The Sermon on the Mount : A History of Interpretation and Bibliography

The Sermon on the Mount continues to attract persons of different backgrounds and traditions. There is general agreement that the Sermon offers a compendium of the teachings of Jesus, and that it is one of the most lofty and powerful expressions of the essence of the moral life. But when one turns to questions about the Sermon's meaning and relevance, there is no unanimity of opinion. A cluster of problems has divided interpreters from the first centuries of the Christian era to the present. Kissinger's readable yet scholarly guide to the literature of the Sermon on the Mount reflects some of the many attempts which have been made to wrestle with those problems. Part I traces in 35 sections the history of interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount from the patristic period to the twentieth century. An extensive partially-annotated bibliography on the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes is presented in Part II. The bibliography was developed from the collection of the late Harold Row. The author added materials from the Library of Congress and other outstanding collections to provide the first full-scale bibliography of the Sermon on the Mount which has indeed proved to be authoritative. Since the book was first published in its cloth edition in 1975, it has been widely consulted as a resource for Sermon on the Mount research and study. A general index of topics, a biblical references index, and an appendix listing "Sermon on the Mount" in 61 languages completes the work.