When we understand the sermon in the cultural context of the first-century Mediterranean world, we can discern as much continuity as there is difference. This is a good thing. Jesus wasn’t speaking Mars-based gibberish, but revealing God’s kingdom to real people in real cultures.

It has been a great joy for me to devote a lot of mental energy to studying, teaching, and writing about the Sermon on the Mount. Even though I’m done writing my new book on the sermon, this famous biblical text continues to teach me new things every day.

Here are three things I’ve learned about the sermon that most people probably don’t know.

Jesus’s Sermon Is Radical But Not Entirely New

Out of respect for Jesus, we often assume his message was a lightning bolt of novel and wonderful things never heard by humanity before.

The Sermon on the Mount is a lightning bolt. It’s direct revelation from God, coming from the mouth of the incarnate Word himself. But this doesn’t mean Jesus’s teachings were entirely new.

When we understand the sermon in the cultural context of the first-century Mediterranean world, we can discern as much continuity as there is difference. This is a good thing. Jesus wasn’t speaking Mars-based gibberish, but revealing God’s kingdom to real people in real cultures.

There are two slices of Jesus’s cultural context that both illuminate what Jesus is saying and also show that the sermon isn’t entirely new. In the Jewish context, Jesus is presented as a prophet, just like those in the Old Testament. Jesus is calling people to reconsider who God is and what he desires for his creatures. Jesus’s message in the sermon is that God is our Father who sees and cares about the heart, not just external righteous deeds and religion.

This teaching is rooted in and resonates with the prophetic tradition, particularly Isaiah and Jeremiah, with a healthy dash of Daniel and the minor prophets thrown in for good measure. There is deep continuity between Jesus’s words and the rest of the Bible.

The other context operative in the sermon is the world of Greek and Roman philosophy. Jesus isn’t only a prophet, but also a sage — a wise philosopher who calls people to re-orient their lives according to a virtuous vision of the world.

As a philosopher, Jesus invites people into ways of being in the world that promise the good life (or human flourishing). He is a teacher who gathers and instructs disciples; his teachings are gathered together into memorable epitomes; he offers a series of macarisms (beatitudes) that promise true life; and he emphasizes virtuous wholeness (see especially Matt 5:48). Certainly there are differences between the content of what Jesus said and what other philosophers taught, but the form and feel of the sermon would be familiar to hearers in the first century.

Read More