has been written with the simple goal that God will use this book to lead us to become in real life the portrait Jesus sketched in the Sermon.
The contrast between Jesus’ vision and our life bothers many of us. Throughout church history many have softened, reduced, recontextualized, and in some cases abandoned what Jesus taught—ironically, in order to be more Christian! Pinchas Lapide, an Orthodox Jew who wrote a short commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, described this history in these terms:
In fact, the history of the impact of the Sermon on the Mount can largely be described in terms of an attempt to domesticate everything in it that is shocking, demanding, and uncompromising, and render it harmless.1
Harsh words, to be sure. But the history is there, and all you have to do is spend a day or a week reading how the Sermon has been (re)interpreted. Note Lapide’s quote of Karl Barth’s famous words: “It would be sheer folly to interpret the imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount as if we should bestir ourselves to actualize these pictures.”2
So, what do these (re)interpretations look like?3 First, some have said the Sermon is really Moses or the law ramped up to the highest level and that Jesus’ intent is not to summon his followers to do these things but to show just how wretchedly sinful they are and how much they are in need of Christ’s righteousness. The Sermon, then, is nothing but a mirror designed to reveal our sinfulness. Second, others assign the sayings of Jesus in the Sermon to the private level, sometimes as little more than disposition or intention or striving and other times to how Christians live personally and privately as a Christian but not how they live publicly. The Sermon, then, is a code for private morality. Third, others think these sayings belong only to the most committed of disciples, whether monk, nun, priest, pastor, or radical. If they are designed only for the hypercommitted, the ordinary person can pass them by. The Sermon is for the elite Christian. Fourth, the tendency today is to see the Sermon as preceded by something, and that something is the gospel and that gospel is personal salvation and grace. That means that the Sermon is a sketch of the Christian life but only for those who have been so transformed by grace that they see the demands not as law but as grace-shaped ethics that can only be done by the person who lives by the Spirit. The Sermon, then, is Christian ethics, but it can only be understood once someone understands a theology of grace.
This tendency today is respectable Christian theology and only the one who turns back an apple pie from Mom would disagree. But the danger is obvious: those who take this approach more often than not end up denying the potency of the Sermon and sometimes simply turn elsewhere—to Galatians and Romans and Ephesians—for their Christian ethical instruction. What many such readings of the Sermon really want is Paul, and since they can’t find Paul in the Sermon, they reinterpret the Sermon and give us Paul instead.4 It is far wiser to ask how Paul relates to the Sermon than to make Jesus sound like Paul, and many today are showing that Paul’s ethics and Jesus’ ethics—their theologies—are not as far apart as some have made them out to be.5 Even more important, when we seek to “improve” the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount by setting them in a larger theological context, we too often ruin the words of Jesus. There is something vital—and this is a central theme in this commentary—in letting the demand of Jesus, expressed over and over in the Sermon as imperatives or commands, stand in its rhetorical ruggedness. Only as demand do we hear this Sermon as he meant it to be heard: as the claim of Jesus upon our whole being.
What these proposals for the Sermon do is force us to ask a set of questions:
The Sermon on the Mount remains the greatest moral document of all time.6 To justify this claim I want to probe Jesus’ moral vision by comparing Jesus’ Sermon to other moral theorists.7 From Moses to Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas to Luther and Calvin, and then into the modern world of thinkers like Kant and Mill all the way to contemporary moral theorists like Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, and also Oliver O’Donovan and Alasdair MacIntyre, some of the finest thinkers have applied their energies to ethics. How does Jesus fit into that history?8
In the history of discussion about ethics there have been some major proposals, and I want to sketch three of the most important, show how each can be used to explain Jesus, offer critical pushback against each, and then offer what I think is a more helpful approach to understanding the ethics of Jesus.
The person with whom virtue ethics begins is ultimately Aristotle, whose theory has been influential both in wider culture and in the church. It was especially influential in Aquinas and the monastic tradition of the Catholic Church, including devotional and spiritual greats like Benedict and Bonaventure. Others come to mind: Alasdair MacIntyre and N. T. Wright and Stanley Hauerwas are each, in one way or another, deeply influenced by Aristotle’s virtue ethics. So we need to drill down a bit deeper to see just what Aristotle had to say in order to grasp the core of virtue ethics.
Three ideas will give us handles on Aristotle’s ethics. First, the goal of life was human flourishing (Greek word eudaimonia). Second, a moral, reasonable person could only become a virtuous person in the context of friendship. Put in broader categories, virtue ethics are defined by and take shape within a community.9 Third, Aristotle’s approach was to practice the habits that made virtue the core of one’s character. The word “virtue,” then, is tied to the word “character,” and character forms as the result of good habits. The good person (character) does what is good (virtues), and doing good (virtues, habits) over time produces good character. The question, then, is not so much “What should I do?” but “Who should I be?” or “What does it look like to be a virtuous person?”
Again, Christian ethicists have their own version of virtue ethics, and I would call to our attention at this point the emphasis in Dallas Willard’s spiritual formation studies: his acronym is “VIM.”10 That is, a person with vision and intention needs to practice the habitual means of the spiritual disciplines to become a person with character sufficient for a flourishing (or blessed) life. In important ways Willard’s theory of spiritual formation is a radically revised version of virtue ethics reshaped by the Christian theology of revelation and grace.11
The question I will ask below and in this commentary is this: Was Jesus a virtue ethicist? Or, is virtue ethics the best or a sufficient way of thinking of how Jesus “did” ethics? I will argue that virtue ethics push us to the rim of the inner circle but do not completely come to terms with Jesus in his Jewish world. The fundamental problem with virtue ethics is that Jesus does not overtly talk like this; he does not teach the importance of habits as the way to form character.
The famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose work reshaped all philosophical thought in the Western world, sought to establish ethics on the basis of reason alone, and his normative theory, often called deontological ethics (deon means “ought, duty, or obligation”), landed on the “categorical imperative.” Kant framed the categorical imperative in a number of ways:12
Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. [The focus here is on the universality of true ethics.]
… so act that you use humanity, whether in your person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. [Here the emphasis is treating humans as humans deserving of profound respect.]
… the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law. [And here we are to see that each person, as an individual, can be an expression of the universal ethic.]
These three statements—universality, humanity, individuality—are each variations and developments of the categorical imperative: what is true for one must be true for all, and if we treat others as an end and therefore value humanity inherently, we will act in such a way to live rationally and ethically. Two more ideas: At work here (1) are both intention and practice, with intention having even more weight than practice. Also at work, because Kant thinks of ethics in terms of universality, is (2) that what “I” ought to do becomes a right for everyone else as well as my duty to other people.
Was Jesus Kantian? It could be argued that Kant’s categorical imperative is a variant on the Golden Rule (Matt 7:12) or the Jesus Creed (Mark 12:18–32), but this is inaccurate. In fact, Kant’s categorical imperative is far more useful in telling us what not to do—do not lie—than what to do—make promises and live by them. The ethicist Hauerwas levels Kant: “Kant’s statement of the categorical imperative is an attempt to free us of the need to rely on forgiveness and, more critically, a savior. Kant’s hope was to makes us what our pride desires, that is, that we be autonomous.”13
Two English thinkers, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), offered what is usually called utilitarian ethics. Classic utilitarianism can be said to have three leading points: it is consequentialist, universalist, and (in some cases) hedonist. It is consequentialist in that what makes an action right is the consequences of that action. It is universalist in that a utilitarian judges the consequences for everyone affected by the action. It is hedonist in that the classic utilitarian (and here we are thinking of Bentham, not Mill) identifies “good” with “pleasure” and “bad” with “pain.” So an action is right if, and only if, it produces (thus, consequentialist) the greatest good (hedonism), and for the greatest number (universalist). We are asking if Jesus fits into such a scheme of ethical thinking.
Christian thinking can in some ways adapt or even colonize consequentialism and reframe ethics into that which brings the greatest pleasure of all, namely, glorifying God. I would not restrict John Piper’s famous Desiring God project, which permeates all of his work, to an ethic of consequentialism, but there is a strain of this approach to ethics in his emphasis on God’s glory.14 In addition, one has to begin to think of Christian eschatology, including the final judgment as well as the new heavens and the new earth, as the final consequence toward which all ethics need to be shaped.15 A kind of consequentialism plays an important element in the ethical theory of Jesus, but it needs to be said that the utilitarian model secularizes, flattens, and rationalizes eschatology. Furthermore, consequentialist ethics entail a major issue that postmodernity has brought to the fore: Who decides which ethic is most consequential? What groups do we include when we say the “greatest number”? It must be said once again: far too often we discover an ethic shaped and controlled by the privileged and powerful.
I am convinced Jesus doesn’t fit neatly into any of these theories, and the Sermon on the Mount requires a better “theory.”16 However, each of these theories—virtue, deontological, and utilitarian ethics—does say something true about how Jesus “did” ethics. But using these categories runs the serious risk of colonizing Jesus into the history of philosophical thinking. It might be wiser for us to begin by wondering what Jesus sounded like—morally, that is—in a first-century Galilean Jewish world.
This warning about imposing philosophical categories to Jesus leads to a warning against theologians doing the same. There is something about the Sermon on the Mount that makes Christians nervous, and in particular it makes Protestants nervous, especially those whose theology’s first foot is a special understanding of grace. Now I don’t want to say grace is not an important foot in the dance, but for some grace has to be said first or nothing works right. This realization leads many theologians to say something like this: “Nothing in the Sermon can be understood until you know that you are saved by grace and that, as a result of God’s regenerative work in your inner person, you can listen to Jesus and follow Jesus.” Or they may pose law (Sermon without grace) against gospel (grace leading to Sermon). No one said this more poignantly than John Wesley: “If they [the words of the Sermon] are considered as commandments, they are parts of the law; if as promises, of the gospel.” And Kenneth Cain Kinghorn, who edited Wesley’s sermons on the Sermon, put it this way: “Wesley taught that the moral law is the gospel presented in the form of a requirement, and the gospel is the law presented in the form of a promise.”17
However this posture of introducing the Sermon is expressed, the Sermon still makes many Christians nervous. Why? Because Jesus doesn’t “do” ethics the way many want him to do them. You can squeeze some texts all you want, but Jesus doesn’t say, “First grace, then obedience.” He dives right in. There may be—indeed is—a reason Jesus simply dove in. Stanley Hauerwas recognizes that Jesus’ new wine doesn’t fit into the ethical-theory wineskins: “Virtue may be its own reward, but for Christians the virtues, the kind of virtues suggested by the Beatitudes, are names for the shared life made possible through Christ.”18 Or later, “Yet Christians are not called to be virtuous. We are called to be disciples.”19
To sketch Jesus’ “theory” I want to suggest first that Jesus “did” ethics from four angles: Ethics from Above, Ethics from Beyond, Ethics from Below, and then setting each of these into the context of Jesus’ messianic ethics designed for the messianic community in the power of the Spirit.20
Jesus emerges out of a history, and that history is Israel’s history. One of the central elements of that history is that God speaks to humans in the Torah—the law of Moses. The paradigmatic story is found in Exodus 19–24, with the Ten Commandments found in Exodus 20, all rehearsed in a new form in Deuteronomy. What strikes a reader is that this is top-down communication from God: God descends to the top of Mount Sinai and reveals divine law for Israel through Moses. That God spoke, of course, was nothing new, nor did God speak only once to Israel. The singular expression of the prophet, still known in the King James Version, is “Thus saith the LORD.” Everything about Jesus’ ethics emerges from this history of God having spoken directly to Israel.
Perhaps the most astounding feature of Jesus’ ethics is that while Jesus clearly speaks for God and Jesus clearly fits the profile of a prophet, Jesus never says, “Thus saith the Lord.” He speaks directly as the voice of God. His words are no less than an Ethics from Above. The Sermon on the Mount ends with words to this effect: “When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law” (7:28–29).
No one in the last two hundred years seems to have grasped this self-authoritative dimension of the ethics of Jesus, namely, the encountering force of God-with-us in Jesus as King and Lord and Savior, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer did in his Discipleship.21 This classical book blows apart the common distinction between justification and sanctification, and that move enabled Bonhoeffer to get closer to the heart of the Sermon than most. (If someone entered my house and stole every book I own, Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship would be the first one I’d purchase the next morning—if I waited that long.)
Classic virtue, Kantian, and utilitarian ethics never make the claim to be divinely revealed words, but this is at the heart of the ethic of Jesus (and the Bible). When Christians express Christian ethics through such philosophical theories, they have to modify and reformulate both the content and the theory to make the theory fit.
Variations on this Ethics from Above are found in the Christian tradition. Perhaps the strongest form is divine command theory. This theory of ethics emphasizes divine revelation as the first word in all ethical discussions, with the added emphasis that what makes a moral demand right is that God issues that demand.22 The ancient philosophical debate in Plato was whether an act was good because God commanded it or whether God commanded it because it was (already) good. But divine command theory today has found a way out of that thicket to make the claim that because God is good God’s demands are good and right and loving.23
The newest kid on the block when it comes to ethical theory is narrative ethics, and by this we mean theories of ethics that contend we are part of a story, that such a story formed our ethics and is designed to shape us yet further. Stanley Hauerwas’s capturing of ethics into an ecclesial narrative is perhaps the best-known example of a narrative-shaped ethic, but our point here is that this story is a revelation, that is, the story in which we dwell comes to us from God, and we appropriate this story as divine revelation through Scripture, the tradition, the Spirit, and the church.24 Christian narrative ethics, then, require an Ethics from Above.
I would contend as well that N.T. Wright’s virtue ethics work so well because of his commitment to Story and a biblical eschatology, one that takes seriously the created order as continuous in some ways with the new heavens and the new earth. Thus, Wright substantively reshapes virtue ethics in part by an Ethics from Above that is shaped by a kind of narrative ethics.25 I have myself framed Jesus’ gospel and the apostolic gospel as making sense only in the context of the Story of the Bible, the Story of Israel, and that the fulfillment of that Story is the Story of Jesus.26 That is, the gospel itself is a way of narrating God’s Story in this world as moving from Adam through Abraham and Israel and David to Jesus and then beyond Jesus into the church of the prophets and apostles. If Jesus is the Messiah of that Story, and that is the gospel itself, then all ethics for Jesus involve at least, as one element, an Ethic from Above in the form of that narrative.
But narrowing how Jesus “did” ethics to a divine command posture or, better yet in his day and in his terms, to a Torah posture won’t adequately capture how Jesus’ ethics operated. Yes, to be sure, God speaks to us through Jesus, no more ethically than what we find in the Sermon on the Mount, but simply a vertical movement of words from God to us isn’t sufficient for the fullness of Jesus’ ethic.
The genius of Israel’s prophets was that they revealed God’s will to his people, and at the heart of the prophets’ ethic was bringing God’s future to bear on the present. This is what I mean by an Ethics from Beyond, and it takes us one step beyond an Ethics from Above and one step closer to how Jesus “did” ethics. There is little corresponding ethic in modern ethical theory to this Ethics from Beyond except perhaps in a social contract that sustains a society into its future, or a progressive ethic that hopes beyond hope in some form of a world getting better and better, or a green ethic that urges humans to live now in light of the earth’s future (or catastrophe). But social-contract, progressive, and ecological theories run out of steam just where Jesus began: his ethical posture toward the present was robustly shaped by a certain knowledge of God’s future. Jesus’ ethics flowed directly from God’s kingdom; they are kingdom ethics.
The sheer force of Jesus’ kingdom language, found more than a hundred times in the Synoptic Gospels and then advanced to some degree by John’s conceptualization of kingdom in his expression “eternal life” and then crystallized in several Pauline observations (like Phil 2:6–11 or 1 Cor 15:20–28) and then gloriously sketched in Revelation 20–22, puts the listener of Jesus’ ethic up against an eschatological ethic, a set of norms grounded in his belief of what is to come. What is to come for the person is consequentialist in that the future determines how one lives in the here and now. His ethic was an ethic for now in light of the kingdom to come. In the words of Stanley Hauerwas, “The sermon is the reality of the new age made possible in time.”27 Or, as Joe Kapolyo framed it, “These disciples have the responsibility of living their lives in terms of the values that prevail in the kingdom of heaven.”28 We often call this “inaugurated” eschatology, and that means Jesus’ kingdom ethic is an inaugurated-kingdom ethic.
The most notable element of Jesus’ Ethics from Beyond was that the future had already begun to take effect in the present. This is the point of Matthew 4:17, words that butt up against the Sermon on the Mount and propel the words of Jesus throughout: “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ ”
Over and over again in the Sermon and in Jesus’ teaching, the future impinges on the present in such a way that a new day is already arriving in Jesus. Thus, “these are not ordinary ethics, nor are they merely an extension of intensification of Jewish ethics … They are the ethics of the kingdom.”29
The utilitarian, consequentialist ethic of Mill is a dry bone when compared to Israel’s prophets and Jesus, for their consequentialism is not just a better world or even personal happiness, but ultimately the glory of God when God establishes his kingdom in this world. And a virtue ethic with no eschatology, which is what Aristotle offered to the world, can’t be compared to the virtue ethic that one finds in Jesus. Here I think of how NT ethics are unfolded in Tom Wright’s After You Believe, in Oliver O’Donovan’s magisterial Resurrection and Moral Order, and in Glenn Stassen and David Gushee’s Kingdom Ethics. An ethic unshaped by eschatology is neither Jesus’ nor Christian.
But once again, there’s a dimension of Jesus’ ethics that is neither covered by an Ethics from Above or an Ethics from Beyond, but which is inherent to Israel’s Story and, in fact, have become the predominant form of ethical reflection in the history of humankind.
This third dimension of Jesus’ ethic emerges from a dimension of the Bible and Jewish history that is too often ignored in contemporary ethical theory, and it is an irony that a discipline known as the “love of wisdom” (philo-sophia) so rarely today lets itself become absorbed in wisdom motifs. An example of a moral philosopher who does, however, is Martin Buber, whose work I and Thou remains monumental.30 Those familiar with Israel’s wisdom tradition, and Buber was, will know that there is a striking absence, or at least a major de-emphasis, of a Torah-shaped ethic and a revelatory-based set of commands.
Wisdom was not an Ethic from Above or, since it lacked an eschatological shaping, an Ethic from Beyond. The wisdom writers, and here I’m thinking of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and the noncanonical Ben Sirach, don’t say, “God says do this”; neither do they say, “Here comes God, better shape up!” No, the wisdom tradition anchors itself in human observation. Wisdom, then, is how to live in God’s world in God’s way, but this kind of wisdom can only be acquired by those who are humbly receptive to the wisdom of society’s sages. As well, a wisdom culture trusts human observation and through intuition discerns God’s intentions for this world.
Jesus, too, frequently teaches his followers how to live in light of inductive observation. In the Sermon this is clear, for instance, in going the second mile in Matthew 5:38–42, or in 6:19–34, where Jesus teaches a single-minded righteousness. Each day has enough gripes, so why engage today in tomorrow’s griping?
Yet this earthy, horizontal, and inductive—dare one say empirical?—framing of ethics too often leads to the elimination of an Ethic from Above and an Ethic from Beyond.31 One sees this in Aristotle, of course, but also in Kant, who wanted to frame all ethics on the basis of reason alone; one sees it in Bentham and Mill; one sees it in the egoistic ethical theory of Ayn Rand, our modern world’s obsession with cultural relativism in which belief in a revelation or a kingdom has been surrendered; one sees it even more in evolutionary ethics that seek to frame ethics on the basis of what is natural to human evolution; one sees it in B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism, which, in fact, all but surrendered anything like ethics. A good example of that struggle is Bernard Gert’s attempt to establish moral theory on reason alone.32 As my friend Greg Clark observed to me, perhaps we first learn about the futility—but ultimate cynical posture—of framing ethics entirely from below in the Bible itself, in Ecclesiastes, which reminds us that so much of human striving is nothing but vanity.
But others are extending through discernment Jesus’ Ethics from Below in light of how the Bible speaks about a variety of pressing topics, and I think here of both William Webb, in his Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals, where he thoroughly maps his “redemptive-movement hermeneutic,” and of Samuel Wells, in his Improvisation, where he contends that the proper posture of the Christian is to improvise rather than simply to perform the script.33 The reason I assign Webb and Wells to an Ethics from Below is because they singularly focus on learning to discern, in wisdom, how to live out the Bible in our world in a way that breaches the script in order to advance a Christian ethic into new territory. Any use of the Sermon on the Mount that does not extend it into our world by plowing new ground converts into a mere Ethics from Above and fails to embrace that Jesus himself “did” Ethics from Below. How we can we “follow” Jesus and not learn to do ethics as he did?
I want to propose, then, that Jesus’ ethic is a combination of an Ethics from Above, Beyond, and Below—the Law, the Prophets, and the Wisdom Literature. But there’s more because those three elements for his ethics are tied to his messianic vocation, his conviction that an ethic can only be lived out in community (the kingdom manifestation in the church) and through the power of the Spirit now at work. The above, beyond, and below are each reshaped because it is Jesus’ ethic, because this ethic is for his followers, and because the Spirit has been unleashed.
Jesus’ ethic is distinct because Jesus saw himself as Israel’s Messiah, and because at its core Jesus offered nothing other than a Messianic Ethic.34 Nothing makes sense about the Sermon until we understand it as messianic vision, and once we understand it as messianic we can understand it all—especially its radical elements.35 Thus, Tom Wright gets it exactly right when he says: “The Sermon … isn’t just about how to behave. It’s about discovering the living God in the loving, and dying, Jesus, and learning to reflect that love ourselves into the world that needs it so badly.”36 Or, as the German New Testament scholar and Lutheran bishop Eduard Lohse, put it: “Jesus’ word is not separable from the one who speaks it.”37
At the core of Jesus’ ethics, then, is a belief about himself, that he indeed was the one who brought the Old Testament Law and the Prophets (as well as Wisdom Literature) to their completion or defining point in who he was, what he did, and what he taught. There is a Torah dimension; there is a Wisdom dimension; and there is a Prophet dimension. But King Jesus pushes each of these to a new level where Jesus himself is the Torah, the Wisdom, and the Prophet who was to come. Only in association or relationship with Jesus does the Sermon make sense. Jesus does not offer abstract principles or simply his version of the Torah for a new society. Instead, he offers himself to his disciples, or, put differently, he summons them to himself and in participation with Jesus and his vision the disciples are transformed into the fullness of a kingdom moral vision.
But Jesus’ Messianic Ethic is not for isolated individuals. Transcending what Aristotle meant in his discussions of friendship and recapturing Israel’s own sense of family identity, this ethic of Jesus was to be lived out in the context of a kingdom community, the ecclesia. As the Messiah formed a community of followers, so the ethic of Jesus is a messianic and kingdom-community ethic. The Sermon on the Mount is supremely and irreducibly ecclesial. Few have emphasized this theme as central to Christian ethics like John Howard Yoder.38 Or, as Hauerwas said it, “The sermon, therefore, is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus.”39 Church, then, forms the context for the ethic of Jesus.40
But there’s more in the pages of the New Testament as ethical reflection lumbers toward the second century: Jesus’ ethical vision was only practicable through the power of the Pentecostal gift of the Holy Spirit who took human abilities to the next level and human inabilities and turned them into new abilities. This Spirit-driven ethic was to be sustained in the ecclesia by sacraments, by Word, by the gifts of the Spirit, and by memory of our common Story. Much more could be said, but this sketches how Jesus did ethics.
There are two versions of the Sermon, one in Matthew 5–7 (the text this commentary will expound) and one in Luke 6:20–49. Since our focus will be on Matthew’s version of the Sermon, we need to sketch a brief introduction to Matthew and its Sermon, though when this series is completed there will be a more complete introduction to Matthew in the volume on Matthew.41
After more than three decades of teaching Matthew and the Sermon, I have come to this conclusion: it is impossible to prove who wrote Matthew’s gospel. By that I mean it is as impossible to prove that he (Matthew, the tax collector of Matt 9:9–13) didn’t do as that he did. It has been customary to lay on the table one’s claim: undeniably, Matthew is the traditional author. Then lay next to that claim the many and various criticisms of that claim, then respond to each criticism—often done with admirable detail—and then conclude that since none of the criticisms are sufficiently demonstrated, Matthew is the author. The logical problem here needs more attention by those who use this approach: disproving criticisms is not the same as proving the claim that the tax collector wrote the gospel. The reason I say that is because the critics of the traditional claim perform a similar procedure: they lay on the table the claim, then argue against the claim by offering their criticisms, and then conclude that Matthew did not write the gospel. Knocking down arguments does not a case make.
The arguments for Matthew, the tax collector, writing this gospel eventually wind down to the simple fact that Matthew has been connected to this gospel from the earliest surviving evidence. The earliest manuscripts of this gospel have Kata Maththaion, “according to Matthew.” Many today have for a variety of reasons chosen to be suspicious of any early church claim like this, but I cannot share that suspicion. In fact, I am inclined to trust early church attributions.42
The authorship question can be rooted in the question of sources. For more than two hundred years, but particularly for the last century, how the Synoptic Evangelists got their material has been a constant discussion. Some think the canonical order is the chronological order (Matthew, then Mark, then Luke), while others argued that Augustine got it more or less right when he said Matthew was first, Luke was second, and Mark combines and reduces Matthew and Luke into a shorter gospel. This theory, today called the Griesbach Hypothesis, is a minority viewpoint. The standard hypothesis, which I prefer to call the Oxford Hypothesis because it was framed at Oxford University about one century ago through the detailed work of B. H. Streeter and others, is that Mark and a hypothetical source called “Q” (from the German word Quelle, “source”) were at the bottom of the Synoptics. Both Matthew and Luke each used both Mark and Q independently of one another, and they each probably had access both to other written sources as well as to oral traditions. I will assume this theory, which is the majority viewpoint today, in what follows. Though this will not be the focus of this commentary, at times we will observe how “Matthew” has edited his sources to reflect the theology we can detect in the first gospel.43
By way of additional note, if Matthew used Mark, we have now “dated” Matthew after Mark, and since most date Mark in the late 60s to early 70s, Matthew was probably written sometime in the 70s or even 80s, but a slightly earlier date for Mark (say the early 60s) makes it entirely possible for Matthew to have been written before AD 70. Any proposal for dating Matthew must remain tentative.44
If our source-critical conclusion is accepted, we have another piece of evidence for considering the authorship question. If Matthew used Mark, and if Matthew is the tax collector, then Matthew copied Mark’s story of Matthew’s own conversion story.
| Mark 2:14 | Matthew 9:9 |
|---|---|
|
As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him. |
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. |
There is nothing here that can really prove or disprove Matthew’s authorship, but it strikes more than a few readers today odd that an author, in this case Matthew, would copy someone else’s version of his own conversion even if he changed the name from “Levi” to “Matthew.” It is possible that Matthew had two names, Levi and Matthew, but that doesn’t relieve the oddity of copying someone else’s record of your own conversion.
The evidence is not compelling in any direction. Craig Keener has summed this up well: “Matthew’s claim to authorship on any level [is] the weakest among the four canonical Gospels.”45 Yes, and with Keener I would contend that this argument comes down to whether or not we trust the earliest evidence and that a reasonable view is that Matthew is either the original deposit of this gospel or the author of the whole gospel. I will call the author “Matthew” because I think that is the most likely conclusion we can draw.
The question of structure for the Sermon is incapable of any kind of firm resolution.46 There are a few proposals for the structure of the Sermon, the most intriguing being the one that suggests from the Lord’s Prayer on we have expositions of each line in the Lord’s Prayer.47 The evidence in Matthew 6 and 7, though, must be stretched to fit those lines. The safest way to read and preach this Sermon is to recognize clearly discernible topics about discipleship that move one to another. The opening lines about disciples gathering around Jesus (5:1) with the ending having crowds (7:28) suggests to many that Matthew has composed a sermon based on sayings given by Jesus about ethics from a variety of his ministry locations.
1. P. Lapide, The Sermon on the Mount: Utopia or Program for Action? (trans. A. Swidler; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986).
2. Ibid., 4.
3. For an exceptional study of how the Sermon has been interpreted by major theologians, see J. P. Greenman et al., The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries: From the Early Church to John Paul II (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007). A more complete sketch can be found in C. Bauman, The Sermon on the Mount: The Modern Quest for Its Meaning (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990); H. D. Betz, The Sermon on the Mount (Hermeneia; ed. A. Collins; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 5–44. For a brief sketch of three major interpreters of the Sermon (William Stringfellow, David Lipscomb, and sixteenth-century Anabaptists), see R. Hughes, “Dare We Live in the World Imagined in the Sermon on the Mount?” in Preaching the Sermon on the Mount: The World It Imagines (ed. D. Fleer and D. Bland; St. Louis: Chalice, 2007). Also see G. Strecker, The Sermon on the Mount: An Exegetical Commentary (trans. O. C. Dean; Nashville: Abingdon, 1988), 15–23; W. Carter, What Are They Saying about Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount? (Mahway, NJ: Paulist, 1994); C. Quarles, Sermon on the Mount: Restoring Christ’s Message to the Modern Church (NAC Studies in Bible and Theology; Nashville: Broadman & Homan, 2011), 4–11; R. Schnackenburg, All Things Are Possible to Believers: Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount (trans. J. S. Currie; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 10–21.
4. Two classic German examples: J. Jeremias, The Sermon on the Mount (Facet; trans. N. Perrin; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963); E. Thurneysen, The Sermon on the Mount (trans. W. C. Robinson; Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1964). Two recent examples, one better than the other: G. H. Stassen, Living the Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Hope for Grace and Deliverance (Enduring Questions in Christian Life; San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006). Stassen maintains a balance of finding a theological, or soteriological, context while affirming the demand of the Sermon. But Carl Vaught (The Sermon on the Mount: A Theological Investigation [Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2001]) seemingly can’t find Jesus saying what he thinks Jesus ought to have said, so he works hard to show that Jesus can be made to be say what he wants him to say. Vaught might instead have written a commentary on Romans.
5. I have attempted to show this in The King Jesus Gospel. Of the many studies, see D. Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); J. R. Daniel Kirk, Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? A Narrative Approach to the Problem of Pauline Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011).
6. J. Pelikan, Divine Rhetoric: The Sermon on the Mount as Message and as Model in Augustine, Chrysostom, and Luther (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000).
7. For an older study, H. K. McArthur, Understanding the Sermon on the Mount (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 105–48. Here are McArthur’s twelve approaches: absolutist, modification [of the absolutist approach], hyperbole, general principles, attitudes-not-acts, double standard, two realms, analogy of Scripture, interim ethics, modern [now classic] dispensationalist, repentance, and unconditional divine will.
8. The literature here is overwhelming: S. Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); R. J. Mouw, The God Who Commands (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990); J. P. Wogaman, Christian Ethics: A Historical Introduction (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993); O. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994); D. Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002); S. Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004); S. Hauerwas and S. Wells eds., The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); W. C. Reuschling, Reviving Evangelical Ethics: The Promises and Pitfalls of Classic Models of Morality (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008); N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (New York: HarperOne, 2010); S. Wilkens, Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics: An Introduction to Theories of Right and Wrong (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011).
9. This is a major point of A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Also S. Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
10. Willard, Renovation of the Heart, 85.
11. Nikki Coffey Tousley and Brad J. Kallenberg, “Virtue Ethics,” in Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics (ed. J. B. Green; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 814–19. Their definition summarizes Aristotle’s approach but shows how adaptable virtue ethics can be: “Virtues are (1) habituated dispositions involving both an affective desire for the good and the skill to both discern and act accordingly; (2) learned through practice within a tradition (i.e., a historical community with a rich account of the ‘good’); and (3) directed toward this tradition’s particular conception of the good (making virtues ‘teleological’)” (p. 814).
12. Reuschling, Reviving Evangelical Ethics, 31–41.
13. S. Hauerwas, Matthew (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible; Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), 88.
14. John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (rev. ed.; Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2011).
15. One good example is G. H. Stassen and D. P. Gushee, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003).
16. This is not to say they don’t each contribute to reading the Sermon. Charles Talbert’s Reading the Sermon on the Mount: Character Formation and Decision Making in Matthew 5–7 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004) is framed through virtue ethics rather than through norms for decision-making. The same is true of N. T. Wright’s After You Believe. My criticism is that Jesus isn’t speaking in this manner when he teaches his norms, morals, or ethics. Virtue ethicists focus on character (or virtue), not on norms or commands; Jesus focuses on the latter. That is what is in need of theoretical explanation. I will contend it is found in Christology: his demands confront us with who he is, the Lord, the Messiah/King.
17. K. C. Kinghorn, John Wesley on the Sermon on the Mount (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), 19. On Wesley, see Mark Noll, in J. P. Greenman et al., The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries, 153–80.
18. Hauerwas, Matthew, 65.
19. Ibid., 75.
20. I have a slightly more academic outline of this approach in the forthcoming revised Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), s.v. “Ethics of Jesus.”
21. D. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 4; trans. B. Green; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996). On Bonhoeffer’s Sermon on the Mount, see S. Hauerwas, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder,” in The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries (ed. J. P. Greenman; Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007), 207–22.
22. W. C. Reuschling, “Divine Command Theories of Ethics,” in Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics (ed. J. B. Green; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 242–46.
23. See Mouw, The God Who Commands.
24. See Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom; idem, Community of Character.
25. Wright, After You Believe. In other words, Wright’s virtue ethics is a modified virtue ethics. Wright’s serious work of appropriating creation can be explored further in O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order.
26. S. McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011).
27. Hauerwas, Matthew, 60.
28. J. Kapolyo, “Matthew,” in Africa Bible Commentary (ed. T. Adeyemo; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 1117.
29. D. A. Hagner, “Ethics and the Sermon on the Mount,” Studia Theologica—Nordic Journal of Theology 51/1 (1997): 48.
30. M. Buber, I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).
31. Wilkens, Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics.
32. B. Gert, Common Morality: Deciding What to Do (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
33. W. J. Webb, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001); Wells, Improvisation. Also, W. J. Webb, Corporal Punishment in the Bible: A Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic for Troubling Texts (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 57–73.
34. There are a number of books exploring Jesus’ self-consciousness (who did he think he was?); N. T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters (New York: HarperOne, 2011); McKnight, King Jesus Gospel, 100–111.
35. Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount, 10–20.
36. N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone (2 vols.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 1:53.
37. E. Lohse, Theological Ethics of the New Testament (trans. E. Boring; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).
38. Yoder’s only study of the Sermon on the Mount, presented in 1966 in Uruguay, found the “political axioms” of the Sermon to be an ethic of repentance, discipleship, testimony, fulfillment, perfect love, excess, and reconciliation. See “The Political Axioms of the Sermon on the Mount,” in J. H. Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2003), 34–51.
39. Hauerwas, Matthew, 61.
40. See a helpful emphasis in Reuschling, Reviving Evangelical Ethics.
41. See S. McKnight, “Gospel of Matthew,” DJG, 526–41. For a recent study, R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 1–22. On the structure, see Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount, 21–26. On rhetoric, H. Betz, Sermon on the Mount, 44–70. For the purpose and setting, see Carter, What Are They Saying, 56–77. On empire criticism, see W. Carter, “Power and Identities: The Contexts of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount,” in Preaching the Sermon on the Mount (eds. D. Fleer and D. Bland; St. Louis: Chalice, 2007), 8–21. For evaluation, S. McKnight and J. B. Modica, eds, Jesus Is Lord, Caesar Is Not: Evaluating Empire in New Testament Studies (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013).
42. C. S. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 38.
43. For my own take, see S. McKnight, “Source Criticism,” in Interpreting the New Testament: Essays on Methods and Issues (ed. D. A. Black and D. S. Dockery; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2001), 74–105.
44. See Keener, Matthew, 42–44.
45. Ibid., 39.
46. A dense summary of proposals can be seen in ibid., 163.
47. R. A. Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding (Waco, TX: Word, 1982), 363–81.