the crowd sought to touch him, for power came forth from him and healed them all. And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said:“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.“Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.“Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.“But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.“Woe to you that are well fed now, for you shall hunger.“Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.“Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”
So why the difference in location for these sermons — mount and plain?
Matthew mentions the occasion of the Sermon on the Mount because his Jewish audience would have been keen on such a detail. The reason? Moses was given the Law, the Ten Commandments, on Mount Sinai. So Jesus was giving the law of blessedness, also known as the Beatitudes, also from a mount. Matthew also makes sure to quote Jesus, saying that He had “come not to abolish them [the law and the prophets], but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17), also appealing to a Jewish listener. Moses gave the Ten Commandments that came from God to the Hebrew people, and now Jesus was going to fulfill that Law.
Luke, on the other hand, mentions the time that the sermon was given on a plain. Why mention the obscure detail of a level ground? Luke was writing for a Gentile audience. Unlike the Jewish audience of Matthew, which was used to the Law being given from God to Moses on Mount Sinai, the Gentiles were accustomed to giving and listening to philosophical debates in the Greek tradition. Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle debated one another on level ground, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, eye-to-eye, instead of lecturing from an elevated podium, in order to give a sense of fairness and equality to the discussion. Because a Gentile audience would have been more interested in a speech given by Jesus in similar fashion, Luke retold such an occurrence.
A slight difference can be detected in some of the wording of Luke’s account versus that of Matthew, as well as an addition of “woe to you” given by Jesus to correspond with each “blessed are you,” which isn’t found in Matthew. Again, a preacher often adapts an older sermon by adding to, subtracting from, or modifying his original work, depending on his second audience. The Catholic Church maintains that the discrepancy comes from a change Jesus made because neither sacred author would feel free to alter anything Jesus said or did on his own human authority.
Mark
Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels, due to the fact that his audience was mainly Roman. When you belong to an imperial police state, you’re not as concerned about making intricate connections to a Hebrew past, and you’re not interested in lengthy philosophical dialogues. You want action. That’s why the Gospel According to Mark has fewer sermons and more movement. It’s a fast-paced, nonstop, continuous narrative, like an excited person telling the events “a mile a minute.” Romans would have been far more attentive to the Gospel According to Mark than to the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, or John.
Mark explicitly describes the Roman Centurion, a military commander of a hundred soldiers, at the Crucifixion as making the proclamation, “Truly, this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). His Roman audience would’ve certainly perked up when that was said because it was an act of faith from one of their own kind.
Like Luke, Mark wasn’t one of the original Twelve Apostles. Matthew and John were Apostles, but Luke and Mark were 2 of the 72 disciples. The Apostles were there in person to witness all that Jesus said and did. The disciples often had to resort to secondhand information, told to them by other sources. Luke most likely received much of his information from Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mark undoubtedly used his friend Peter, the chief Apostle, as his source.
John
John was the last one to write a Gospel, and his is the most theological of the four. The other three are so similar in content, style, and sequence that they’re often called the Synoptic Gospels, from the Greek word sunoptikos, meaning “summary” or “general view.”
John, who wrote his Gospel much later than the others, was writing for a Christian audience. He presumed that people had already heard the basic facts, and he provided advanced information to complement the Jesus 101 material covered in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In other words, the Gospel According to John is like college calculus, whereas the Synoptic Gospels are like advanced high-school algebra.
John sets the tone by opening his Gospel with a philosophical concept of preexistence: Before Jesus became man by being conceived and born of the Virgin Mary, He existed from all eternity in His divinity because He’s the second person of the Holy Trinity. Take a look at the first line from the Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
This is a very philosophical and theological concept. John wanted his audience to see Jesus as being the living Word of God: As he says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He was saying that Jesus was the incarnate Word — the Word taking on flesh. The first book of the Bible, Genesis, starts with the same phrase John uses in the opening of his Gospel: “In the beginning.” According to Genesis 1:3, God said, “Let there be light; and there was light.” In other words, by merely speaking the word, God created. John built on that in his Gospel, saying that Jesus was the Word. The Word of God wasn’t a thing but a person. The Word was creative and powerful. Just as God said the word and light were created, Jesus spoke the word and the blind received their sight, the lame walked, and the dead came back to life.
Dealing with Heresy and Some Other $10 Words
Christians were violently and lethally persecuted for most of the first 300 years after the death of Jesus — from the time of Emperor Nero and the burning of Rome, which he blamed on the Christians. So, for the first 300 years, Christianity remained underground. Through word of mouth, Christians learned about Jesus of Nazareth and His preaching, suffering, death, Resurrection, and Ascension.
It wasn’t until A.d. 313, when Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in his Edict of Milan, that Christians were even allowed to publicly admit their religious affiliation. But once Christianity became legal, it soon became predominant and even became the state religion.
Leaving the catacombs (underground cemeteries sometimes used by Christians to hide from the Romans and as places of worship during times of persecution) and entering the public arena, Christians began devoting themselves to theological questions that the Bible didn’t specifically address. For example, Scripture teaches that Jesus was God and man, human and divine. Yet how was He both? How were the human and divine natures of Jesus connected? So the second 300 years after Jesus’s death, the fourth to seventh centuries, became a hornets’ nest of theological debate.
To the Catholic Church, heresy is the denial of a revealed truth or the distortion of one so that others are deceived into believing a theological error. After Christianity was legalized, the Christological heresies that referred to the nature of Christ became rampant. Debates often degenerated into violent
