I’m working my way through Matthew 5-7
in an attempt to process the words of the Lord Jesus from some approximation of
the cultural and religious perspective of his original audience.
As established in my first two posts on the subject, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that most of the ears that took in
the Sermon on the Mount were Jewish ears. Any Gentiles in that crowd were
either proselytes of Judaism, or on their way to becoming proselytes, or else
outside the community of the faithful just listening in. In those days, if you
wanted to draw near to God, or even to obtain more accurate information about
him, no better means existed than studying and obeying the Law of Moses.
Other generalizations could be made about
the crowd that gathered to hear the Sermon, but let’s consider those when we
reach the relevant portions of the Lord’s discourse.