The Sermon on the Mount, Background and Introduction

Tony for leading my favorite hymn there. Appreciate that. Thanks for the consideration.

I mentioned a few other things, too, that I should have mentioned in terms of the background for this study. I will be projecting all of the scriptures on screen here. It makes it easier to follow along, plus I can actually cram more material into it that way. Also, as I go through this, I've been covering an awful lot of the cultural and historical background for the Gospels because in the last couple of decades in particular, a tremendous amount of new information has come to light. What has been happening is that various American and British Bible scholars have been working in a cooperative relationship with Jewish scholars in Israel. This has been a great boon to biblical studies because the Jewish scholars in Israel know everything about the Old Testament culture, background, history. The American Bible scholars know a great deal about the Bible, what we would call the New Testament. What they've been able to do is, over recent decades, get together and compare notes. As a result of that, they have found a tremendous amount of correlation and things that have been more or less hidden to our eyes and our understanding—Christianity's eyes and understanding—because they did not understand the background of the Old Testament scriptures and the culture and the history.

In the Middle East, those of you who have been there, you realize this, that culture changes very, very slowly. I've been to Israel three times—Egypt twice, Jordan twice, Turkey twice—and you can literally see people living there the same way they did 4,000 years ago in the time of Abraham. You can drive through the desert and see people living in bedouin tents with their goats and their sheep and their camels outside. The only difference is, if you drive through at night now, you see a blue glow in the tent from their widescreen TV and their generator that they have hooked up there. Some things have changed, but the whole culture has changed very, very little in that part of the world. Actually, if you go to Jerusalem in particular and you see the Orthodox Jews there with the black robes and the black hats and the side curls and beards and so on, that is actually a continuation of the Phariseeism that we read about in the Gospels, which we've talked about a little bit. That essentially is the way the Pharisees lived in practice. That has continued on after the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jewish people after Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD. There's just an awful lot of history there. I try to bring out a lot of that cultural background because it does give us a much deeper insight into the Gospels. I liken it to an archaeological dig. You can walk through Israel or Jordan or Egypt today and you look on the surface of the ground and you see bits and pieces of pottery and things like that. But the deeper you dig, the more pieces you uncover. As you uncover more and more pieces and you start putting those pieces together, you come to a much deeper and greater understanding, in this case of God's Word. That's what I'm trying to do in this is to teach all of us how to better understand the cultural context and what's going on. Eventually, how to put all the pieces together, how to study the Bible for yourself and really dig deep and get every morsel out of there that God has preserved for us in His Word. That's our overall goal with the goal of eventually all of us being able to teach and relate God's Word to other people as well. That's part of our purpose in that. Another thing about the format, too, is I will generally try to open it up for questions a couple of times through the course of the message. Again, I'm trying to pattern this like a college class. Today, if you do have a question, raise your hand. We do come to a couple of logical breaks in here at that time. Hopefully, I'll remember to ask if there are any questions about that. If not, I do have some time at the end for that if I don't get too carried away on it.

Now getting into the actual study with that introduction out of the way, we are at a significant point in our studies of the Gospels. We have followed Jesus chronologically for approximately a year as he has traveled around Galilee, as he's visited Jerusalem, for the feast days. We have seen some of his confrontations with the scribes and the Pharisees and what I call the Jerusalem religious establishment. These are the people who controlled the temple, more or less controlled their Jewish religious life there in Jerusalem. They were very opposed to Jesus. As we've seen already, they are in the first year of Christ ministry already plotting to destroy him, to discredit him, and eventually to kill him, as we know. We've also seen some very dramatic healings that Christ has performed. We've seen some confrontations, very bitter confrontations, when some of those healings were done on the Sabbath day. But a question for us, one of the study questions, I think the first one I included last night, is what have we not seen in the Gospels? Something has been conspicuously absent in the Gospels. I don't want you to think about that for just a minute. Hopefully you've already given some thought about that. But here's the title for today's message, by the way, the Sermon on the Mount Part 1, the background and introduction to this. So Mark's Gospel, getting into the question again, what have we been missing so far in the Gospels? What is not covered or not included? Mark's Gospel really jumps right into the heart of things. In his first chapter, Mark 1, verses 14 and 15, begins with... I'm sorry? Actually, we're not at a page yet. We will be talking about page 25, I believe it is, later on. But for right now, we're again covering background. Actually, you won't need your harmony much at all today, but I want to make sure you have a copy of it. We will talk about it a little bit, but again, mostly today we're setting the stage for the Sermon on the Mount. So Mark 1, 14 and 15, Mark just jumps into the story with John the Baptizer beginning his ministry in the desert, then Jesus being baptized by John, then Jesus being tempted for 40 days, and then Jesus beginning his ministry up in Galilee, up in what is today northern Israel. So Mark just jumps right into the story with the beginning of Christ's ministry and says, Now after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. So what have we been missing in our gospel study so far that Mark says Jesus was doing? Anybody know? It's kind of obvious, but what we've been missing is examples of Jesus' teaching. We've been missing examples of his teaching. We've talked a lot about his miracles. We've talked about him choosing his apostles, things like that, but we have not really read much at all about Jesus Christ's teachings. We've seen scriptures like these. And don't try to write down everything, but Matthew 4 in verse 23. These are some we've covered so far. And Jesus went about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues. Mark 1 verse 21. Then they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and taught. Mark 2 13. Then he went out again by the sea, the sea of Galilee. And all the multitude came to him, and he taught them. Luke 4 verse 15. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all. And Luke 4 verse 31. Then he went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and was teaching them on the Sabbath. So here we see five different examples that mention Christ teaching, teaching in the synagogues, teaching outdoors to multitudes of people. But not one of them tell us what it was he was teaching. What he was saying.

So now we're getting to that. We haven't seen examples of what Christ was teaching yet. And now we're reaching the point in our study of the Gospels where we have three chapters of Matthew and one of Luke that record in detail examples of Christ teaching. So that leads to another obvious question. Why? Why have we been, you know, we're now a year, more than a year, into Christ's ministry. Why only now are we getting to the point of getting concrete examples of what it was that Christ was teaching? Why didn't all these others that we've read, why didn't they give examples of Christ teaching then? Well, it's basically, I believe, a matter of establishing Christ's credentials, of establishing Christ's credentials. What were Jesus's credentials? Again, as we go through these studies, I'm trying to also help us get in the understanding the mindset of people then because they had a very different mindset. They had a very Jewish, a very Eastern mindset, not opposed to our as opposed to our Western way of thinking. Our thinking is patterned after the Greeks and the Romans. I'll give some examples of that a little bit later here. But when we say Christ's credentials, what does that mean? Well, it means who was Jesus? Why should we pay attention to his teaching? What is his background? By what authority is he teaching? We talked a couple of years ago about the concept of authority coming from the Hebrew word smeka. There were rabbis who had authority. We say that mentioned several times in the Gospels. These were the super-rabbis, you might say, of their day, the einsteins of the day, the great brilliant thinkers, those Jewish rabbis who had smeka, who had authority. Jesus is one of these. John the Baptizer is one of these. There's, on average, only one or two a century during that period there who had this authority. And the Gospels tell us that Jesus had this authority. So by what authority does he teach? What credibility does he have to give his teaching here? Well, what we see is that leading up to this point, both Matthew and Luke, have clearly established Jesus Christ's credibility and authority before they get into his teaching.

Before they get into his teaching. Let's notice some scriptures that tell us how they have established Christ's authority and what his credibility is. First of all, both of them cover, Matthew 1 and Luke 3, cover how Jesus was of the promised lineage of the Messiah. The Messiah had to be a son of Abraham. He had to be a son of David, or a descendant of that. He had to be a son of others. Back when we covered the genealogies, I went through about eight or ten different individuals that Jesus, that the Messiah was promised to be of the lineage from, from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Zerubbabel, a number of others there. And Jesus's genealogies established that, that he was the fulfillment of those promises. So he was of the promised lineage of the Messiah. They both covered that so far. Second, his birth was divinely foretold by angels.

Divinely foretold by angels, we find that in Matthew 1 and Luke 1, where angels appeared to his mother Mary, to his stepfather Joseph, and to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptizer. So his birth was divinely foretold by angels. Both of them cover that. Next, he was the fulfillment of various prophecies. That's talked about in Matthew 2 and 3, and Luke 2 and 3. A few of those prophecies were that he was to be born in Bethlehem. Bethlehem, the house of bread, the bread of life was to be born in Bethlehem, the house of bread. There were the prophecies of Simeon and Anna when he was brought to the temple there in Jerusalem. There were the prophecies of him being miraculously spared as a child from Herod, Herod the Great and the slaughter of the infants. And also of him moving to Nazareth in the land of Zebulun and Naftali, where the Gentiles would see a great light that was prophesied. So these have all been fulfilled up to this point, as recorded in Matthew 2 and 3 and Luke 2 and 3. Next, he had been preceded by the Elijah, who was to be a forerunner of the Messiah, John the Baptizer. And we find that in Matthew 3 and Luke 3. He was to be preceded by the one, the voice crying in the wilderness, as Malachi foretold.

Some others, the Father, God the Father, had proclaimed Jesus to be his beloved Son, which again took place at his baptism by John the Baptizer there in the Jordan. And we find that in Matthew 3 and Luke 3. And also he had defeated Satan in the temptation in the wilderness, as recorded in Matthew 4 and Luke 4. And finally, we've talked about this in considerable detail, that he had performed divine miracles, divine miracles of healing. Up to this point, we find that recorded in Matthew 4 and in Luke 4, 5 and 6. So this has all been crammed into the chapters, the four chapters leading up to this here. So what we see here is that both Matthew and Luke seem to be making the clear point that before we hear and see examples of Jesus Christ's teaching, we need to understand who he was. We need to understand who he was, that he was indeed the promised Messiah, that he was the one who fulfilled some of these prophecies of the Messiah, that he is the one whom God the Father proclaimed to be his very Son, that he was the one who had defeated Satan the devil in the temptation in the wilderness, and also that he was a teacher who performed miracles by the divine power and divine authority, showing that he was one who is indeed sent by God. So that is the background. Now with that background, which Matthew and Luke have been steadily building up to this point, now we get to the point where he can begin to understand his teaching, which we are obligated to follow. And that's the key point, because if you have a teacher who by all of these conditions fulfilled prophecy, the Father proclaiming that he is the Son, that he's fulfilled all of these conditions for the Messiah, then when we get to his teaching, the only thing we can conclude is we have to obey. We have to live by that teaching. That is the Jewish approach to it. In Jewish thinking or Eastern thinking, it's not just a matter of believing something. I mean, as James put it, even the demons believe and tremble, but they don't obey.

But in Jewish thought, and we see this theme again and again in the Gospels, is once you understand it, once you believe it, you are absolutely obligated to obey it. You have no other choice, no other option. So that's part of the theme we run into in the Gospels again and again. This is kind of the case that Matthew and Luke have been building up to. Okay, you've seen all of this clear evidence that this is indeed the Messiah, the promised Son of God and Savior. So therefore, here's his teaching, which we are obligated to obey. We'll get into that more as we get into the actual Sermon on the Mount. Now, there's another example here of the authority, you might say, or the credibility, I guess, a better word of Jesus Christ's teaching. And this is what I call the granddaddy of all Remesim.

That's something I've been thinking of. What in the world? The granddaddy of all Remesim. Let's talk about Remes for a minute. I've given a whole sermon on that, which you can find on the website. Remes is a Hebrew word, R-E-M-E-Z, and it means hint or clue or a look back. And it is a teaching technique that was common among the rabbis there in the first century.

We actually find Jesus Christ using this technique a number of times. We find John the Baptizer using it. We find Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all using it. We find Paul using it later on. And it is a teaching method...well, to give you an example...let's see, where to start on this.

Jewish schoolboys and schoolgirls, because they went to the local synagogue for school, and the Jewish boys, by the time they were age 12, were expected to have memorized the five books of Moses. Not just the names. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The entire books by the time they were age 12. They were a very literate society. I'll get into this a little bit more later on, but they didn't have their own Bibles there. It was much too expensive. So they memorized Scripture. If the boys had succeeded at that by age 12, then they would go on and attempt to memorize the rest of the books of what we call the Old Testament. The entirety of it.

Those were the conditions to becoming a rabbi or a scribe. Those two terms we find in the New Testament. Jesus is called a rabbi. John the Baptizer is a rabbi. What does that tell us? It tells us they had memorized the entirety of the Old Testament. And that is why in Jesus Christ ministry continually you find him just rattling off Scriptures scattered randomly throughout the Old Testament. You see that especially in Paul's writing where he just quotes from all over. It's because he has memorized the entirety of the Old Testament. And if you were to aspire to be a rabbi or a scribe, a lawyer it's sometimes translated, that was the minimum requirement. You had to memorize the entirety of the Bible. So when Jesus and Paul are teaching to a Jewish audience, their audience, the men in the audience, most of them have memorized large portions of the Old Testament. So this is where this teaching method comes in. The girls too, I don't want to leave them out because they too memorized...their focus was not so much on the law, the five books of Moses, but on the Psalms, the book of Deuteronomy. That's what they were expected to memorize. One or two other books which I don't remember off the top of my head. It's interesting that when Jesus talks or teaches to women, he nearly always does so quoting from the books that they were expected to have memorized. I may get into that further at one point. I don't remember it off the top of my head here. But Rimes was a technique where...to give an example, if I were to sing, and I won't...I'll spare you, but if I were to say, Oh beautiful, four spacious skies, what comes to your mind? Four amber waves of grain. You know the rest. You've memorized it. You know the song. You know the tune there. So what Jesus does and the other gospel writers, when they will quote part of a verse and they will expect their audience to fill in the rest because they know the Old Testament scriptures by heart. And we see this again and again. Again, there's a scripture, there's a sermon on this online that I'd recommend. If you haven't heard that, go back and listen to it because there's...and there's literally hundreds of examples, somewhere between three to four hundred examples of it just in the Gospels alone. And once you understand this, you start seeing them all over the place. And we'll see a number of examples as we go through the sermon on the Mount.

The reason they're doing this is to make a particular point there. To give an example, Jesus Christ...well, to give a couple of examples that I mentioned in the sermon, I'll get a little distracted here, but just to remind us of how this works. John the Baptist is mentioned in connection with his ministry. There are two physical locations that are mentioned in John the Baptizer's ministry.

Those two locations...well, first of all, when John appears on the scene, how is he dressed?

He's dressed in a garment of camel skin with a leather belt around his waist. What is John's role? He is the second whom?

The second Elijah. Go back and read the account of Elijah. How is Elijah dressed?

In a garment of animal hair with a leather belt around his waist. John is consciously dressing like Elijah. The two places in the Gospels that where John is mentioned, baptizing. One of them takes place near the southern end of the Jordan River, just north of the Dead Sea, where Elijah is taken off in a chariot into the skies, leaving his mantle for Elisha. The other place that is mentioned in connection with John baptizing is further north on the Jordan River, where, during the famine, Elijah is fed by ravens there during the period of famine. So we see John the Baptizer appearing dressed like Elijah, bearing the same message as Elijah to repent because God is about to start acting here. The two places that he's mentioned are places that are prominently connected with Elijah's ministry on earth. Another example, Jesus heals a...we haven't gotten to this in the Gospel studies yet, but there is one case where Jesus heals a widow's son. He's walking through the countryside with his disciples, and they come across a funeral possession with a widow's son who has died, and Jesus miraculously resurrects him and brings him to life. Where does that take place? It takes place about a half a mile from the town where Elisha, the prophet Elisha, raised a widow's son to life. And you see little things like this throughout the Gospels. And if you don't study the geography, and if you don't understand the history of it, you miss all of these connections. Why does Jesus raise that one particular woman's son at the place where Elisha raised a widow's son? It's because he's sending a message that he is a prophet, a great prophet like Elisha. Why is John dressing like Elijah to send the message that he is the second Elijah? So little things like that throughout the Gospels, which we'll cover. But anyway, this is the concept of Remes. And Remazim here is plural, at an I.M. on the end for Hebrew. So now, what do I mean by the granddaddy of all Remes? Well, it's a granddaddy because it's an extensive one that covers several chapters of Matthew's Gospel. Now Matthew, as we've discussed before, is writing to a primarily Jewish or Hebrew audience. And we've talked before about how he does a lot of Jewish things in his Gospel. He emphasizes how Jesus is the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies of Isaiah, of Jeremiah, Daniel, others. We saw a particular Jewish thing, you might say, in his genealogy, where he inserts a little coded message into his genealogy that is only going to make sense to a Jewish reader. A Jewish, a Gentile reader, go right over their heads. Spent quite a bit of time explaining that. Matthew uses many examples of Remes and records a number of examples of Jesus. This technique of Remes. And Matthew includes this one, what I call the granddaddy of all Remes in. So let's notice several personal biographical events that Matthew has told us about Jesus leading up to this point. Let's see. And he's drawing parallels here. First one, Matthew 2. Jesus escaped death as an infant when Herod is slaughtering the babies.

Matthew 2. As a result of that, Jesus enters Egypt.

Jesus goes into the wilderness after he's baptized. He goes into the wilderness. And what happens in the wilderness? He is tempted there in the wilderness. Jesus, while he's in the wilderness, fasts for 40 days. Matthew 4. I've given you the chapter references there as well.

Now we come Matthew 5 to where Jesus ascends a mountain. And what does he do when he's on that mountain? He reveals the law from the mountain. Now, does any of that sound familiar? Any of that sound familiar? This just blew my mind when I came across this. First of all, Jesus escaped death as an infant. As did Moses.

Moses, you remember the story he's born at a time when they're throwing the Hebrew boys into the Nile River to be eaten by the crocodiles. But what happens with Moses? He's put in a little basket and is rescued by Pharaoh's daughter. He ends up being raised in Pharaoh's household. Jesus entered Egypt. Well, so did Moses. Moses, of course, was exiled from Egypt after he killed the Egyptian overseer and fled into the land of Midian. And then God says, guess what? Time to go back. Time to go back and bring my people out. Jesus went into the wilderness, as we talk about there, after he was baptized. As did Moses. Moses actually went into the wilderness twice. He went when he was fleeing after killing the Egyptian. And then also when God commands him to take Israel out of Egypt and into the wilderness. Next, Jesus is tempted in the wilderness. As was Moses and Israel. They spent 40 years being tempted, being tried, being tested. In the wilderness, again, you can say that Moses went through that twice during his 40 years of exile when he's a shepherd. And then again, as he's leading the Israelites there. Jesus fasted 40 days. Who else fasted 40 days? Moses. Jesus ascended to a mountain, as we talked about now, leading, getting into the Sermon on the Mount. As did Moses, and climbing Mount Sinai. And last, Jesus revealed the law from the mountain. As did Moses. Moses received the law, and then taught it to the peoples there. So when I say this is the granddaddy of all rim is in, what we see is at Matthew in chapters 2 and 4 and now in 5 is building up these parallels with Moses.

So we see seven different things here that Matthew writes covering biographical details of Jesus Christ's life. So what's the point then? What's the point? Why does Matthew do this? Well, his point is rather obvious that Jesus is the second Moses. Jesus is the second Moses. He's fulfilling the prophecy that God would raise up another prophet like Moses. And that prophecy, of course, is Deuteronomy 18 and verse 15. And this is Moses speaking here, and he says, the Lord, the Eternal your God, will raise up for you a prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren. Him shall you hear. And this is widely understood to be a prophecy of Jesus, of the Messiah, the second Moses, the prophet like Moses. Several times we come across in the Gospels where people ask Jesus, are you that prophet? What prophet? Well, if you don't know the Old Testament Scriptures, you don't know what they're talking about. They're talking about this prophet, the prophet that Moses himself promised would be raised up, who would be a second Moses. There's another point, another parallel, that not only would Jesus be a second Moses, but as Moses was the great lawgiver, Jesus would also be a great lawgiver. But another prophecy as well that Matthew gives us here explains the fulfillment. Isaiah 42 and verse 21, this is from the King James version, where Isaiah says, The Lord the Eternal is well pleased for his righteousness' sake. He will magnify the law and make it honorable. This again is a prophecy of what the Messiah would do, that he would magnify the law and make it honorable. And what we see now is that, going through the Sermon on the Mount, is that Matthew goes to considerable length to show that Jesus is indeed magnifying the law, that he is expanding the law to show its full spiritual intent, just as Isaiah had prophesied of the Messiah, that he would magnify the law and make it honorable. So we see here a couple of parallels, that Jesus would be a great lawgiver, as Moses was a great lawgiver, and that also Jesus would magnify the law. He would explain and teach the law, just as Moses did. A couple of other parallels, or this of course leads us to the question, who was the I AM? Who was the Lord? The Yahweh, white W-H, who gave the law to the Israelites there? Well, it was exactly the same being who would come as a human being, born of human parents, as Jesus Christ. We find this spelled out several times in Scripture. I'll just cover one. That's 1 Corinthians 10, verses 1 through 4, and verse 9. Paul here explicitly tells us that Jesus was the God who was with Israel in the Exodus period there.

He says, Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud. It's talking about the cloud that sheltered them, that protected them.

God appeared as a cloud and as a pillar of fire there. That's what he's referring to. All passed through the sea and crossing the Red Sea. All were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the seas, drawing the parallel between baptism and them walking through the waters of the Red Sea as he left Egypt. All ate the same spiritual food, the manna. And all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.

Tells us very explicitly this was the God that they were interacting with, the one who became Jesus Christ. And skipping down to verse 9, Nor let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted. That's referring to them attempting or testing God in the wilderness when they rebelled and wanted to return to Egypt and so on. And Paul says, don't do that. We see how that ended up for them. How's that working for you? So the point here is that since the being who gave that law was the very one who became Jesus Christ in human form, it's only fitting that Jesus should expound and explain that law and its spiritual intent, as he does here in the Sermon on the Mount.

You might also write down, just for reference, we won't go through these, but John 1, Hebrews 1, and Colossians 1 all talk about how Jesus Christ was the Creator, the Creator there in the Old Testament period, and the one who interacted with human beings. There we won't take the time to cover that, but you can just jot that in your notes as a parallel with 1 Corinthians 10, showing that Jesus was indeed the God of the Old Testament who interacted with people. So again, to wrap this up a little bit, this section, Matthew is writing to a Hebrew audience, as we've pointed out before, and he's setting the stage knowing that his Hebrew readers, his Jewish readers, will notice and pick up on these parallels with Moses, the seven parallels we just pointed out here, parallels between Moses' life and Jesus' life. Now why doesn't Matthew spell that out explicitly? Well, he doesn't have to, because he's writing to people of the book. He's writing to people who know God's Word inside and out. And so Moses expects them to know and to pick up on all these subtleties there of what he's saying because they know the book. And what are the implications of that for us? Well, God doesn't spell out all of this. He doesn't have to, because he expects us to be people of the book, to know God's Word inside and out, to see these connections because it all ties together into one incredible and amazing story there. Like Matthew, God didn't spell it all out for us in one place. He didn't give us all these...you know, here's a parallel. This is how Jesus and Moses were alike. God doesn't do that. Matthew didn't do that, because he expects us to know, expects us to know to be that familiar with God's Word that we will pick up on those things ourselves. So, bottom line, we need to keep our noses in the book. All of this has been right there preserved for us for the last 2,000 years, staring us in the face. But if we don't understand and keep studying God's Word, we miss a major part of the story. So, transitioning to another area. Any questions in there? It's one of your chances. So, okay. Alright, we'll move on to the next section there of the background...another section of the story of the background. And that is differences between Matthew and Luke. They're the two gospel writers who give us the Sermon on the Mount. And if you compare the accounts in Matthew and Luke, and you can do that starting on page 25 and for the next few pages there, what are some of the differences there? What do you notice some of the obvious things? I won't go into a lot of detail, but I'll give you a few points here to think about. One is that some of the wording is different between Matthew and Luke. Why? Why? If these are the words of Jesus, why is the wording different? Why does Matthew put it one way? Why does Jesus put it another way if these are the inspired words of God in the flesh? Well, actually we see this is pretty common in the gospels. They're not word for word identical between Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And why is that? Actually, the explanation is pretty simple. And that is that Jesus is speaking in Hebrew or Aramaic, and it's translated into Greek. And then it's further translated from Greek into English. So we're actually two languages removed from Jesus Christ's original words.

In some cases further, because Luke wasn't an eyewitness to these things, nor was Mark, for the most part, they are relying on the accounts of others. So that easily accounts for some of the differences in wording. If you've worked with translating languages, and I know some of you have, a lot of times it's not word for word, translating from one language to another. In Hebrew and Aramaic, as we've talked about before, is a very limited language. We have about six or seven times as many words in English as there were in Hebrew at that time. So one Hebrew word can have a range of meanings, which we have different words for in English, but they don't have in Hebrew. So we're dealing with translation matters a lot of the time. You can see the thought is the same, but it's expressed differently. So that's really pretty easily explained. Some of the wording is different. We'll cover some examples of that as we go along. Another difference between Matthew and Luke is that Matthew is much longer. Matthew covers three chapters.

Sermon on the Mount is three chapters in his gospel compared to one in the Gospel of Luke.

Another example is that this ties in with that. Matthew has several long sections that aren't found at all in Luke, covering 47 verses total that we find in Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount that are not included in the Gospel of Luke. Luke, in turn, has a few sections that aren't found at all in Matthew. And that's 12 verses that we find in Luke that are not found in Matthew at all. And last, some parts that are found in Matthew appear in completely different places and contexts in the Gospel of Luke. 34 verses in all we find in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew are found scattered throughout Luke's Gospel. So what's going on? Why if this is the Sermon on the Mount? Why are there so many differences here?

Let's notice a few examples of some of these differences here. For example, we find Matthew 5 and verse 13, and I'll show these to you in just a minute, is found in Luke 14, many chapters later in Luke. Matthew 5, 15 is the same as Luke 8 and verse 16. You don't have to write all these down. We'll talk about them more later. Matthew 5 and verse 18 is found all the way over into Luke 16 and verse 17. And Matthew 7, 7 through 11 is found in Luke 11, 9 through 13. So these are just some of the examples here. So let's look at these examples now, and you'll see it's obviously the same thing that is being talked about. These are very well-known phrases or sayings. First of all, you are the salt of the earth. Matthew 5, 18, Jesus says, For assuredly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law, till all is fulfilled. And that's found much later in Luke's Gospel in Luke 14, 34 and 35. Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its... Oh, wow! I get the wrong passage there.

Sorry, it was late at night when I was working on this. It's my only excuse. I thought I'd fix that, but obviously not. Okay, let's go on to the next one. You are the light of the world.

Matthew 5 and verse 15, Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand. And it gives light to all who are in the house. And that's found over in Luke 8 and verse 16, totally separate from the Sermon on the Mount. No one, when he has lit a lamp, covers it with a vessel or puts it under a bed, but sets it on a lampstand that those who enter may see the light.

So clearly the same thought, but it's in totally different locations of the two Gospels. Another one about the law not being done away, Matthew 5 and verse 18.

For assuredly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. And that is found way over in Luke 16 and verse 17, where Jesus says, it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the law to fail.

And another very long section, Ask and it shall be given you, Matthew 7 through 11, appears in Luke 11, 9 through 13. I won't take the time to read through all of that, but Jesus is Ask and Seek and Knock and it will be given to you. And it appears in very much the same form over in Luke 11, verses 9 through 13.

So why are there these differences? Now some Bible critics will pounce on this and say, well, obviously they're not describing the same thing. Obviously this is a discrepancy in the Gospels. You can't trust it because they're obviously not talking about the same events. They're not using the same words, this kind of thing. And this is why I'm spending a fair amount of time to talk about this and explain these differences because there are, frankly, a lot of scholars out there who have learned they can make a lot of money writing and publishing books to trash the Bible. Some are very, very successful at that, but frankly they are very dishonest scholars. They are only presenting one side of the story and not giving you the logical explanations, which I will be giving you right here. So I want to arm you when you do come across these arguments, and you will see them increasingly, no doubt, but I want to arm you so you do understand why there are these apparent discrepancies or differences. And there clearly are differences. We've just seen them. I've just shown you five examples of that. But why? Why are there these differences? It really boils down to one simple fact, and that is that Matthew and Luke took different approaches to writing their Gospels. They took different approaches to writing their Gospels.

I covered some of this a couple of years ago when I went through the backgrounds of the four Gospels and the writers, and it probably didn't mean much to you then, but this is a perfect example of where it starts to become important. That we understand the differences in the approach of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and why they wrote the way they did. Because if we don't understand that, again, this is where some people can trip people up who don't understand this background. And they assume that the Bible contradicts itself, or it really isn't God's word at all. And again, people made a lot of money selling books, advancing this. So I want to explain this in quite a bit of detail here. Now, this also ties in with what I mentioned earlier about Hebrew thinking or Eastern thinking versus our Western Greek and Roman type thinking. If you were going to write a biography of somebody today, how would you write it?

We'd probably all sit down and write it the same way. Well, he was born, such and such. He did this. He went through school. He went to college or flunked out or joined the army or whatever, go through the middle events of his life. And you conclude the book with, he died, and end of story. So that's what I mean by Western thinking, Greek thinking. We think very logically, very linearly—not necessarily logically, we do not think logically—but we think linearly. We have a beginning point, we have a middle, we have an end. And if you and I were going to write a biography, that's just the way we're used to thinking. So we think linearly, beginning, middle, end of story there. So that's just the way we've done it. That's the way probably every biography we've ever read in our lives are structured chronologically with a beginning, and a middle, and an end point. So we expect that when we start reading the Gospels.

Guess what? The Gospels aren't all written that way. As you can see, you just thumb through the pages of that and you'll see things in different places depending on which Gospel you're reading. Why is that? Well, it's because in ancient biographies, and we have a number of them, there's biographies, for instance, of Julius Caesar, of Alexander the Great, of other great Roman emperors, and Greek conquerors, and generals, and people like that that were written from this period a couple of centuries before and during and after the first century. And they don't all follow the chronological pattern of birth, and middle of life, and death.

Some did, but many of them didn't. They're organized differently. Instead, they might be organized around themes of a person's life. Themes of a person's life. Or they might group together similar experiences in the person's life. Or people. They might be organized around the different people that they interacted with. Or the wives that they married and this kind of thing. They didn't. In the thinking of that day 2,000 years ago, they didn't necessarily think of things in chronological order. They're the way we do. We're used to, again, thinking very linearly, beginning, middle, end. They didn't think in those terms then. They didn't write in those terms. They didn't write biographies in that way. And actually this is true of some areas of the Bible. For instance, if you strictly follow the historical books of the kings of Israel, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, some things just don't add up until you realize this is an in strict chronological order. That the authors have sometimes rearranged the order to make a particular theological point there. And we see this in the Gospels as well. You can look through the book of Ezekiel. Go through some time. The book of Ezekiel has about a dozen date markers in it. In the X number of year of the captivity, I saw this vision. There are about a dozen markers in the book of Ezekiel, but it's not in chronological order at all. It's kind of like chapters that you organized, and then you rearrange the chapters chronologically. And this happens in the Gospels as well. I have an example of that here in a book called The Man Nobody Knows. How many of you have read this or are familiar with it? Okay, a few of you have. I highly recommend it. The Man Nobody Knows. It was written in 1925 by Bruce Barton. I've read through it probably a dozen times over the years. And it is a biography of Jesus Christ, one of the top ones I've ever read. But it is not organized chronologically. It's organized by themes. For instance, the chapter titles of it are the leader, the outdoor man, the sociable man, his method, his work and words, his way in our world, and the master. It's organized around themes of his character there, how he dealt with different situations. Each chapter takes one or more vignettes out of Christ's life and organizes it around a theme. The themes that I just read off that are the chapters on. It's a very, very short book there. And the result is an incredibly effective book. A book that I have no hesitation recommending to you here. The Man Nobody Knows. Again, so that is an example. And Matthew, in particular to some extent, uses this type of organization in his gospel. So my point is they organized their gospels in different ways. They didn't organize them strictly chronologically. And that is why when you look through the harmony you see things in different orders, in different places. Incidentally, the harmony of the gospels follows the order of Mark's gospel.

We probably all thought, well, Matthew, since it's the longest, would be the one in chronological order. Well, it's distinctly not. So how does Luke, let's compare Matthew and Luke, how does Luke write his gospel? Well, he tells us right up front. Luke 1 verses 1 through 4. He describes his purpose and his methodology for writing his gospel. And he says, "...inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set an order," that implies that he's writing in chronological order, "...to set in order a narrative of those things which have been fulfilled among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us." So he's giving his sources that he interviewed eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered these things to us. So he's giving us his method and his sources. "...It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things, from the very first, to write to you an orderly account," again implying it's in chronological order, although maybe not, not 100% sure, "...most excellent Theophilus." Theophilus is the one who is apparently paying or supporting Luke while he's writing this gospel, "...that you may know the certainty of those things in which you are instructed." So Theophilus is a Christian, a believer, Theophilus, incidentally in Greek, means lover of God, Theo, God, Sophie, Phyllis from Phylia, love, so lover of God. So Luke tells exactly how and why he wrote his gospel, that you may know the certainty of these things which you were instructed. So here's his methodology, here's his source. So he interviewed people and he probably incorporated oral histories as well. Oral histories as well. How many of you saw the the TV series? This will give away our age because it aired back in the 70s. Roots, when it first aired many, many years ago. Okay. Do you remember how Alex Haley wrote the story, his original source? He traveled over to Africa and started talking to people from the the area that he thought his ancestors came from. And he sits down with this old man. And the old man is somebody who has memorized generations and generations of history. And he goes through and reciting all of these names. And one name pops up, Kunta Kinte. And Alex Haley pops up, wow, that's the name I was looking for. And that was very common in the ancient world to memorize things. I touched on this earlier. People in the in the first century did not have Bibles. It was very expensive to produce a copy of the Bible.

Letters were not that bad because they were written on sheets of papyrus. That's where we get our word paper, which is made of a plant fiber that's kind of pressed together. There. That wasn't terribly expensive. So letters, and here's an ancient Greek letter on a sheet of papyrus here, but to write something the length of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John was quite expensive. Well, why is that? Well, it's interesting that the scholars have determined by measuring the number of words in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John are about the length of your average scroll that was in use at that time. They're about the length of your average scroll. A scroll is maybe about as far as from here to to the wall. If you go to the Dead Sea Scrolls Museum in Israel, in Jerusalem, you can see some of those. So what does this mean? Well, it means probably because books had not been invented yet. They wouldn't come along until sometime in the second century. It probably means that this is how the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and... excuse me, Matthew, Luke, and John, Mark is shorter, but they're all about the length of an average scroll. So it means that probably Matthew, Luke, and John wrote their Gospels on a scroll.

So they had a limited amount of space to work with. They didn't have computers. They didn't have word processors like we do today to arrange and rewrite and all of that. They sit down and start writing, and when you get to the end of the scroll, that's the end of your story. So that's why some things are included and some are excluded there. They had a limited amount of space to work with. Now, what is a scroll? What is a scroll made of? They're made of animal skins, usually sheep or goats. The animal is slaughtered. Its skin is taken off and treated so it will last and be flexible. Then it's cut into rectangular pieces, and those rectangles are sewn together. Like sheets of paper, you might think. You can actually see a seam right here where two pieces have been stitched together.

So that's the way scrolls were prepared there. Of course, this is very expensive to prepare a scroll of length like this. It might take somewhere between five and seven sheep or goats. So you've got the cost of the animal skins there. Then you've got the cost of somebody sitting down ascribe and hand-writing every word on that scroll. So it's very expensive, and the average person just could not afford anything like that. So the average person didn't own any of the books of the Bible. So to hear the Bible they had to go to the local synagogue. And only in the local synagogue would they have scrolls of the books of the Bible kept in a special cabinet. We've talked about that some before as well. So then those books would be brought out and read on the Sabbath and on the Holy Days and so on. And that is the only time that people had opportunity to hear the Word of God. Taught or explained to them is to go down to the local synagogue where it would be read. So this is where memorization, which I talked about, became so important because people, if they didn't have the books of the Bible, they had to memorize them. That was the only way you could get them. So it was very common in that time. So what happens then when Jesus comes along and he starts teaching? What do people do with his teachings? They memorize them. They memorize them. That's how we get this long verbatim sermon on the mount from Matthew and Luke because they're memorized. And a number of scholars are coming to understand and see this now. So they're used, Jesus's followers, his disciples are used to memorizing. It's what they've been doing since childhood. They did it back in, starting in kindergarten there. And I think that's what we have in the sermon on the mount. Jesus's followers memorized his teachings and they later spread those teachings to other people who memorize them. And then they added to it things like some of the parables. And this became the heart and core of the Gospels. Because the Gospels we understand probably were not written until some 30 to 40 years after Christ's death, written probably in the 60s AD. So how do we have his sayings from 30 or 40 years earlier if they're not written down until 30 or 40 years later? Well, the answer again is that they were most likely memorized very early on, very after, possibly during Christ's ministry. If not afterwards. So again, it was very common for students to memorize their rabbi's teaching. And Jesus is a rabbi and his disciples would have naturally wanted to memorize their rabbi's teachings there. So we've seen that this gives us a very good idea of how Luke wrote his Gospel. As we saw, he interviewed different people, eyewitness accounts of these, and wrote it down. Luke was not an eyewitness. He came along later. And that's how he records Christ's teaching and the parables and so on, because he was told those things by the direct followers of Jesus Christ. So we've covered how Luke wrote his Gospel. How did Matthew organize and write his Gospel? He took a very different approach, and we can prove that. Matthew wrote an orderly account, as Luke wrote an orderly account, but he wrote an orderly account in a very different order, a very different way. So how is Matthew's Gospel structured? We covered it back in the background of Matthew several years ago, but now hopefully it'll begin to make sense. Matthew's Gospel is woven around five different collections of Jesus Christ's sayings and teachings. It's organized around five different collections of Jesus Christ's sayings and teachings. I'll prove that to you in just a minute here.

And scholars recognize this. This isn't my thought. And they are. And I've listed them up here. And you may want to write this down. First of all, the Sermon on the Mount, chapters 5 through 7, Collection of Christ's teachings and sayings.

Then in chapter 10 we have the Commission to the Twelve Disciples.

In chapter 13 we have the Parables of the Kingdom. It gives a series of different parables teaching about what the Kingdom of God is like. That's in chapter 13.

And then in chapter 18 he talks about the need for humility and forgiveness. And then there's the Olivet Prophecy. We think of Matthew 24, but it actually continues into Matthew 25. That's the last covering of that. And while you're writing this down, I'll just comment a little bit more that between these sections we then have narrative material. We have accounts of healings, of his interactions with the Pharisees and the scribes and the Temple. Jerusalem religious authority. We have interactions with his disciples, and so on. So we see here that Matthew is not following a chronological order. He's following a theme of a collection of sayings. And this is a very Jewish way to do it. Matthew is Jewish. He's of the tribe of Levi, apparently. And he organizes it for a Jewish audience, a Jewish readership there. So this is how he has organized his gospel. And again, this is very different from the way Luke organized his. Now, how do we know this? How do we know that Matthew has organized his gospel this way? Well, because he tells us. He tells us this. A good way to think of this is to think of Matthew's gospel as organized into five chapters. Each chapter has a slightly different theme to it. And at the end of each chapter, Matthew inserts a chapter break to tell us that now he's moving on to the next chapter. So at the end of these five collections of sayings, we have an almost identical break that is inserted in the flow of the story. And I'll show it to you here.

Matthew 7 verse 28. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew says, And so it was, when Jesus had ended these sayings... And he goes off and transitions into another story, or some of the bridging material. Matthew 11 and verse 1. Now it came to pass when Jesus finished commanding his twelve disciples, and then he transitions into another story. Matthew 13 and verse 53. Now it came to pass when Jesus had finished these parables, the parables of the kingdom. Then he transitions into another story. Matthew 19 and verse 1. Now when it came to pass when Jesus had finished these sayings, then he transitions. And finally, Matthew 26 and verse 1. Now it came to pass when Jesus had finished all these sayings, and then he goes on with the events of the crucifixion, and the arrest, and the final Passover, and so on. So notice when he had finished the parables. Yeah, let me point it out. When Jesus had ended these sayings, when he had finished commanding his twelve disciples, when he had finished these parables, when Jesus had finished these sayings, when Jesus had finished all these sayings. So he's telling us, yes, here's a collection of sayings, and now we're moving on to something else. So this is how his gospel is structured around these five groups or collections of sayings. So what does this mean then?

What's the bottom line? Well, what it means is that where Luke had all of the sayings and teachings of Jesus scattered throughout his gospel, as we saw earlier, because it's written in an order that made sense to Luke, Matthew took a different approach, and he took all of these sayings that happened over the course of Christ's ministry and collected them all into one place, because that made sense to him. So he took a core, which is the Sermon on the Mount, and then he brought in material that happened at other times and places in Christ's ministry and included it in the Sermon on the Mount. And again, this is not unusual in the way that biographies are written at that time, of the first century and the centuries before and after it. It doesn't mean that one, that Matthew is right and Luke is wrong, or Luke is right and Matthew is wrong. It just means they took different approaches. And they wrote in a way that made perfect sense to them at the time, although 2,000 years later that's not the way we write biographies. It doesn't mean it's right or wrong, it's just that was the different approaches that they took to organize the material. So when it comes to the Sermon on the Mount, because there are these differences, are Luke and Matthew describing the same event? Well, yes, they are for several reasons. Both begin with the Beatitudes, blessed are, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth and so on. The flow of the teaching, you can see this looking at the next few pages of the Harmony of the Gospels, the flow of the teaching, is very much the same. They're very parallel. It's very obvious there. Both of them end with the importance of building on a right foundation. And then both of them transition to something in common. And that is where Jesus goes to Capernaum and heals a centurion's son. So they're clearly describing the same story. Starts the same way, ends the same way, the flow is the same in the middle. So both are telling the same story of the same event. The difference is that Matthew, again, in the way that he chose to structure his story, seems to have viewed this as a good place to flesh out Jesus Christ's teaching and sayings and combine those into these three chapters that are all together here. And it made sense to him because it's a very Jewish way of viewing things. Another way to look at this, and this may help us understand the concept a little better as well, is to ask a very simple question. Is this the only sermon that Jesus Christ gave in his three and a half year ministry? Is this the only sermon? Well, obviously not! As we've already seen from the first verses I showed up there, he went around teaching in the synagogues. None of that is recorded for us. We find other places. We'll cover many more where he went around teaching and so on, but they don't record what the teaching was.

So he's already been traveling around for a year at this point, and during that time he no doubt gave many sermons. You might say I hesitate to use sermons because it sounds like a formal, structured environment. While that was true in the synagogues, that wasn't true for much of his teaching, where he's out teaching to multitudes out in the countryside there. But the point, and the reason I mention that, is since he is a traveling rabbi, we've seen that again and again, he travels around the area around Galilee and occasionally down to Jerusalem. What it means is he probably gave the same basic sermon many, many times, or the same basic teaching many, many times, and there were probably different variations in it as he gave it. Because he's not working off a notebook or PowerPoint or something like that. He's just giving it all extemporaneously out of his mind. So as he gives it in different places, there are going to be variations. The order is going to be different. The examples he might use would be different.

I do this in sermons. Those of us who speak here will give slightly different messages, depending on whether we give it in Denver, Colorado Springs, or Llewellyn, or Frisco. We'll add some details in, sometimes leave other details out. So the message, even though it's the same sermon, it'll vary a little bit from time and place. So the way I would characterize the sermon on the Mount is that this is a compilation of the basic message that Jesus probably gave a number of times throughout his three and a half year ministry. And that Matthew has fleshed it out and filled in other teachings that he gave in other places and included it here in the Sermon on the Mount. Another proof of this, you might consider how long it took Jesus to give the Sermon on the Mount. Go home and try reading it out loud and see how long it takes. It'll probably take you about 10 minutes. Jesus is talking here to people who have traveled many miles to see him. Did he give them a 10-minute sermon and then leave them and walk away? Of course not! No, he didn't. Were all of his sermons 10 minutes long? No, obviously not. You may be wishing that were the case we were following today, but I don't think it was. No, he probably taught for hours. They're giving different examples there. So what we would have to...I think this illustrates again and proves that this is the consistent core teaching that he taught again and again as he traveled around. The consistent core teaching. And just to be clear, everything I've covered so far should not diminish what is being said here in any way. And in fact it makes it all the more important to us because this is what we might call Christianity 101. Christianity 101. It is basic Christianity that Jesus wants and expects his followers to practice. It is just basic Christianity. This is the core reality of how he wants and expects his followers to live. And this is the only place we see it all condensed into one place in the Gospels. So it's critically, critically important here. So this is a bit of a stopping place. Any questions prompted by any of that? Okay, great. Okay, we'll move on to the next section, shift gears, and take a look at something else. This might be easier to follow. I've given you a lot of heavy-duty information so hopefully you've been able to follow all of that well. But this is one of the study questions I sent out last night. And this may appear to be a contradiction, but is it really? And that is that where did Jesus give this? Did he give it on a mountain, or did he give it on a level place? How do we resolve that? Well, let's notice it. Matthew 5 in verse 1, "...and seeing the multitudes, Jesus went up on a mountain." Again, the parallel with Moses. "...And when he was seated, his disciples came to him." Luke begins, "...and he came down with them, and stood on a level place, with a crowd of his disciples, and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon." Some of these people have traveled a good 80 miles, maybe not that far, maybe 40, 50 miles, something like that, from Tyre and Sidon on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and what is today Lebanon, who came to hear him and be healed of their diseases. So what gives? Matthew says it's on a mountain. Luke says it's on a level place. How many of you have been to Galilee before?

Okay, good, good, quite a few there. What's a terrain like there?

You don't have to answer it. Just think about it. What do you remember? If you rode on a bus, you remember going up and down and around and curves and this kind of thing. So you're familiar with the fact, if you've been there, that Galilee is quite hilly.

The Sea of Galilee is a big lake down in a basin. Because it's in a basin, you've got hills around it. You have to go downhill to get to the Sea of Galilee and Capernaum. Here's a photograph of a church on the site of modern-day Capernaum. Let me point out a couple of things about the geography. This is the Sea of Galilee. Here's the shore. Here's a modern-day church on the site of Capernaum. Uphill from that, because you come down into this basin, you've got a pretty good mountain. From the Sea of Galilee, you look up and you've got mountains all around. You've got hills as it goes up, kind of like our Rockies here. Up here on top of this ridge is Capernaum. The town of Corazin is about two miles uphill from the city of Capernaum. In between, you've got these kind of rolling hills going uphill. If we went from here up to the top of this hill and looked down, this is what you would see. You've got the Sea of Galilee over here. You can see it's down in a basin. Over here is what's called the Golan Heights, because they're high and they overlook this valley. Here, this gray area is the ruins of ancient Corazin.

Capernaum would have been down on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, about two miles. It's out of sight below the brow of this hill here. What's the terrain like?

Well, it's hilly, but look at this big level place where Corazin is.

Is it on a mountain or is it on a level place? Yes.

Absolutely. It's on a mountain and it's on a level place. And you see that pretty much anywhere you go around the shore of the Sea of Galilee, or particularly going uphill from Corazin. It's hilly, it's mountainous, but there are level places there. So, they're not... Matthew and Luke aren't contradicting each other. That's an accurate description of the terrain. You'll have level places, you'll have hills, you'll have mountains around there. Here's another place. This is just to the east of Capernaum. Capernaum is maybe a mile or two off to this side of the photo. This is the traditional site of the Sermon on the Mount. Whether it is or not, I don't know. If you've been around there, you've probably stopped up there. You remember the church. It's up here on top of the hill. The reason I want to point this out is you see this bare dirt area there, which is downhill from the traditional site. That's a natural amphitheater there. A bowl-shaped area that's in the hillside. This is natural, and you see them quite a bit in Israel. We see Jesus taking advantage of the features of the terrain to magnify his voice as he teaches to people. Those of you who are fishermen, if you've been out on a boat on a lake, you know that sound carries tremendously over waters. It can carry tremendous distances. It's hundreds of yards where you can hear conversations from people in another boat that's so far away you can barely see it. Jesus does that. We've seen it already where he gets out in a boat and preaches or teaches the crowds on the shore because his voice will carry over the water. He probably took advantage of natural amphitheaters like this where he could be at the bottom of this bowl and people could be spread out on the hillside there and they can hear him and teach. The same principle in a lot of our concert venues these days. The Hollywood Bowl or famous places like that showed you a number of examples of that when going through the Turkey tour, the big theaters at Ephesus where you can be up 50 rows high in the nosebleed section and you can hear people talking in a normal voice down in the stage area there. Same principle there. They were masters of acoustics at that time and took advantage of natural features. Jesus no doubt did the same thing. So probably what is going on is that Jesus went up, had to go up from the shore of the Sea of Galilee, went uphill, found a natural amphitheater, and that's probably where he taught. He probably did that on a regular basis. Thus he's ascending a mountain, but he's got a semi-level place where he can teach and a number of people can hear him there. You don't get on the very peak of a mountain with people surrounding you and talk that way because your voice just dissipates into the air. It just doesn't work. Try it yourself sometime and you'll see that. No, you want the people spread out in front of you in one direction so you're speaking only one direction. That's the way it works. That is no doubt what Jesus is doing there.

Bottom line, when we actually look at the land and the terrain there around the Sea of Galilee, we see there really isn't a contradiction at all. Nearly all of the land in that area is a mixture of hills, mountains, and level places in between. As we saw earlier, Matthew emphasizes Jesus going up on a mountain because he's making a theological point. It's not that it's not true. He's just emphasizing that aspect of it to draw again the parallel with Moses going up on a mountain to receive the law of God and to teach it. It's not that he's distorting the truth. It's just that he's emphasizing a different aspect of it to make a connection that, as Jewish readers, would understand the link there between Jesus and Moses as we've talked about. Any questions?

You'll have one more opportunity for questions at the end. I want to cover one final point here. One I intended to cover in our last study several months ago, but that is, is how many disciples did Jesus have and who was his audience for the Sermon on the Mount? How many disciples did he have and who was his audience?

Disciples, as we've talked about, the word in Greek is a methietes, but they weren't talking Greek. They were talking Hebrew or Aramaic. The word would have been talmede, T-A-L-M-I-D, or talmedim, plural. We use the word disciples. Some Bible versions will translate it students or interpret it as students. That doesn't capture the whole meaning. A disciple, the relationship between a rabbi and his disciple, was that the disciples, the talmede, their goal wasn't just to learn what the rabbi knew, but to become like their rabbi in every way, to become just like him. And that is what God has called us to be, to become just like Jesus Christ, not to just know what he knows, but to become just like him, to reach the measure of the statue of the perfect man, Jesus Christ. So disciples is a more generic term than just the twelve. You know, where we left off last time... let's see, I think that was page 25.

Yeah, didn't go into that in detail, so I'll talk about it a bit here on page 25 in the middle there. After a night of prayer, Jesus chooses twelve apostles. Here's a new term, apostles, not disciples. We tend to, because our background, tend to equate the two, twelve disciples, twelve apostles. It's not true, as we'll prove here in the next few minutes here.

So who is Jesus teaching on this day? Backing up from where we left off last time, in the middle of page 25, Luke 6, and you can find it here, Luke 6 and verse 13, the middle of the page. I'll project it up here for you. And when it was day, Jesus called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose twelve, whom he also named apostles. So he's got a group of disciples, and from that group of twelve, we don't know how big it was, he chooses twelve out of that. He chooses a subset here of twelve.

So obviously there is a larger group of disciples, but there are only twelve whom Jesus selects to be apostles. It's very, very clear here. And the word apostle, of course, means messenger, or one sent with a message. So there are to be twelve, only twelve, who are to be special messengers. Why twelve? It's a Rames. Twelve tribes. It's a Rames. Where else do we see that there were more than twelve disciples? Another example, Luke 10 and verse 1, After these things, the Lord appointed seventy others also, and sent them two by two before his face into every city and place where he himself was about to go. So here Jesus has not just the twelve apostles, but seventy others also that he sends out in teams of two. Why seventy? Does the number sound familiar? It's a Rames to the seventy elders of Israel, who Moses chosen. You can find that in Exodus 24 and Numbers 11. We'll turn back there.

So he chooses twelve apostles after the twelve tribes. He chooses seventy after the seventy elders, again, parallel with Moses there. It's not spelled out. God expects us to know to pick up and see those parallels. Another proof that there are more than twelve. Acts 1 verse 15 and 21 through 23. This is when they gather to choose a replacement for Judas, who after betraying Christ went out and hanged himself.

Acts 1 and verse 15, And in those days Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples. Altogether the number of names was about 120, so we see here spelled out, 120, disciples, and said, skipping down to verse 21, Of these men who have accompanied us, all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John to that day when he was taken up from us, one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection. And they proposed two. Joseph called Bar-Sabbas, who was surnamed Justice, and Matthias. So you see here there's a group 120. From that 120 there are some who have met the conditions of having been with Jesus as one of his followers from the beginning, and they narrow it down to two who meet those conditions. Joseph also called Bar-Sabbas, surnamed Justice. He's got three different names, and Matthias there, of which they choose the one of them in. So this tells us there are 120 disciples there, and not just the 12. And it tells us there are several men who meet the qualifications, and finally just the two from whom Matthias is chosen to be a replacement for Judas. So what's my point? My point is simply this. Don't assume when you see the word disciples mentioned in the Gospels that it's only talking about the 12 who are chosen as apostles. Disciples is a broad term in the Gospels. Sometimes it may refer to three or four. Sometimes it might be the 12. Sometimes it might be, and probably most of the time, it's a group of probably 15 to 20 who are following Jesus Christ around, among whom are several women who are followers, which we see mentioned again and again in the Gospels. And at times it might be 70, like the 70 elders, or a hundred people, or more than that. Sometimes it's thousands. So you have to look at the context and not make assumptions about it there. Why does it matter? Well, because we need to again understand the context. This is why I keep emphasizing context again and again. We need to understand the context to be accurate, to make sure our beliefs are correct. I've heard in sermons in the past before, and probably you have as well, that this sermon on the Mount was Jesus' private teaching to the 12 apostles. That's simply not accurate, and we'll prove that. Let's read the accounts, Matthew 5 and verse 1. Read these carefully, and it shows that simply isn't the case. And see, Matthew 5 and verse 1, and seeing the multitudes, Jesus went up on a mountain, and when he was seated, his disciples came to him. And this is why some people think, well, it's only the 12 who came to him, because he saw the multitudes and left them, went up on a mountain, and only his disciples come to him. So that's the way the story begins in Matthew 5. But how does the story end? Over in Matthew 7 verse 28. And so it was when Jesus had ended these sayings, the sermon on the Mount, that the people were astonished at his teaching. Not the disciples anymore. It's the people, a group of people, a considerable number of people, far more than just the 12. And notice also how Luke describes it in Luke 6 and verses 17 through 20.

And he, Jesus, came down with them and stood on a level place with the crowd of his disciples, and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem. They've come all the way from Jerusalem, assuming this is in Galilee, that's a good 70 to 90 miles, and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and be healed of their diseases, as well as those who were tormented with unclean spirits, and they were healed. And the whole multitude sought to touch him, for power went out from him and healed them. Then he lifted up his eyes toward his disciples and said. And then Luke begins the Sermon on the Mount. So we see it described as disciples, as multitudes, as the people. So it's obviously a much larger group than just the 12 who were there.

So now we have finished laying the foundation to begin studying the Sermon on the Mount. We've talked about the credibility. Now Matthew and Mark established the credibility of Jesus as the Lawgiver, as the prophet, as the promised Messiah of God. We've talked about who it was given to.

We've talked about how the accounts in Matthew and Luke differ, and why they differ. And we've talked about how we came to have the words of the Sermon on the Mount preserve for us today. So next time in our series on the Gospels, we'll pick it up from there and begin a close look at what it means to be a true Christian in every sense of the Word, and what it means to be the kind of people that God expects us to be. So any questions from anybody before we wrap up? Yes, Natalie. It would be memorized, or more of an aspect, because Jesus was traveling from place to place and giving the same or similar sermon, different versions of the same sermon, and then they would memorize those. Right. Yeah, good question. The question is, what was I saying? That they could memorize the sermon once and then write it down pretty much verbatim, or was it the continual exposure over a period of time? And yes, it would be the latter period of time that these men, Matthew and John, are part of the Twelve. They're traveling with Jesus pretty much continually for three and a half years. So for them, it would have been no problem. They heard it many times and could have organized it. Connie gets to hear these sermons three times, and she can probably, by the third time, give it better than I can there. So you could ask her about it. But yeah, they would have... And this also was pretty common in the ancient world. I heard some accounts from a lecture about this where among the Romans and the Greek orators, oration was a very highly valued skill in the ancient world, where senators and political leaders would come up and they would give these two-hour speeches just off the top of their head, supposedly extemporaneously. But they had memorized it. And some of their audience... There was one guy who... Let's see... trying to get the story straight. Yeah, someone in the audience would also be equally adept at memorization and could listen to this hour-long speech and come back and recite it. Pretty much verbatim back. There were actually Roman records, historical accounts of people who could do that. So their minds were a lot more focused. They weren't as cluttered up with all the internet stuff, and TV, and movies, and music, and all of that. They were much more focused, clear-minded, and it showed in their ability to memorize things like that. So very, very, very good question there. Any other question? Yes, Faye? Temporaries. Do you think they sort of consulted with each other? You know, did you get this point? Did you get that point? Do you think they might have done that too? Okay, Faye's question is, did those who were hearing it consult with each other and compare notes and so on? Actually, oddly enough, I don't think they did because there are different theories about which gospel was written first and who drew on... which author drew on the others. And Matthew and Luke... the common assumption is that Mark wrote his gospel first since it's the shortest one. And Matthew and Luke had that as a source material, and then expanded on that and added a lot more detail to it. That's a pretty valid argument, but I get the impression because there are... the problem with that is that, as I mentioned before, the wording is different. So if you're Matthew and you've got Mark's gospel there and you're copying from it, why is the wording different? Why don't you just copy it word for word? It's a whole lot easier to do it that way. So are Matthew and Luke comparing notes? I don't believe they are because of that, because the wording is distinctly different in the Greek.

Oh, yeah, okay, to clarify. Did they discuss what Christ said? Yeah, I think they definitely did.

They did hang around Jerusalem for a couple of years after the crucifixion, which was actually in contradiction to Christ's instruction to go you therefore into all the world. And they stayed around, and it actually wasn't until that church started being persecuted that they were forced to go out and fulfill his commission to them. And even then, they didn't necessarily do a terribly good job at it because what happens? God ends up calling Paul and sends him to the world there. So did they discuss it? Yeah, yeah, I'm quite sure they did. Did they consult in terms of putting together their Gospels? I don't believe so. I get the impression that they were done independently in different areas of the Roman Empire. And that's how we have Gospels that are so similar because they're based on common experiences, but so different in the way they're structured and organized. There's some great, great questions. Anybody else? Yes, Ren? Did they, like when Mark finished his Gospels, did they copy it down or did they repeat it by memory so that it could be spread?

Yeah, Ren's question is, did they, like Mark, copy it down immediately? Or how did it spread? I think that's your question. How did it spread? A lot of theories about that, the one to me, that makes the most sense. We have, for example, in, I'm trying to remember which book it is, in Paul's writings, I think it's the Epistle to the Colossians. He says, take this epistle and see that it is read in Laodicea. And those in Laodicea, be sure you read the epistle I wrote to the Laodiceans and read it here. So there's an unstated assumption in there that there's a lot of copying going on. And I think, particularly with Paul's letters, because they're pretty short, like I showed, they're not the scrolls like Matthew, Luke, and John were. I think there's no historical direct evidence in any way in that. But I think what is going on, because again the Gospels are apparently written 30 to 40 years later, 60s AD. Why do I say that? Because Paul starts writing his epistles in the 50s AD.

We can date that pretty clearly, but he never quotes from the Gospels. So what's the obvious implication? He doesn't quote from the Gospels because they haven't been written yet. Otherwise, if he's writing so much about Jesus Christ, obviously he's going to get a copy of them and start quoting from them to back up what he himself is saying. So there is only one quote from Luke, and I think it's more blessed to give than to receive, if I remember correctly, that shows up in one of Paul's last epistles. It's the only quote from the Gospels, so apparently the Gospels are just starting to be distributed late in Paul's ministry in the 60s.

There, that's what most scholars believe, and I think that's the case. So how did they get distributed? Well, I think for after Christ is crucified, and that's clearly a shot to the disciples. They didn't see that coming, even though Christ had told them that again and again. What do they do? They hang around Jerusalem. Pentecost comes. They receive God's Spirit. It was promised to bring to mind the things that I taught to bring to your remembrance, all these things. You've got the core of the 12 apostles there, and they have memorized being good Talmadiim.

They would have memorized a lot of Christ's teachings. They heard it repeated for a number of times here. So there is... it's getting into quite a bit of detail, but it's important, I think, to understand. Many of you, if you've studied the Gospels, you'll hear something called the the Gospel of Q, which is a Q means...

in German it's Q-U-E-L-L-E. It's called the Q Gospel. If you read anything about it, scholarly circles, you'll come across this term. What that means is scholars theorize there was an earlier Gospel that both Matthew and Mark and Luke all drew from, and that was the source material from which they get the things they have in common, like the Sermon on the Mount. They would say that, yes, there was this earlier Gospel, we don't know who wrote it, and Matthew drew his Sermon on the Mount material from that, and Luke drew his from that, and they all drew their parables information from this theoretical document that is Q.

What I think, and this isn't original to me, is that the original Gospel was not a written Gospel at all, but was an oral Gospel. The memorization that was fragmentary and varied, but there was enough of it in common that that's how 30 to 40 years later we have all this memorized material that is written down verbatim in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John for us. So I think that is the original source material is what they had memorized.

It's why there's no fragment has ever been found of it at any time. It's because it was all in people's heads. How did it get distributed? You have to circle around and get to that question. On Pentecost, we see all these people coming together from all over the world, and that no doubt happened for a couple of decades. As these people would come and be exposed to the truth and hear about the Gospel, eventually it dawns on Matthew and Mark and Luke and John that, hey, we're starting to die off.

The Church is starting to be persecuted. James, the half-brother of Christ, is martyred there in Jerusalem. Persecution starts in and they begin to realize, hey, we're starting to die off. We'd better write this down. The common theory, and I agree with it, is that is why they started writing those down fairly late in the process because it's a generation removed. They start writing them down and once they do, then it starts spreading like wildfire. That's when we start finding different fragments in Asia Minor and in Alexandria, Egypt and in North Africa and even in France and so on. There are people who come and they say, hey, I want a copy of that.

So, copies I would start going out. Probably starting originally as somebody who started writing down the oral Gospel there and then that later gets incorporated into the actual Gospel. So, let's see. Scott, I believe you had your hand up. I have a question.

It's obvious that the word had gone out to the region that Christ is going to give this message and being early on in his ministry, it says people came from Judea and Jerusalem. Is there any indication that Pharisees sent people to listen to what Christ was saying at this time? Like I said, early on in his ministry, had he already tipped them off yet?

Yeah, good question. Were the Pharisees spying on him at this point? And they were. I don't remember exactly where that is stated, but he's already had a couple of confrontations with the Pharisees by this point. Now, the Pharisees weren't all... Actually, the Pharisees were more in Galilee than in Jerusalem. The Sadducees basically were the religious establishment in Jerusalem. The Pharisees are scattered all over. They're more rural people. The Pharisees basically control the synagogues and the Sadducees control the temple. It's over generalization, but to help us understand what's going on. So, yeah, you actually have both. You have the Pharisees who are deliberately coming and listening to his teaching, trying to find something they can accuse him of. And you also have the Sadducees when he's down around Jerusalem or Jericho, which isn't that far. And they're doing the same thing, trying to... Because at the beginning of his ministry, he's already gone through and overturned the Moneychanger's temple and got the Sadducees really ticked off at him. So, they're looking for an excuse to discredit him. And then his teaching is also in conflict with the Pharisees. So, they're looking for him. So, he's already building up enemies this early in his ministry. And it's going to build and build and build until it's inevitable conclusion. So, Dave? Yes, Yerba? One thing that brought to mind the Scripture in 2 Timothy 4 and verse 13 is Paul was just about to die. And he says, the cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when you come, bring with you and the books, but especially the parchments, which was more than likely Paul's writings. So, Paul's written down. Good comment. 1 Timothy 4.13 was that? Yes, where Paul is imprisoned. It's near the end of his life. And he tells Timothy, who's coming to visit him in Rome, and tells him to bring the books and the parchment. The books there is Greek biblos, from which we get the word Bible. There is a historical question as to exactly when books came to be known in that form. The earliest actual evidence I've seen is from the early second century from Egypt, where things were preserved a whole lot better, where they took pages and they know that some were sewn together in what we would call a book form. So, sometime around the 60s AD to early second century, say 110-120, sometime in that period, papyrus letters start being collected into a book type form. And the parchments, yes, he's talking about parchment letters, which are probably copies of his letters. There's some evidence that Paul took those letters and edited them, or certainly selected out which ones were to be preserved. We're clearly missing some of the letters that he wrote, like the letter Delaia, that I mentioned earlier. So, Paul wrote many letters, but we only have, well, we don't know what percentage we have of them, but yeah, good observation there.

Any other thoughts? Okay. All right, we'll wrap up. Yes, Vicki? I was just going to say, with the stoning of Stephen, I mean, before that, they had ordained deacons so that the apostles could devote themselves to the scriptures. And that's about Acts 7 or somewhere over there. Right? Right. Good comment, Vicki. Yeah, the apostles were awaiting tables, and the office of a deacon was established so the apostles could dedicate their time to teaching, which is their job. They are the messengers, which is what it means. So, they divided up their responsibilities, and that's a model we continue to follow today. Let's see...

This is a question from Aaron Dominguez, who is lolling on a beach in Mexico somewhere. No, he doesn't say that. He says, I have a question. Does the transfiguration of Mark 9, verse 2, and Matthew 17, verse 2, tie in with the Rimmazim mentioned New Testament within New Testament? Their raiment from the transfiguration is mentioned in Revelation 1, and they are talking with Jesus on the mountain, the kingdom of God, sitting similar to Luke 13, verse 29, sitting down in the kingdom of God. You probably are not going to be able to see this until afterwards, but since we have a sharp crew here, they're on top of it. Yes, I do believe that's probably a Rimmazim, a Rimmaz mentioned there, again, a common teaching method. The book of Revelation... boy, you could do a whole series of studies on the examples of Rimmaz that are in there, the allusions back to prior things with Israel's history, with a tabernacle, with Jesus Christ and his ministry. To give you a very notable one, how does the book of Revelation end in the last chapter? It ends with allusions to the Garden of Eden, that the world is to be restored to a paradise-like state as Eden was. So you're going all the way here at the end of history. You're turning back to the beginning of history and God dwelling with mankind, as he did originally with Adam and Eve. So yes, in all likelihood, that is the case. So yeah, good question there, Aaron. Enjoy your my ties there on the beach. Okay, with that, we'll wrap it up and look forward to seeing you all. We won't see you next Sabbath, but to Sabbath from now.