Essays on the Sermon on the Mount

"A diligent and carefully argued exercise in the historico-critical method, Hans Dieter Betz' Essays present the Sermon on the Mount (SM) as a pre-Matthean composition coming from a Jewish-Christian community engaged in the polemical process of constructing an identity vis-á-vis mainstream Jewish (Pharisaic) groups on the one hand and emerging Gentile Christianity on the other. It is this process that prompts the SM compiler(s) to rethink and rework the inherited Jesus tradition. Since the ...