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A Portrait of Progress in Bible Study

I am in the middle of a Bible study on the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps one of the most studied passages in the Bible. As I look back on some of the established interpretations I see a vast difference between on what the Sermon means to different people -- it is Law, it is Grace, it is ethics for the Church, it is only for Jesus' day, and the positions go on and on.

Before I began my Bible study, I saw the passage as Jesus' ethics for all ages, distilled into one place. I would have called myself a "Sermon on the Mount Christian." I was ignorant of the other positions, and I had great skepticism of the other positions as I encountered them in the early parts of my Bible study.

My vision of this passage has enlarged, and my love of the passage is becoming enriched. Here's what I've done so far:

1. I surveyed articles in reference works dealing with this passage by performing a Libronix search on "Sermon on the Mount" (R.H. Mounce in The New Bible Dictionary, Graham Stanton in The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, and Craig Blomberg's treatment in The New American Commentary, vol. 22, etc.). I gained an overview of the history of interpretation and the contemporary debates. I learned with interest that Augustine was the first to extract and study the passage apart from the rest of the book of Matthew.

2. My survey (above) led me to continue my Bible study by searching for features that it has in common with the rest of the book of Matthew. I wanted to find out if it's even feasible to study the Sermon on its own without taking into account the whole Gospel. So far I've accomplished two parts of this:

(a) I printed out the whole book of Matthew on printer paper in the NASB, and spread it out in front of me. I went through with different colors of highlighters and marked themes that appeared throughout the book (fruitful/unfruitful trees, kingdom, persecution, forgiveness, the city Jerusalem, fulfillment, etc.). I left the software package open so I could check the Greek words and make sure I was finding all the ones that go with the theme (BDAG and Louw-Nida were very helpful here). It has surprised me how the themes run through the book, with little difference between the historical "time-bound" sections and the "timeless" Sermon. Could it be that the whole book is to be seen as time-bound (history of Jesus) and timeless (teaching for the church), including the Sermon?

(b) It occurred to me in reading through repeatedly that there seem to be a lot more commands in the Sermon than in most other places of the book, and I wondered if there was something to this "feeling." I did a computer search of all the imperatives. This was not narrow enough, since I got every request made to Jesus by others, and all sorts of other things that appeared exclusively in the narratives. I used the morphology search with several different options to better sort the results out between 2nd person plural and singular, 3rd person, etc. The results were very enlightening, seeing where the concentrations of Jesus' commands to disciples and crowds are found, and seeing how many are spread throughout. For instance, the call to follow Jesus is spread throughout the book, and it develops a fuller picture of what "following Jesus" meant (4:17, 19; 8:22; 9:9, 13; 11:28, 29; 16:24, 19:14, 17, 21).

3. Where am I now in this Bible study? I'm still ruminating over themes, and I'm waiting for a new tool to come in. I ordered the Original Languages package last week, since I have become very passionate about understanding Matthew's Gospel (and the Sermon) as it was meant to be read. I hope to use syntax and other tools to help with this understanding. In the end my greater desire is to know what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus, and in turn to become a better follower of the Lord in our day. I think this should be the honest goal of any Bible study!

Submitted by Jonathan K. Henry