The Sermon on the Mount: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Including the Sermon on the Plain

The Sermon on the Mount:

A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Including the Sermon on the Plain

By Hans Dieter Betz

Minneapolis, Fortress, 1995. 695 pp. $72.00.

Betz's Hermeneia commentary comprises three sections: an eighty-eight page introduction, a nearly five-hundred-page discussion of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3-7:27), and a seventy-page discussion of the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:20b-49). He argues that the Sermon on the Mount (SM) and the Sermon on the Plain (SP) "were created by the early Jesus movement, one (the SM) to instruct converts from Judaism, the other (the SP) to instruct those coming from a Greek background."

Betz reiterates and sustains views that he has proposed over recent decades. (1) While most scholars argue that Q contained a sermon closely akin to Luke's SP, which Matthew expanded with special material, Betz sees the SM and SP as two separate and distinct pre-Synoptic compositions. Formulated independently of Q, they were later attached to Q. Matthew and Luke found the SM and the SP in their respective recensions of Q and incorporated them into their Gospels without redaction.

(2) While previous scholarship has either ignored the question of genre or readily accepted the conventional designations as sermons or catechisms, Betz argues the SM/SP represent the Hellenistic literary genre of the epitome. This genre consists of a summary of...