[General Religions Setting for the Sermon on the Mount]
The Sermon at the Temple
[Coherent, Insightful, and Profound
[Worth Memorizing in Full]
[People Living the Law of Moses]
[Anticipating Coming of Christ]
[Law of Moses]
[Sermon is a Religious Observance]
[Sermon is Given at the Temple]
[Sermon is Given for Covenant Making]
[Sermon is Given as Commandments]
[Sermon is Part of the Forty-Day Literature]
[Martin Luther Called it “A Masterpiece of the Devil”]
119 Okay, Brothers and Sisters—I think it is about time for us to get started. I’d like to first let you know that Brother Nibley left at 5:00 o’clock this morning. Apparently, he didn’t tell many of you what was going on, but that’s all right. He’s on a plane right now somewhere over Chicago on his way to Egypt where he will be present at the opening of some tombs that have never been opened before and the unwrapping of some early Christian burials. He is working with Brother Griggs here on campus. I’ll be taking his position, not filling his shoes in any way but directing our discussion for the next couple of weeks while he is gone. We’ll have five sessions together before he is back. I’m John Welch, past president of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, general editor of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, professor over in the Law School, and one of the directors of the Religious Studies Center.
119 Let me make a couple of general comments about what we hope to accomplish in the next five lectures. First of all, if I were in your position I would view myself somewhat as trying to catch up to a freight train that has been moving about ninety miles an hour for about forty years. Brother Nibley has been working in the Book of Mormon area that long. He has covered an awful lot of territory. I remember when I first had a class from him as a freshman here at BYU, in fact the first lecture I attended. I’d had a lot of ancient history, four years of Latin, and things like that in high school, so I was prepared enough to at least understand and appreciate the incredible things he was talking about. But it still, even that long ago, was a mammoth chore trying to catch up with where he already was. It’s staggering to me to imagine your position as a student trying to pick up everything that has happened in the interim.
119 So I would suggest, especially for this particular class and for the final that I know you’re going to have to take, that you look at things like the Approaching Zion volume that has recently come out and volumes 6, 7, and 8 of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, especially chapters 27-30 in volume 6, his concluding chapters in An Approach to the Book of Mormon, where he talks about the ways of the intellectuals, the ways of the wicked, the nature of society, and the strategy for survival. I’d also recommend chapters 12 and 13 in Since Cumorah and chapters 19, 21, and 22 in The Prophetic Book of Mormon. That’s volume 8 in the Collected Works. I think that would help you to catch up a little bit with what he has been up to in the last forty years and put you in tune with a lot of the scriptures that he focuses in on, the phraseology, the mentality, and the gospel orientations. They are all in the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley in the library and the Bookstore, and volume 9 is Approaching Zion. We have about twenty on the drawing boards in one place or another. It’s mostly the latter chapters in each of those volumes where he finally gets to telling you what’s really eating at him—what is really driving and impelling what he is telling you.
119 You will have a final exam, and Brother Nibley told me to instruct you that this is significant. I know I’m a substitute, and I know what the Utah teachers association have told the press: If they go on strike—nothing that happens when the substitute is present will count for anything. That’s not your fortune. He has asked me to prepare one portion of your final exam which will cover what we will do here in the next five lectures. That’s what I understand is going on. [There were some questions from students about the course:] I understand that there will be one final exam at the end of the semester. I’ve never known Hugh Nibley to teach any other way. I think my final exam for Book of Mormon 121, if I remember the question right, was “Write a book review of the Book of Mormon.” That was the exam.
120 Matthew Chapters 5-7; 3 Nephi Chapters 11-18; Mosiah Chapters 1-6 I’d like to talk primarily about what I call the Sermon at the Temple and spend the next five lectures working on this material. We all know the Sermon on the Mount by that label—that’s Matthew 5, 7. The Sermon at the Temple is in 3 Nephi 11-18. It is a monumental text. It is one of those texts that acts as a “Grand Central Station,” a switchboard through which almost everything else in the Book of Mormon sooner or later will pass. There are a couple of other seminal texts like it: King Benjamin’s speech, in Mosiah 1-6, acts in a similar way as sort of the constitution of the covenant that Benjamin placed his people and the Mulekites under, bringing together the Nephite nation and creating the basis for what became a hundred and fifty years of the Nephite republic. These documents are important in the life of a civilization.
120 Similarly, the Sermon at the Temple replaced everything else that the Nephites had lived under. In 4 Nephi they tell us that they had from this point forward lived only according to the commandments which Jesus had given them while he was there. There was a radical change in life in Zarahemla and Bountiful and in other cities that the Nephites occupied as a result of this Sermon at the Temple. It’s a masterful sermon. It is coherent and specifically organized. It addresses themes that were of interest and would have been a pressing concern to the people in Bountiful and in the Nephite world in that day. Moreover, it becomes an anchor for everything else in the gospel.
120 Jesus only had a short time to spend with these people at the temple at Bountiful. He didn’t waste a word. What he says is of crucial importance. It’s the kind of thing that you and I can look to as an anchor in our lives to put our bearings straight, to see what is going on in the world, and to see what really matters most in our covenant relationship with our Father in Heaven. I believe, and I wish to submit for the next five lectures for our testing, the proposition that there is unsurpassed power and strength in the Sermon at the Temple—that it is coherent, insightful, and profound— notwithstanding the fact that this section of the Book of Mormon has probably been subject to more ridicule and criticism than any other part of the book. Why? Because it has the obvious inclusion of Matthew 5-7, which to a naive or simple-minded view appear to have simply been spliced in crudely into the middle of a text.
121 Today I’d like to do two main things. First is to establish a general religious setting for the Sermon at the Temple, and then to establish a more specific religious context for this great discourse—and it’s more than a discourse. We will begin in earnest our look at the material next time, and I would like you to read very carefully 3 Nephi 11-14.1 don’t care if you have read it recently; I want you to read it again. I would like you to memorize your choice of any segment of those chapters. Let me just say in general, I don’t know how much memorizing you do. Some of you are returned missionaries and you know the value of memorization, of studying and of having things in your mind so that the Spirit can bring to your thoughts those things that you need to be moved to remember. My experience is that if I don’t pack a lot of things into my mind and into my heart there is a vacuum there, and it’s pretty hard for the Spirit to move a vacuum. If you give the Spirit a few building blocks to push around at the right time, some very significant things can happen in your lives. We don’t use our minds for memorizing nearly as much as we ought to. Thinking of Brother Nibley over in Egypt, [I recall] that not long ago it was a requirement to enter the Moslem universities in Egypt that you have the entire Koran committed to memory. That can be done; the human mind is capable of such things. Yet we’re so lazy. We have computer disks and books at our disposal, and we feel little need to internalize these materials. You hear stories about the early brethren in the Church riding from Kirtland to Missouri. What do you think they did on horseback all the time? Much of it was spent reciting scripture. They had large portions of the Bible memorized, so I challenge you to do the same.
121 Let’s go then to the establishing of a general religious setting for the book of 3 Nephi. What is going on in this world? Well, you know a little bit about the Gadianton robbers and problems that were encountered there. First, the obvious thing is that these people were living in the imminent expectation of the coming of a Messiah. They had prophecies that went back to the days of Lehi, Nephi, Benjamin, and more recently Samuel the Lamanite, who had specifically talked about the coming of Christ. I don’t know exactly how specific their expectation was. It seems that they still were a bit in the dark about exactly what was going to happen. What Jesus would do when he would come, etc., were questions that they didn’t have completely answered, but they knew that he would come, that he would fulfill the law, that he would bring about a redemption, and there would be some major changes. Second, notwithstanding that, they all lived the law of Moses. How do we know that the Nephites lived the law of Moses? How far back did their living of the law of Moses extend?
122 2Nephi 5:10 There is 2 Nephi 25 where Nephi says, notwithstanding the fact that we know that salvation does not come by the law, we live the law of Moses. Were they strict in their living of the law of Moses? Well, look at some of the passages like 2 Nephi 5:10. When Nephi establishes the monarchy in the city of Nephi, he does all the things that kings basically do in getting a society going. He builds a temple—you have to have a temple. He establishes the law. He says, we will live the law. What law is it that he says they must live? It’s the law of Moses. He says, we will live it according to its statutes, judgments, ordinances, etc. The nomenclature here becomes important, as we will see in a minute. He says, “And we did observe to keep the judgments, and the statutes, and the commandments of the Lord in all things according to the law of Moses.”
124 3 Nephi 9:17-20; Psalms 51:q17 Let me then suggest that if you were a Nephite and you were standing around in Bountiful after the signs of Jesus’ death had been given, there would still be a bit of a question in your mind what you should do next. You know that the law of Moses is now in some way superseded. What do we do? Do we go about reconstructing the law ourselves? Do we look to the prophet to give us the law? Do we wait for Christ himself to come? This would have been a question that they wouldn’t have had an immediate answer to. They knew that something incredibly important had happened—the destructions made that perfectly obvious. They knew that something was no longer applicable. But the voice from heaven in 3 Nephi 9 hadn’t really clarified this issue very much either. For example, in 3 Nephi 9:17 the voice simply says, “In me is the law of Moses fulfilled.” All right, we know that, but what comes next? In 3 Nephi 9:19-20 the voice says, I no longer want sacrifice by the shedding of blood. The Nephites would have then known that that aspect of the law of Moses was done away. But what is to take its place? The phrase that is used is simply, what I now want is the sacrifice of a broken heart and a contrite spirit. That phrase, by the way, comes right out of Psalms 51:17, and as such was always thought in pious Judaism as the necessary precondition for making a valid sacrifice of any kind. Did that mean to the Nephites that they were simply to go on as things had been? In other words, the broken heart and contrite spirit was still a part of what they were to do, only they weren’t to offer sacrifice of blood.
124 3 Nephi 11:1; Joshua 24:15 That is, I think, among many factors a general religious setting for why the people might have gathered around the temple and have been discussing in 3 Nephi 11:1, with great amazement, the mighty changes that had taken place. I think those were not just physical changes, but the mighty changes in their society. Many people were dead, and there were mighty changes in their legal and religious system as well. They were amazed, and they stood and wondered. I think as they pondered on those questions, then the manifestation of the resurrected Christ was precipitated and occurred. I don’t think that just came “out of the blue.” Very few revelations come without someone asking a question. “Have you asked?” Nephi pushes his brothers Laman and Lemuel [to consider]. Joseph Smith received so many of the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants as a result of asking specific questions about the meaning of things. I imagine that as the Nephites stood around the temple at Bountiful they, too, were asking questions—what next? Why were they at the temple in Bountiful? Let’s now turn our attention to a more specific religious context for the Sermon at the Temple. One of the requirements for the law of Moses [was a gathering three times a year]. You will find this in Exodus 23, throughout Leviticus, and toward the end of Deuteronomy. Three times every year all men—and for the Feast of Tabernacles, all men, women, and children— [gathered together]. I suppose women and children came for a number of them. We don’t know exactly, but we do know for sure that all of the families had to be present for the celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, when they sat in tents or booths around the temple while the king delivered a speech—reminiscent, of course, of King Benjamin’s speech in Mosiah 1-6. Three times a year all Israel had to present itself before God at the temple. What for? Primarily for covenant renewal. When Joshua says (in Joshua 24), “Choose you this day whom ye will serve,” this isn’t the first time Israel has chosen to follow Jehovah. This is a covenant renewal, very much like you renew your covenants of baptism every Sunday when you partake of the sacrament. At the temple they read the statutes, they read the law, they were instructed by the priests, and they performed certain rituals and ordinances. They had a liturgy that they followed very specifically on each of these high, holy festival days, these feasts. The three that were convocation festivals were Passover, Pentecost, and the Year-rite Festivals, which brought together in the ancient world all of the elements of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; the Feast of Tabernacles; and Rosh ha-Shanah, the new year, which appears to have been a single ritual complex in the pre-exilic period. They have those three main festivals.
125 The logical conclusion is that if they are living the law of Moses and still strictly doing so, the observance of the festival requirements would not yet have been abrogated; therefore, it would have been logical for all of this Nephite city to have presented itself before the Lord at their temple—all the men, women, and children. Notice that they are there. That, in my mind, rules out the possibility that this is some kind of a city council pulled together to deal with the emergency at hand. You would only have the men, the elders, attending such an affair as that. But the men, women, and children are there from the first thing in the morning. [The leaders] don’t have to run off and get everybody. That’s the next day when Jesus says, go get the people in the neighboring villages, or wherever. The multitude is there; they are waiting, I think, to say, as they logically would have, all right we are now here for our festival, but what do we do? We know we’re not supposed to offer sacrifice, but what next?
125 It’s possible that they had other temples, but not likely. It seems in the Nephite history that there was always one main temple. The center of population moved. There was the temple at [the city of] Nephi, but when they left they went to Zarahemla and they built a new temple there. There were some people who were reactionary enough not to accept the new temple in Zarahemla. That, of course, was the Zeniff colony who said, we want to go back and at any cost redeem the land, because that has the real temple in it. Now, why are they up in Bountiful? Well, because in the face of the Gadianton war there was that seven-year period when they had to gather all of their property together in one place where they were a little closer to the narrow neck, which they could defend. They then moved their population center. I would think that this is the main temple of the Nephites.
126 Let’s carry on then with some specifics. One of the specifics of the religious context of the Sermon at the Temple may then well be that it was a part of some kind of religious observance, or one of the regular festivals that these people had been observing. Number two: A very important clue is given to us; that is that this sermon is given at the temple. Jesus could have picked a lot of places to appear, as one of you has suggested. He could have appeared at the town gate, out on a mountain, or in a synagogue. No, he chose to appear at the temple. This is a profound temple-related text. We will see in the next lecture that if we are sensitive to temple connections, the coherence and meaning of the, Sermon on the Mount all of a sudden snaps into sharp focus. By the way, some New Testament scholars, W. D. Davies in particular, have toyed with the idea that when the New Testament refers to the Sermon on the Mount, no normal mountain is meant. In ancient Israel there was one mount, and that, of course, was the Temple Mount. “Let us go up unto the mountain of the Lord” refers to the temple in Jerusalem. Thus, some New Testament scholars who have sought Jewish backgrounds for the Sermon on the Mount have toyed with the idea that what Jesus is delivering is a new temple-related sermon in the Sermon on the Mount. We will see, and the Book of Mormon corroborates this, that those scholars are onto far more than they suspect.
126,127 3 Nephi 18; 3 Nephi 11; Mosiah 5:7 We are now on point three, if you are numbering them. Point three is that this speech is clearly delivered in the context of covenant making. What actually happens as a result of what Jesus gives in the Sermon at the Temple? It all leads to 3 Nephi 18, where the people enter into a personal covenant and promise that they will keep the commandments “which he has given us this day.” Where are those commandments found? In the Sermon at the Temple. This is clearly a covenant-making text. Thus, for example, in 3 Nephi 11 we’ll see that Jesus invites these people to become the children of their Father in Heaven. That’s covenant language. How was it that the people of Benjamin became the children of God, “spiritually begotten this day.” In Mosiah 5 it was by entering into a covenant with God and with the king.
127 Point number four in terms of contextual interpretation is very clear: On multiple occasions in this text Jesus refers to his words as commandments. We will see that biblical scholars have struggled to try to understand what Jesus really meant in the Sermon on the Mount. Are these abstract, ethical principles that are impossible for any human being to really live in this life, or did he really mean for people to try to live these laws? Who did he want to live these laws? Is he talking to all human beings, or is he only talking to a certain group of converted, committed people? Is he talking about rules and principles that are to apply in this world in this day, here and now, or is he talking about rules that will only be effectuated in the Messianic Age in the Millennium or in the age to come? These are questions that the rest of the world stands boggled over.
127 For example, when Martin Luther ran into the Sermon on the Mount, he found that it was inconsistent with his own views about salvation by grace. After all, it demands that people do things, and indeed do more than just say, “Lord, Lord.” Luther couldn’t reconcile that with the rest of his theology and ended up calling the Sermon on the Mount “a masterpiece of the devil.” Why? Because it had twisted what he thought was the real message of Jesus around to something completely different. I just give you that to indicate how difficult it is for people who don’t have something like the Book of Mormon to even understand what kind of statements Jesus is making here. The Book of Mormon clearly tells us that he is giving commandments.
127 3 Nephi 15:1 There are some other contextualizing points [which we will cover] very quickly. We know that this is a part of the forty-day literature. We know that certain esoteric, secret, and important things happened to the disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem as a part of the forty-day ministry! It was here, we believe, that they received an endowment. Luke 24 talks about them being told to stay in Jerusalem until they are endowed with power from on high. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and others commented that Jesus himself gave the disciples during this period basically the Equivalent of our temple endowment. The purpose of the Sermon at the Temple is clearly stated in 3 Nephi 15:1, and that is that it is of eschatological importance. If a disciple wishes to be lifted up at the last day and withstand the final day of judgment, he must hear and do and remember these things that Jesus has instructed them this day. If they do they will survive and pass into the presence of God at the final day of judgment. That again, is an important clue about what Jesus is talking about.
127 With these ideas in mind, take a really good look back at the materials in 3 Nephi 11-14 in particular.