Tuesday, August 26, 2014

The Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon at the Temple, and the Doxology

In Matt 5-7, we find the sermon that is often called "the Sermon on the Mount. " This sermon is reproduced, with some changes, by the then-resurrected, glorified Christ when, after his resurrection, preached to his people in the New World (somewhere in ancient Mesoamerica) at a temple in a land called "Bountiful"; thus it is often labelled “The Sermon at the Temple” (3 Nephi 12-14).

In Matt 6:13, Christ provides a doxology (emphasis added):

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil; For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever, Amen.

This is paralleled in 3 Nephi 13:13:

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.

Some critics, perhaps most notably Stan Larson, have charged that this is strong evidence of a 19th century origin for the Book of Mormon. The reason? Some early manuscripts of Matthew lack this doxology. Many modern translations (e.g. the NRSV) lack the doxology. The argument goes that Joseph Smith pilfered, rather ignorantly in this case, from the KJV, and the Book of Mormon retains this error.

There have been many responses to this alleged “error.” In his book, Illuminating the Sermon at the Temple and Sermon on the Mount (online here), John W. Welch provides a number of arguments that Jesus did utter a doxology. Consider the following:

First, it would have been highly irregular at the time of Jesus to end a Jewish prayer without some words in praise of God. In Palestinian practice, it was completely unthinkable that a prayer would end with the word “temptation.” In Judaism, prayers are often concluded with a “seal,” a sentence of praise freely formulated by the man who was praying (on this, see Jeremias’ book, The Prayers of Jesus).

Secondly, at a temple setting, that of the Sermon in 3 Nephi 12-14, it is all the more unlikely that a prayer at the temple would end without some form of doxology. This may be a factor in explaining why Luke 11 does not contain a doxology, while the Lord’s Prayer at Bountiful does. In prayers at a temple, the people did not end a prayer with just “Amen.” The benediction at the temple on the Day of Atonement ended with the phrase, “Praised be the name of His glorious kingdom forever and eternally!”

Thirdly, the doxology in the KJV and the Sermon at the Temple seems to have followed a traditional form, reflected in 1 Chronicles 29:10-13, as is widely observed. The Nephites may have known such phraseology from their Israelite traditions, for it appears in an important blessing spoken by King David, and the Nephite record contained certain historical records of the Jews (see 1 Nephi 5:12). According to Chronicles, David’s blessing reads: “Wherefore David blessed the Lord before all the congregation: and David said, Blessed be thou Lord God of Israel out father forever and ever. Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine if the kingdom” (1 Chron 29:10-11, emphasis added).

Fourthly, although a minority, several early texts in Greek, Syriac, and Coptic include doxologies at the end of the Lord ’s Prayer in Matthew 6:13.

What is also interesting is the Didache, an early Christian document that has been variously dated (most scholars argue that it was written about 100 C.E.; one leading Didache scholar, Aaron Milavec, in his The Didache: Faith, Hope, and Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50-70 C.E. places it before the inscripturation of the Gospel of Matthew) contains the doxology in his rendition of the Lord’s Prayer (Didache 8:2), showing that the doxology in the Sermon at the Mount was known in Christian antiquity; it was not a much later development.


Overall, these considerations show that the argument of Larson et al. does not hold water vis-à-vis the Sermon on the Mount and Sermon at the Temple in Matthew and the Book of Mormon.