The Sermon on the Mount: A Jewish View

Extract

The Jew is never more uneasy than when faced with a text from the New Testament. Aware of the scriptural authority that such a text holds for the Christian, the uneasiness is compounded when what, basically, the Jew is offering is an opportunity for Christians to listen in, as it were, on a Jewish interpretation of one of the most important texts in the New Testament.

There are, of course, historical considerations that determine how a Jew understands the New Testament. For much of the past, if Jews read or studied the gospels, it was only for polemical purposes. One of the first figures to abandon such an attitude was Claude Montefiore, an English Jew, founder of the Liberal Jewish movement in Britain. In 1909 Montefiore published The Synoptic Gospels, consisting of an introduction, translation and commentary on the first three gospels. The aim of such a book was two-fold: to dissipate the patronising and negative attitude which Jews held towards Christianity and to reveal the true spirit of the Jewish religion to Christians.

Montefiore’s attitudes roused dissent and suspicion among the Jewish community. For him, Jesus linked on to the prophets and sometimes seemed to go beyond them. But as Montefiore revealed, for the Jew it was not the personality or life of Jesus that was important but the teaching:

We persist in separating the one from the other, whereas to Christians they form a unity, a whole. From his childhood upwards the Jew’s highest conceptions of goodness and God have never been associated with Jesus. (Vol. 1)