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The story of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance in the New World is the climax of the Book of Mormon, but in some ways it is disappointing. It doesn’t fit well into the larger narrative and Jesus’ words consist, in large measure, of lengthy quotations from Isaiah, Micah, and the Sermon on the Mount. When examined from the perspective of the narrator, however, several key themes emerge. In Mormon's account, the issue of prophecy and fulfillment comes to the forefront, in both Samuel the Lamanite's predictions of the birth and death of Christ, and also in Jesus’ own prophecies concerning the destiny of the House of Israel and the fulfillment of the Law of Moses. The general flow of the narrative is punctuated by four significant editorial interruptions, and with the last of these, Mormon himself undergoes a literary transformation from historian to prophet.

This chapter analyzes the dying forgiveness prayer of Stephen and the related prayer of the Lukan Jesus. By reading these prayers aside related bodies of literature including Maccabees and the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, it argues that these prayers are for Luke a Christian proprium. They are potentially more radical than Gospel teaching on enemy love, as Tertullian would have recognized, since the plea for forgiveness of undeserving persecutors, more so than enemy love, challenged the framework of cosmic justice, as Marcion would have affirmed. The prayer was frequently read intransitively, as idealizing the one who so prays, without having any effect on the prayer’s object, thereby functioning analogously to the Roman discourse of clemency. Those who read the prayer otherwise landed upon this radical challenge, which explains the prayer’s complicated reception history, including the scribal omission of Jesus’ forgiveness prayer (Luke 23.34a) from the Gospel of Luke.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of the Anabaptist peace tradition in the sixteenth century and its various expressions extending into the present. It considers the importance of the person of Jesus and his teachings (particularly the Sermon on the Mount) as the ethical rationale for their pacifism.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Matthean Judaism. It then outlines the structure of the Sermon on the Mount followed by an aretegenic reading of the Sermon. The aretegenic force of the Sermon on the Mount can be characterized as follows. The evangelist invites his hearers to consider themselves among the privileged by becoming his followers, and he prepares them for the suffering they will endure. He reassures them that they and their mission are of paramount importance, that they are capable of accomplishing it, and that through their lives God will be glorified. In this process Jesus offers his followers a sense of importance and dignity that comes from cultivating the sort of inner purity that requires great restraint under stress. Echoing the promises of Psalm 37, Matthew creates a determined esprit de corps among the beleaguered disciples to encourage them to hold to the new piety, which would triumph as the way for Jews and gentiles to live as God's privileged.

Stanley Hauerwas and others have presented Bonhoeffer as if he espoused pacifism as understood in the peace-church traditions. But reading Bonhoeffer through an Anabaptist theological lens, often by associating him with John Howard Yoder, obscures his thinking about peace. This chapter shows how Bonhoeffer developed his ideas about peace—as well as his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount—in Lutheran terms and in explicit contrast to Anabaptist thinking. Peace, for Bonhoeffer, is a penultimate ordering of the sinful world that preserves it for redemption. This means, in contrast to Anabaptists, Bonhoeffer does not locate peace at the center of the gospel. Rather, peace keeps the world open for the hearing of the gospel. Because Bonhoeffer’s peace thinking was closely associated with his ecumenical work, the chapter also discusses Lutheran character of his ecumenism.

This chapter examines cases where authors use prosōpopoeia to puts words in the mouth of Christ—either revoicing speeches which are found in the gospels, or inventing completely new ones. It first studies various interpretations of the Sermon of the Mount which read it rhetorically, commenting on the setting, on the effect of Christ’s words (pathos and persuasion), and the way his words reveal his character (ethos and integrity). Next, it examines speeches invented for Christ in hagiographies, where he takes on the character of the president of the games, preparing martyrs for and standing by them in their ‘victory’—that is, their deaths in the arena. Prosōpopoeia can complement our usual sources of Christology: the use of prosōpopoeia as invented speech appropriate to a character one can draw conclusions about how certain authors viewed Christ. It also raises questions about how appropriate it was for an author to imitate Christ.

This chapter addresses Baur’s treatment of the Synoptic Gospels by asking how Baur identified the essence of early Christianity through his historical research. The primary source is Baur’s Critical Investigations of the Canonical Gospels (1847), in which he gathers together earlier work on John, Mark, and Luke, and makes the case for the priority of Matthew. Baur believed that Matthew is based on an earlier source, the so-called Hebrew Gospel, which functions as a “sayings source” for the teaching of Jesus. The essence of early Christianity can be found in parts of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus presents a moral–religious vision emphasizing purity of heart, morality of conscience, and righteousness before God. The chapter shows how this vision is further elaborated in Baur’s Lectures on New Testament Theology (1864) and serves as the basis for all later Christian doctrine.

In this chapter, Jean-Yves Lacoste offers a theologically rich reading of the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the antitheses (Matt. 5:38-48), in which Jesus issues a series of seemingly impossible commands culminating in the order to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Lacoste argues that the antitheses are speech-acts that exceed the Mosiac law without abrogating it, effectively calling Jesus’ audience to enact (and creating in them the ability to practice) the exact sort of extra-moral perfection that Jesus demands, in the context of both a world (kosmos) where such acts make little sense and a kingdom (Basileia) where they will no longer be necessary.

This chapter focuses on Onésime Lacouture's controversial retreat movement that put him at the center of a vicious intra-clerical scuffle and culminated in the loss of his priestly faculties, after which he was shuffled around North American Jesuit provinces until his death in 1951. While Lacouture's formal retreat ministry came to an end, his evangelical influence continued; he persevered for the remainder of his life to gain satisfaction for his brand of maximalist moral theology and vindication for himself on allegations of heterodoxy. This chapter first looks at Lacouture's clerical life and retreats before discussing his preaching of the Sermon on the Mount and its doctrine. It then considers the basic principles of Lacouture's preaching and theology, doctrine of samples, and his belief in saints and demons as part of his cosmology. It also examines Lacouture's exile and his death on November 15, 1951.

This chapter traces the trajectory of early Christianity’s eventual embrace of the new, as articulated in the New Testament. Early sections probe the Gospels, illustrating how difficult it is to trace the word “new” back to the sayings of Jesus himself. Clearer evidence emerges in Paul, though he balances assertions of innovation with appeals to a prior covenant of faith. Other gospel traditions—above all, the Sermon on the Mount—seek to establish the novelty of Jesus’s teaching, a claim that sometimes entails denying earlier precedents for Jesus’s instruction. Going one important step further, the Letter to the Hebrews provides the earliest evidence for supersessionism, when the valorization of innovation is undergirded by a condemnation of the old. But an alternate discourse is also in evidence in texts like the Didache, which speak not of an old/new contrast but a timeless duality between good and evil.

“Inner-Life Ethics” presents the elements of Augustine’s moral theory, elements that can be found scattered in works written by the year 401. The theory is shaped by Augustine’s understanding of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and Augustine’s soul-body dualism. Augustine’s dualism is distinctive in claiming that because the soul is superior to the body, the body cannot affect the soul, and that the moral appraisal of an agent’s bodily behavior must take account of the state of the agent’s soul. Augustine interprets the Sermon on the Mount as emphasizing the moral importance of an agent’s intentions: if one intends to do something morally impermissible, one is already morally culpable, even if the intention is never acted upon. The theory is then applied to Augustine’s concern over his theft of the pears, his worry about his erotic dreams, and his remarks about lying.

Intentionalism is any moral view that emphasizes the importance of intention to judgments of culpability. This chapter presents two intentionalistic principles. The mens rea principle claims that if an agent is culpable for performing an action, then the agent performed the action intentionally and impermissibly. The mens rea principle is examined with respect to cases of lying, strict criminal liability, and the distinction between intending and foreseeing. The Sermon on the Mount principle maintains that if an agent intends to perform an action when it is impermissible, then the agent’s intending to perform the action makes the agent as guilty as the agent would be were the agent to carry out the intention. The Sermon on the Mount principle is applied to cases of failed attempts and legalistic criteria pertaining to self-defense.

This chapter explores the early life of Ben Klassen. Bernhardt Klassen, who was named after his father, was born into a Mennonite family on February 7, 1918. In 1925, the Klassen family moved to Canada. In late 1945, Klassen made his way to California. The next year, he married Henrie Etta McWilliams. In 1951, his only child and daughter, Kim Anita, was born. In 1955, Klassen, along with his family, joined a Presbyterian church in Glenmore Gardens, California. By 1967, Klassen decided that he had finally had enough of this religious garbage. The specter of communism and the civil rights movement rekindled Klassen's interest in politics. By 1971, Klassen decided to take a closer look at the Christian Bible. After a close rereading of the Bible, he concluded that the Sermon on the Mount, as preached by Jesus Christ, was full of “suicidal advice”.

This chapter turns to the Gospel of Matthew, beginning with a basic overview of historical contexts before digging more deeply into a specific issue, this time the various manifestations of Jewish practices in the Second Temple period. Emphasizing the Jewishness of Jesus, this chapter offers an overview of different Second Temple Jewish “schools of thought,” both those appearing in the Gospels and Acts and those we know of from extrabiblical materials. The chapter, then, gives a literary overview of Matthew before examining three main themes: Jesus’s origins and kingship, the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus’s reception by Matthew’s minor characters, including the Gospels’ problematic portrayal of Jewish religious leaders. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of reading Matthew in its context as a Jewish writing that participates in intra-Jewish polemic in order to combat anti-Jewish and anachronistic interpretations.

Matthew’s Gospel builds on the portrait of Jesus and sin found in Mark, but adds a birth story to make it clear that Jesus will save his people from their sins. Matthew thus invokes the significance of Jesus’ death already in the birth story. Although Joseph seeks to divorce Mary because she is scandalously pregnant with Jesus before they are married, Matthew goes out of his way to assure the reader that God has worked in similar fashion before with other women heroes of the faith: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah (Bathsheba) each of whom gave birth in seemingly scandalous circumstances. But like these women, Mary is righteous in the eyes of God and she faithfully bears Jesus regardless of outward appearances. This motif of righteousness continues in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), where we find a Jesus who stresses the moral disposition of one’s heart rather than mere outward observance of the Jewish law. Sin originates from within. Like Mark, Matthew’s Jesus will die a sacrificial death for the forgiveness of sins.