The accompanying diagram aims at giving some suggestion of the general course of transmission of the Sermon, and of the kind of sources which each Evangelist may have had before him in pre- paring his report of the discourse.
4, RELATIVE AUTHENTICITY OF THE TWO AC- COUNTS.—Proceeding now upon the view which has been elaborated, that the two discourses con- tained in Mt 5-7 and Lk 6”? are variant reports of one historical Sermon on the Mount, it becomes an important consideration which of the two reproduces the Sermon with the greater complete- ness and accuracy. ‘The question is as to their relative excellence, for the phenomena of the accounts and the vicissitudes of transmission show that neither the First nor the Third Gospel has perfectly reproduced the content and wording of the original discourse.
In content, Matthew has much more than Luke of that material which is commonly recognized as having been an essential portion of the Sermon, namely, Mt 5%-“8 61-7-16-18; compare with this Lk 620-25. 27-38, [uke or his source omitted most of this section, apparently on the ground that it was inapplicable to the Gentiles, for whom the account was prepared.* This omission was perhaps justi- fiable for the practical purpose of a Gospel, although innumerable Gentiles ever since Luke's day have preferred the Sermon of the First Gospel, as we now do; but however that may be, from a historical point of view such an extensive omission could leave only a seriously incomplete account of the discourse. The further section of the Matthzean discourse (672-4) may or may not have been a part of the historical Sermon; opinion is quite evenly divided upon this point, and there seems no con-
* So B. Weiss, Meyer-Komm. ti. d. Mattevgm. p. 163 ; Wendt, Lehre Jesu, i. 58; Plummer, Comm. on Luke, p. 183 ; Wernle, Synopt. Frage, p. 62; Bacon, Sermon on the Mount (1902), pp. 36-39 ; and most other scholars.
SERMON ON THE MOUNT 7
clusive evidence either way. The fact that Luke places this material in 12”**!, where it has a topical connexion with what precedes it (12-1), suggests another occasion, although that occasion is not chronologically located by Luke. On the other hand, if the theme of the Sermon is found in the Beatitudes rather than in the verses Mt 517-29, this passage, which inculcates devotion to the Kingdom and trust in God, is germane, and marks the dis- course as more than an anti-Pharisaic manifesto. For the present, at least, one may prefer to regard this section as belonging to the Sermon. In this case Luke’s account of the Sermon, which contains nothing of this portion, is again strikingly incom- plete.* The final section of the Matthean discourse (777) has been preserved with some fulness by Luke (6°"), varying less than the two preceding sections from the Matthean account.- It will appear farther on, that in both the Matthean and Lukan reports there are some brief extraneous passages which cannot have been in the original Sermon, such as Mt 525. 26. 31. 52 67-15 76-11. 22. aan Lk 678-26. 38a. 39. 40.45, But in this kind of variation the two reports have both expanded the historical discourse. Considering the relative contents of the Sermon in Matthew and Luke, there can be no doubt (even waiving the question of Mt 61-8) that the First Gospel presents a much more com- plete account of the Sermon than that presented by the Third Gospel.}
*Tt seems impossible to suppose that Luke could have had before him the Sermon in the form in which it now appearsin - the First Gospel. This is also the opinion of Wernle (Synopt. Frage, p. 80), Bartlet (art. MATTHEW in vol. iii.), O. Holtzmann, (Leben Jesu, 1901, p. 21), and of Heinrici (Bergpredigt, i. 10). Heinrici says the two reports of Matthew and Luke ‘are recon- structions of a discourse restored independently by Matthew and Luke rather than in dependence upon one another or upon the same written source.’ The Evangelists have re-worked their material, but that alone cannot explain the phenomena of the two accounts. Would Luke have deliberately broken up a col- lection of teachings so usefully grouped as in the Matthean accounts, and have scattered them so unreasonably through seven chapters of his own work? On the other hand, the First Evangelist might, so far as the Sermon is concerned, have had Luke’s account before him. His own report was surely better than Luke’s, and so would not be altered into conformity with the latter. The general phenomena of the two Gospels, how- ever, are against this particular interrelation, and the pre- vailing opinion assigns Matthew’s Gospel to a somewhat earlier date than Luke’s.
} It is a somewhat difficult matter to explain the absence of the Sermon from the Gospels of Mark and John. The only parallels in Mark to any of the Sermon material are Mk 421. 24 948. 47. 50 101 1125; in John, 1316 (1520), And these sayings are only possible parallels, i.e. they need not have come into the Gospel of Mark from accounts of the Sermon, The opinion of Ewald, H. Holtzmann, Keim, and Wittichen, that Mark originally con- tained the Sermon, but that it has cieppeatae from the canonical work, cannot be accepted, Feine (Jahrb. f. Protest. Theologie, 1885, p. 4), is right in holding that Mark did not use the sources which, containing variant accounts of the discourse, were used by Matthew and Luke independently. It seems quite certain, however, that Mark could not have been ignorant of the Sermon. If that discourse did not appear in his sources, oral and written, it must have been because he voluntarily limited those sources. The Sermon was altogether too highly valued and too widely used in the Apostolic age to have escaped any careful compiler of the Gospel Memorabilia. This would be esp. true of Mark, who, if common opinion is correct, had an ultimate Petrine base for much of his material. Is it imaginable that Peter did not give the Sermon a prominent place in his teaching? Surely Mark must have known the Sermon. Why, then, did he omit it from his Gospel? A plausible explanation, which may be the true one, is this :—