CHAPTERS 12-14

Jesus delivers to the people of Nephi a slightly emended version of the Sermon on the Mount. Biblical scholars generally agree that the sermon in Mt was composed by the author of that Gospel from various saying of Jesus that had circulated after his death, noting that many of the sayings appear in different contexts in Mk and Lk. Given that the book of Matthew is dated toward the end of the 1st c. CE, Christ’s sermon to the Nephites would have preceded the NT version by several decades. This could be taken as evidence that the sermon in 3 Ne originated with the Bible rather than with ancient Nephites; or that Jesus, knowing what Matthew would eventually write, taught a proto-version in Bountiful, signaling divine approval of Matthew’s later compilation; or that the translator inserted a familiar example of Christian teaching to the Nephite record to represent Jesus’s basic message. In any case, whereas in Mt the Sermon on the Mount is the first of five distinct sermons, suggesting that Jesus is like Moses delivering an updated Torah, in the BoM Jesus is speaking not as a new Moses, but as the God of Israel.