* Jesus in speaking to Jews appealed, no doubt often (cf. Mt 65.17 715 1041 1817), to their reverence for the temple with its sacrificial system, and to their many religious ideas and cus- toms. In doing so He did not signify that He shared all these ideas and practices with them, Jesus is not reported by the Gospels as ever offering a sacrifice or otherwise taking part in the customary temple worship (cf. Mt 126-7); He went to the temple, but only to teach. Had the contrary been the case, the First Gospel could hardly have failed to tell of it, because this Gospel is interested to show how close Jesus brought Him- self to the Jews of His day.
+ They are regarded as compiled material by Neander, Witti- chen, Feine, Godet, H. Holtzmann, Wendt, B. Weiss, Bacon; while all these scholars except Godet and Wendt regard vy.23. 24 as also extraneous to the Sermon.
{ For the former view, Jerome, Calvin, Luther, Bengel, and others ; for the latter view, Chrysostom, Tholuck, Achelis, H. Holtzmann, B. Weiss, and others.
§ Jesus is not here attempting to define the relative sinful- ness of lust and the performance of lust ; it would be a perverse and false inference that the former is as bad as the latter, for the lustful look does not produce the fearful consequences which follow the lustful act. What Jesus means is, that the entertaining of impure thought and desire is in itself a heinous oh quite as bad as men commonly supposed adultery itself
0 be.
SERMON ON THE MOUNT
The logical relation of vy.*-®° to the two pre- /
ceding verses is not close, which has led some scholars to regard them as extraneous matter in this discourse. There are parallel sayings in Mt 188°, Mk 9-47, but in both these places also the passage seems to be only partially relevant. The words are figurative and hyperbolical. Jesus means to say with great emphasis that no effort and no sacrifice * are to be considered too great for aman in his struggle to master his lower nature and to secure the supremacy of his higher, better self. Until a man brings his body into subjection to his spirit, he fails both individually and socially of what God requires of him (ef. 1 Co 613-2", Gal 516-4),
The teaching concerning divorce, contained in vy.*1- 32, appears also in connexion with a specific historical occasion in Mt 19*®=Mk 10!!, while the Lukan parallel 16'8 is entirely unconnected. Not a few modern scholars have come to regard the later Matthzean setting as the original one, explaining 5°) as an importation into the Sermon for the purpose of bringing Jesus’ teaching about divorce into immediate connexion with His general ethical discourse, and also to place side by side what He taught concerning the closely related subjects of adultery and divorce.t This seems the more probable view, but the teaching is the same whether given in the Sermon on the Mount or under some other circumstances. Divorce was a subject of discussion in Jesus’ day. The two rab- binical schools headed by Shammai and Hillel, in- terpreting Dt 24'-*,5 promulgated different opinions concerning the proper grounds of divorce: the former school was more strict, allowing divorce only in case of adultery and other serious moral oftences ; the latter school allowed divorce on almost any pretext which the husband might indicate. Remarriage after divorce was considered proper by both schools.§ It was therefore a matter of lively interest what attitude towards divorce would be assumed by the new Teacher, who was independent of both Hillel and Shammai, and had had no rab- binical training. The Pharisees undertook to dis- cover Jesus’ position by their question: ‘Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?’ (so Mk 102, while Mt 19% adds ‘for every cause’). Jesus in reply (Mk 10*- ) first directs their attention (if Mark’s order is to be followed instead of Matthew’s) to the OT teaching on the subject contained in Dt 241-2, where divorce and remarriage are allowed for good cause, the divorce being testified by a formal document. But then He goes on to show (Mk 10**) that this permission of divorce was only a concession to a low moral stage of the people, that the Divine ideal of marriage as revealed in Gn 2%-24 was an inseparable union of man and wife, both spiritually and physically.|| This ideal
* The words are not to be understood literally, as though Jesus enjoined the mutilation of the body. Lust would not be remoyed by the destruction of the physical eye or hand. Nor do the eye and hand stand for specific kinds of evil desire, These concrete figurative utterances, as so frequently in Jesus teaching, have only a general purpose to fix and impress one idea of moral duty. ;
+So Bleek, Olshausen, Késtlin, Godet, Feine, Ibbeken, H. Holtzmann. That the words belong to the Sermon is held by Meyer, Achelis, B. Weiss, Wendt, Bacon, and many others.
t In Dt 241.2 we read: ‘When a man taketh a wife, and marrieth her, then it shall be, if she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some unseemly thing in her, that he shall write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house. And when she is departed out of his house, she may go and be another man’s wife.’