The Sermon on the Mount
I want to take up an interesting question. Is the Sermon on the Mount our earliest extant public speech made to a large audience?
Recall that it took a lot for it to happen. Plenty of earlier meet and greet for the speaker and ensuring his message and acts were well known in a land with little comms. Then selecting a convenient hill or mount cum amphitheatre with good sound characteristics. This is hard to do even today. All this is no mean trick. All this to generate a large audience.
Then you also make sure you have proven memory specialists in the audience to retain the entire speech for later transmittal and ultimate transcription. All this did not happen by accident.
Then he gave a speach that has informed Christianity ever since. Again this is no mean trick.
It was also obviously meant to be this important. Think about that. Did he know that his words would be read until now?
Understand if you read this speach, you have all you need. Understand also that his teaching then went on to completely reform what we describe as Paganism. You can only understand the importance of Christianity if you also understand exactly what came before with the antiquity of thousands of years of Paganism. He only had a modest precurser in the recent commercial promotion of Judism by Herod in the Roman world in order to fatten the treasury..
We live in a world now informed directly by Christianity (2,500,000,000 plus) or Islam a christian heresy (1,000,000,000 plus) and Communism also a christian heresy( 1,000,000,000 plus) and Kristna ( 1,000,000,000) a plausible progenitar. Understand that Islam and Communism does not exist without Christianity.
Plenty of folks actually think they live outside all this, except they adhere faithfully to the teaching embedded in the Sermon.
If you choose to read nothing of the Bible, and in fairness, the rest do demand access to a teacher to do properly, DO read the SERMON often. That is what is important while all else has context.
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