WS.1*. "The Sermon on the Mount" is a traditional label for the opening discourse of Jesus in Matthew. I will often refer to this block of teachings as the Sermon. Capitalization means nothing other than that we are referring to the teachings of chapters 5,6 and 7 in Matthew.
WS.1a*. The Birth of the Messiah, a commentary on the infancy narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke by Raymond E. Brown (Anchor/Doubleday 1993).
WS.2*. New Testament Introduction by Donald Guthrie (Inter-Varsity Press; one-volume edition 1970).
WS.3*. Once the emperor Constantine made Christianity fashionable, the church experienced a great inrush of people of every social stratum. (Christianity became the state religion sometime after Constantine.) In the period in which Matthew was being composed, the church appealed mostly to the downtrodden: slaves and persons of low estate. Yet, even in this early period some became Christian, in name only, but not in spirit nor in truth, in order to make a spouse happy or to please some person other than Christ.
WS.4*. See An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts by Matthew Black (Oxford Clarendon 1967). Citing Charles Fox Burney, Black writes:
WS.5a*. The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content by Bruce M. Metzger (Abingdon 1965; enlarged second ed. 1983).
WS.5*. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration by Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford 1964; third enlarged ed., 1992).
WS.6*. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance by Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford 1987).
WS.7*. I do not subscribe to the bulk of Marxsen's thesis, as described by Metzger (see below).
WS.8*. Quotations from The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin Development and Significance by Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford 1987). Metzger cites
WS.9*. In his analysis of John 6:35-58, Raymond E. Brown finds that the meaning of the phrase "bread of life" was "even in antiquity" a point of contention.
From The Gospel According to John – translated and with an introduction and notes by Raymond E. Brown (Anchor Bible v. 29 1966).
WS.10*. For a Jewish Christian perspective on the New Testament, please see God's New Covenant, A New Testament Translation by Heinz W. Cassirer (William B. Eerdmans Publishing 1989), which was issued 10 years after Cassirer's death. Also see Cassirer's Grace and Law: St. Paul, Kant, and the Hebrew Prophets (William B. Eerdmans Publishing 1988).
Cassirer was a noted Kantian philosopher and son of the world-renowned philosopher Ernst Cassirer. The Cassirers, a Jewish family, fled Germany with the rise of Hitler.
The younger Cassirer taught philosophy at Oxford and Glasgow for many years until, in the 1950s, he had a mid-life crisis as to the idea of truth and decided to check New Testament writings. On reading the letters of Paul, Cassirer had a Damascus Road type of experience and soon was baptized in the Anglican church. He dropped his academic career and thereafter pursued scriptural studies.
I look forward to examining his work in detail as soon as time and circumstances permit.
WS.NK1*. Origen, Aquinas and Calvin quotations come from Discovering God, the Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief by Rodney Stark (Harper Collins 2007).
WS.gr1*. The Presuppositions of Critical History by F.H. Bradley (Oxford : James Parker and Co., 1874). This is an early work by the British idealist, who was weaving a path between the Hegelian view of history and the "common sense" view.
WS.gr2*. An essay in which Bradley explains why he was not a Christian was published after his death in 1925.
WS.tkj1*. Kümmel reflects scholarly opinion that John's main writer had access to Matthew and Mark or at least Matthew. Kümmel notes that John's main writer did not rigidly copy materials he incorporated, as evidenced by the fact that he "treated the materials he took over with complete freedom, as is shown by the manner in which he employs Old Testament quotations from memory, shapes them anew, and combines them." I add that this shows the hand of a literary man, who wished to convey the truths of Christ without being inhibited by exacting technicalities. He was not a college professor; he was a Spirit-filled preacher.
See Introduction to the New Testament by Werner Georg Kümmel, Howard Clark Kee, trans. of revised, enlarged English edition (Quelle and Meyer 1973; Abingdon Press 1975).
WS.kP29*. In the early Christian era, church leaders had to cope not only with repeated waves of persecution, but with the generally "liberal" sexual practices of the Greco-Roman pagan populaces. We tend to overlook that even in the recent past, sexual "improprieties" could and often did lead to catastrophic consequences.
No modern antibiotic wonder drugs were available to suppress diseases of sexual contact. The most effective preventive was a monogamous relationship between two mates who had not had sex before marriage. No birth control pill was available that permitted heterosexual intimacy without much concern for pregnancy.
Various abortion methods were available, which were widely accepted, but which the first Christians saw as stemming from a desire to control or conceal the consequences of lust. These methods were associated with various occult practices; the church was strenuously opposed to these multifarious pagan rituals as works of the devil. Abortion was regarded as a sacrilege against a creation of God.
In other words, the Christians' strict sexual moral code arose, to a great extent, out of social conditions in which there were few good solutions to the often sad results of sexual "acting out."
But we may observe that strict moral codes are no safeguard against sin. For example, in the Roman Catholic Paris of past centuries, out-of-wedlock babies were handed over to caretaker houses run by unscrupulous people whose "care" meant the child was not long for this world.
A definition of sin is "a deed that brings sorrow." These arise when we "lean to our own understanding" (Proverb 3:5-6), or, in other words, I do as I think right without bothering with God's rules or guidance. Because of Jesus, we are now able to "read God's mind" (up to a point) via the Spirit. But, as Paul points out, the old nature is in constant battle with the new. So if it is hard for born-again Christians to avoid sin, it's quite impossible for people who don't really know Jesus but only have an external religion of forms.
WS.1a*. The Birth of the Messiah, a commentary on the infancy narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke by Raymond E. Brown (Anchor/Doubleday 1993).
WS.2*. New Testament Introduction by Donald Guthrie (Inter-Varsity Press; one-volume edition 1970).
WS.3*. Once the emperor Constantine made Christianity fashionable, the church experienced a great inrush of people of every social stratum. (Christianity became the state religion sometime after Constantine.) In the period in which Matthew was being composed, the church appealed mostly to the downtrodden: slaves and persons of low estate. Yet, even in this early period some became Christian, in name only, but not in spirit nor in truth, in order to make a spouse happy or to please some person other than Christ.
WS.4*. See An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts by Matthew Black (Oxford Clarendon 1967). Citing Charles Fox Burney, Black writes:
… one of Burney’s most valuable observations of this kind [a misreading of the Aramaic] is that the disputed monogenēs theos in John 1:18 mistranslates yehidh ‘elaha, 'the only-begotten of God'.For discussion of Jerome's handling of this matter, see The Gospel According to John I-XII, translated and with notes by Raymond E. Brown (Anchor Bible, V29, 1966).
WS.5a*. The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content by Bruce M. Metzger (Abingdon 1965; enlarged second ed. 1983).
WS.5*. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration by Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford 1964; third enlarged ed., 1992).
WS.6*. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance by Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford 1987).
WS.7*. I do not subscribe to the bulk of Marxsen's thesis, as described by Metzger (see below).
WS.8*. Quotations from The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin Development and Significance by Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford 1987). Metzger cites
¶ Herbert Braun, 'Hebt die heutige neutestamentliche-exegetische Forschung den Kanon auf?', Fulder Hefte, xii 1960 (pp 9-24; reprinted in his Gesammelte Studien Zum Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt (Tubingen, 1962), pp. 310-24.
¶ Willi Marxsen, Introduction to the New Testament, An Approach to its Problems (Philadelphia, 1968).
WS.9*. In his analysis of John 6:35-58, Raymond E. Brown finds that the meaning of the phrase "bread of life" was "even in antiquity" a point of contention.
Some of the early church fathers, like Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius, understood the whole discourse ... spiritually; for them the flesh of 53ff. meant no more than the bread from heaven – a reference to Christ, but not in a eucharistic way. For Augustine the flesh referred to Christ's immolation for the salvation of men. In the heart of the patristic period, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, the Cyrils of Jerusalem and of Alexandria gave a preponderance to the eucharistic theory. Skipping to the Reformation, we find that many of the reformers did not accept the eucharistic interpretation, but then neither did the Catholic champion Cajetan. The Council of Trent, after much discussion, took no position, largely lest it give ammunition to the Hussites, who used John vi. 53 to demand communion under both species.
WS.10*. For a Jewish Christian perspective on the New Testament, please see God's New Covenant, A New Testament Translation by Heinz W. Cassirer (William B. Eerdmans Publishing 1989), which was issued 10 years after Cassirer's death. Also see Cassirer's Grace and Law: St. Paul, Kant, and the Hebrew Prophets (William B. Eerdmans Publishing 1988).
Cassirer was a noted Kantian philosopher and son of the world-renowned philosopher Ernst Cassirer. The Cassirers, a Jewish family, fled Germany with the rise of Hitler.
The younger Cassirer taught philosophy at Oxford and Glasgow for many years until, in the 1950s, he had a mid-life crisis as to the idea of truth and decided to check New Testament writings. On reading the letters of Paul, Cassirer had a Damascus Road type of experience and soon was baptized in the Anglican church. He dropped his academic career and thereafter pursued scriptural studies.
I look forward to examining his work in detail as soon as time and circumstances permit.
WS.NK1*. Origen, Aquinas and Calvin quotations come from Discovering God, the Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief by Rodney Stark (Harper Collins 2007).
WS.gr1*. The Presuppositions of Critical History by F.H. Bradley (Oxford : James Parker and Co., 1874). This is an early work by the British idealist, who was weaving a path between the Hegelian view of history and the "common sense" view.
WS.gr2*. An essay in which Bradley explains why he was not a Christian was published after his death in 1925.
WS.tkj1*. Kümmel reflects scholarly opinion that John's main writer had access to Matthew and Mark or at least Matthew. Kümmel notes that John's main writer did not rigidly copy materials he incorporated, as evidenced by the fact that he "treated the materials he took over with complete freedom, as is shown by the manner in which he employs Old Testament quotations from memory, shapes them anew, and combines them." I add that this shows the hand of a literary man, who wished to convey the truths of Christ without being inhibited by exacting technicalities. He was not a college professor; he was a Spirit-filled preacher.
See Introduction to the New Testament by Werner Georg Kümmel, Howard Clark Kee, trans. of revised, enlarged English edition (Quelle and Meyer 1973; Abingdon Press 1975).
WS.kP29*. In the early Christian era, church leaders had to cope not only with repeated waves of persecution, but with the generally "liberal" sexual practices of the Greco-Roman pagan populaces. We tend to overlook that even in the recent past, sexual "improprieties" could and often did lead to catastrophic consequences.
No modern antibiotic wonder drugs were available to suppress diseases of sexual contact. The most effective preventive was a monogamous relationship between two mates who had not had sex before marriage. No birth control pill was available that permitted heterosexual intimacy without much concern for pregnancy.
Various abortion methods were available, which were widely accepted, but which the first Christians saw as stemming from a desire to control or conceal the consequences of lust. These methods were associated with various occult practices; the church was strenuously opposed to these multifarious pagan rituals as works of the devil. Abortion was regarded as a sacrilege against a creation of God.
In other words, the Christians' strict sexual moral code arose, to a great extent, out of social conditions in which there were few good solutions to the often sad results of sexual "acting out."
But we may observe that strict moral codes are no safeguard against sin. For example, in the Roman Catholic Paris of past centuries, out-of-wedlock babies were handed over to caretaker houses run by unscrupulous people whose "care" meant the child was not long for this world.
A definition of sin is "a deed that brings sorrow." These arise when we "lean to our own understanding" (Proverb 3:5-6), or, in other words, I do as I think right without bothering with God's rules or guidance. Because of Jesus, we are now able to "read God's mind" (up to a point) via the Spirit. But, as Paul points out, the old nature is in constant battle with the new. So if it is hard for born-again Christians to avoid sin, it's quite impossible for people who don't really know Jesus but only have an external religion of forms.
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