Sermon’s End

The narrative conclusion to Jesus' homily on the Torah and the Kingdom of Heaven.

Matt. 7:28; 8:5a; Luke 7:1

(Huck 44, 46, 79; Aland 76, 85; Crook 59, 89)^[1]

וַיְהִי כְּכַלֹּתוֹ לְדַבֵּר אֶת כָּל הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה בְּאָזְנֵיהֶם וַיִּכָּנֵס לִכְפַר נַחוּם

When Yeshua was finished telling them all these things he entered Kefar Nahum.^[2]

Updated: 15 November 2024

Table of Contents

1. Reconstruction

2. Story Placement

3. Conjectured Stages of Transmission

4. Comment

5. Redaction Analysis

6. Conclusion

Reconstruction

To view the reconstructed text of Sermon’s End click on the link below:

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Conclusion

Careful observation of Sermon’s End affords a glimpse at the way in which the author of Matthew juggled his sources and constructed his discourses. It also reveals the author of Matthew’s polemical agenda. Despite clear affinities between Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of the rabbinic sages, the author of Matthew erected a rhetorical wall between Jesus and Judaism. The anti-Jewish trajectory of Matthew’s Gospel has contributed to fundamental misunderstandings of Jesus’ message and served to justify Christian anti-Semitism. It is our hope that our endeavor to reconstruct the sources behind the Synoptic Gospels will help to rectify some of the damage caused by the Church’s anti-Jewish legacy.

Click here to return to The Life of Yeshua: A Suggested Reconstruction main page. _______________________________________________________

“A View in Palestine,” by Henry Ossawa Tanner. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

^[1] For abbreviations and bibliographical references, see “Introduction to ‘The Life of Yeshua: A Suggested Reconstruction.’” ↩
^[2] This translation is a dynamic rendition of our reconstruction of the conjectured Hebrew source that stands behind the Greek of the Synoptic Gospels. It is not a translation of the Greek text of a canonical source. ↩