Gospel Passage Study: Comparison Of Matthew’s Sermon On The Mount And Luke’s Sermon On The Plain 

Many people perceive the Bible as being a book that dropped out of the sky. 

It is often read as if God, the eternally transcendent perfect being who is the source of all life, typed it out themself in a way that should be perfectly clear and unambiguous and the only reason humans do not all agree on how to interpret it or believe it its authority is we are stupid or evil (or at least some people are but others are able to understand it perfectly so they call it "inerrant"). 

If this was true though, why would God write four different books, four different “gospels”, four different incomplete accounts of the life of Jesus when Jesus is supposed to be the manifestation of God in human form? 

This paper will not try to answer this question but will perform a comparative analysis of passages within two of these gospels.

The passages of study here are Matthew 5-7 and Luke 6:20-49, commonly referred to as “the Sermon on the Mount” and “the Sermon on the Plain” respectively. Matthew 5:1 and Luke 6:20 both attribute the words of these sermons to Jesus and state that his audience was his disciples. 

The two sermons are similar in content in many ways but are not exactly the same. This is curious if the Bible is supposed to be a historically-accurate but if we consider what many scholars have concluded, that these books were written by two people with two different agendas (or a consolidation of various people’s writings and agendas), then things make a bit more sense. 

The following paragraphs will note and analyze the similarities and differences between the two “sermons” in terms of their content, organization, wording, and location or role in each book. The five sections of the Luke passage all have parallel sections in the Matthew passage with the content being similar but not identical:

• • “The Beatitudes” in Matthew 5:1-12 has a lot of similarities with the “Blessings and Woes” in Luke 6:20-26.

  • Matthew 5:43-48 is subtitled “Love for Enemies” in the New Revised Standard Version Bible as well as Luke 6:27-36.

  • “Judging Others” is the title of Matthew 7:1-5 and Luke 6:37-42.

  • The analogy of “A Tree and Its Fruit” is 2 given in both Matthew 7:15-20 and Luke 6:43-45.

  • Both Matthew 7:21-27 and Luke 6:46-49 are about people who call Jesus “Lord, Lord” but don’t really know him or demonstrate they understand what everything he’s said to them because they don’t have a strong belief or support system, or “foundation” as he uses in his analogy.

Getting more into the specifics of the parallel sections, the blessings Jesus lists in Luke 6:20-21 seem to be an abbreviated version or summary of the blessings in Matthew 5:3-11 and are more ambiguous. 

The line in Matthew 5:3 is practically synonymous with the first blessing in Luke 6:20 except it is more specifically the “poor is spirit” who are blessed and receive the “kingdom of heaven” in Matthew as opposed to the “poor” who are blessed and receive the “kingdom of God” in Luke which creates a bit of ambiguity. 

Luke also is more general when referring to those who “will be filled” as it simply mentions “the hungry” whereas Matthew states that it is those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness.” 

The line in Luke 6:21 about “those who weep” is pretty much the same as Matthew 5:4 but just seems to portray more emotional expression; weeping in Luke as opposed to mourning in Matthew, with the consequences of laughing in Luke as opposed to being comforted in Matthew. 

There is little difference between Matthew 5:11 and Luke 6:22 about those who aren’t treated well because of their association with Jesus other than a few added verbs for illustrative purposes and a reference to “the Son of Man” in Luke rather than the explicit self-reference in Matthew. Matthew also includes six other blessings that aren’t referred to at all in Luke.

The “woes” following the blessings in Luke 6:24-26 aren’t present in Matthew’s account of the sermon which seems like either a major oversight by the author of Matthew or a major alteration by the author of Luke. 

It is not clear which of these is true but in the case of the untrue one it must come down to the agenda or theology of the author; whether they want to frame Jesus 3 as someone who directly preaches judgement and bad news (or maybe rather “tough love” or good news in a negative way) or not.

The other parallel sections outlined have many similarities and some identical passages but the main differences are in how explicit Jesus is in his teachings and how much he uses analogies and parables. Matthew seems to include more analogies than Luke such as the log in the eye analogy in Matthew 7:3-5, and the tax collector analogy in Matthew 5:46.

The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is more extensive than Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, as it contains a number of other sections with various parables and teachings on moral issues that are not included in Luke. It could be that one of them draws on the other as a source for this but it’s unclear which draws on which for this. 

The general criteria scholars use for figuring out which writings were written first is how short the writings are, how difficult the writings are, and how unedited the writings seem (Isaak, Jon. BTS 1130 Lecture. Oct 1, 2020. Canadian Mennonite University.) The sermon in Luke is shorter, has less analogies and seems less structured or edited so it seems more likely that Matthew is drawing on Luke but since scholars believe they share many sources this is hard to distinguish.

By zooming out and looking at how these sermons fit in with the rest of their respective books, some insight can be gained about what the different things the authors might’ve been trying and therefore why differences exist. 

The sermon is near the beginning of the book of Matthew following Jesus’ baptism and his temptation of the wilderness and is followed by Jesus going out to serve people, perform miracles, tell parables, and challenge the scribes. Whether this was chronologically true, it seems it is placed in this spot in the gospel to show what Jesus learned from his experiences prior to his ministry, and to give an overview of what Jesus believes and what he will teach and demonstrate by his actions through his ministry.

Luke overall seems less structured or compartmentalized by topic than Matthew so it seems it could be more chronologically accurate which may be why, although still early on in the book, the sermon takes place after more events. It also closely follows some accounts of Jesus being questioned by scribes and Pharisees which so the author of Luke is locating it here to clearly show how Jesus is different from these authorities and how he believes one should respond to people who disagree or challenge them. Just because there are contradictions doesn’t mean that both accounts of the sermon aren’t subjectively true or at least useful.

All of the analysis done here has been speculation, albeit educated speculation, which many scholars have likely done a lot more work on. The fact though that there is so many differences and so much uncertainty about what is historically-accurate and even what is subjectively-accurate, in terms of what the authors of the gospels were trying to get across, may help to disclaim the idea that the Bible was written by the creator of the universe. 

At least this may help uncover the possibility that rather than God simply deciding one day to sit down and write a book to give a bit of guidance to the beings created in their image, maybe God used a much more complicated process that spanned thousands of years involving many imperfect people from different cultures who used different writing styles.