A. Don Sorensen on the Historicity of the Sermon on the Mount

In his essay, "The Problem of the Sermon on the Mount and 3 Nephi," A. Don Sorensen interacts with, and refutes an article by William D. Russell from 1982 (pdf; html). One should read the entire article, but the appendix discusses whether Christ could have given the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) as it is presented by Matthew (as well as 3 Nephi 12-14 in the Sermon at the Temple):

Appendix

Could Jesus have delivered the Sermon on the Mount as it is recorded in Matthew? The following reasons offer cumulative support for an affirmative answer.

1.      Whether we think Jesus may have delivered the sermon as found in Matthew depends on what we believe about him. There are several opposing views. One is that Jesus was aware of his divine nature and mission of atonement; he understood that only through him could mankind be saved, and hence he saw to it that his message to the world was passed on with great care. Another view sees Jesus as a charismatic leader who used the oral medium and did not speak with a conscious regard for literary retention. “As oral performer he had neither need nor use for textual aids, nor did he speak with an eye toward textual preservation.”³⁹ The Jesus of the first view could have given the sermon recorded in Matthew.

2.      Whether Jesus might have delivered the Sermon on the Mount depends on how his close followers, especially the apostles and the author of Matthew, regarded him. Birger Gerhardsson is worth quoting at length on this point:

We know how great was the reverence accorded to the leaders of the early Church—”the three pillars” or “the twelve”—by the Christians of the first century. . . . But when these great men come to be compared with Jesus Christ, then no more is heard of their authority, their maturity, their knowledge, their wisdom and their insight. Never for one moment are we allowed to forget the distance between the “only” teacher and these others. In the Gospels we see that only Jesus gave positive teaching; “the twelve” are mentioned, as his disciples, servants and messengers, but never as mediators of their own teaching. The Evangelists are only interested in mediating the words and works of Jesus; the traditionalists have nothing to say—not even in passing—about any creative contribution made by a Peter, a James or a John to the teaching of Jesus Christ. . . . It would be well to keep this in mind in face of skeptical scholars’ attempts to show that the tradition of Jesus is a free compilation on the part of the early Church: that they took up sayings which were in circulation, and placed them in the mouth of Jesus; that they themselves freely created “sayings of Jesus”; that they projected sayings of early Christian prophets back into the life of Jesus; and the like.⁴⁰

3.It is reasonable to believe that some among the close companions of Jesus had the ability to record his sayings. The world of Jesus was literate to a high degree. Indeed, as C. H. Roberts explains, “writing was an essential accompaniment of life at almost all levels to an extent without parallel in living memory.”⁴¹

4.Jesus and his followers belonged to a culture that, as noted earlier, had a deeply rooted tradition of preserving the sacred texts in word-perfect form. Writes Roberts, “The strictest rules governed the handling, the reading and the copying of the Law. Multiplication of copies by dictation was not allowed; each scroll had to be copied directly from another scroll; official copies, until a.d. 70 derived ultimately from a master copy in the Temple, were kept at first in a cupboard in each synagogue, later in a room adjoining it. The cupboard faced towards Jerusalem, and the rolls within it were the most holy objects in the synagogue.”⁴²

The general attitude of the early church toward the sacred writings of “the new dispensation was much the same.”⁴³ So it is unlikely that the Christian community of the first century would have “studiously refrained from putting into writing traditions of the life and teaching of Jesus for the first thirty years of its existence.”⁴⁴

5.If the above points are sound, then it is very plausible that if any sayings of Jesus were preserved as they came from his mouth, then the words of the sermon were. Klaus Koch, who incidentally does not accept the conclusion I am defending, admits that if there were “recognised bearers of tradition,” then it is to be “assumed that the wording of the sayings and stories was meticulously preserved.”⁴⁵ He continues, “In the New Testament the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and the logia of Jesus as a whole retained a much more fixed form than the descriptions of what Jesus did, or of the apostles’ experiences.”⁴⁶

6.In Matthew the Sermon on the Mount is explicitly attributed to Jesus. This should count for something, given the other observations already made.

7.Finally, the inclusion of the Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Mormon reveals to the careful and discerning student the profound and intricate unity of the sermon. It is highly plausible that Jesus himself gave the sermon.

Notes for the Above:

(39)Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 19.

(40)Gerhardsson, Tradition and Transmission, 42-43.

(41) C. H. Roberts, “Books in the Graeco-Roman World and in the New Testament,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans (Cambridge: University Press, 1970), 1:48. See Pistis Sophia, 58-61.

(42) Roberts, “Books in the Graeco-Roman World,” 49-50.

(43) Ibid., 50.

(44) David Wenham, “Source Criticism,” in New Testament Interpretations, 139.

(45) Klaus Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition: The Form-Critical Method (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 88.

(46) Koch, Growth of the Biblical Tradition, 91.