The Sermon on the Mount

Betz’s commentary on Matthew 5–7 is an extraordinary specialist resource for the Sermon on the Mount. Few works bring such extensive command of ancient rhetoric, philosophy, ethics, law, Jewish tradition and Greco-Roman parallels to bear on Jesus’ teaching, and even readers who reject Betz’s larger reconstruction will repeatedly encounter historical and conceptual material unavailable in ordinary Matthew commentaries. His comparisons with ancient moral and philosophical discourse can sharpen one’s understanding of both the distinctiveness and cultural intelligibility of the Sermon. The major caution is methodological: Betz’s reconstruction of a pre-Matthean Sermon as an independent epitome and his proposed literary history are often highly conjectural. I therefore would not use his source theory as a controlling framework, but as a specialist commentary on Matthew 5–7 his learning and originality are exceptional.

This massive commentary opens with an introduction which surveys the history of the interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount (SM) and the Sermon on the Plain (SP) and discusses their compositional history, genre, and literary function. A very detailed commentary on the SM and a separate, less detailed commentary on the SP follow. Although Betz investigates the tradition-histories of the various units, focus is on the final form of the texts. The book ends with a useful bibliography and extensive indices. The chief value of Betz's work lies in its exegetical richness, in the way in which traditional exegetical questions as well as Jewish and Greco-Roman parallels are thoroughly explored down to the minutiae. No exegete can fail to learn much from it, and the commentary will remain an exceedingly valuable reference tool indefinitely. There is nothing else like it. Betz's work, however, is as controversial as it is helpful, for it forwards several uncertain theses. Among the more intriguing is his source theory, which seemingly envisages the following sequence: (1) Q originally contained a discourse consisting of, among other things, beatitudes, the love of enemy complex, the sayings on judging, the sayings on two trees, the parable of the builders (p. 43). (2) This discourse was removed from Q and developed in two different directions. The SM was formulated for Jewish Christians as an epitome of the teaching of Jesus, the SP for Gentile Christians (pp. 44, 70-80). (3) The mt lkSM and SP were reintroduced into Q and Q , whence Matthew and Luke adopted them (pp. 43-44). [Full Review]