Luke 6:17

And he came down with them, and stood on a level place, and a great multitude of his disciples, and a great number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and be healed of their diseases; and they that were troubled with unclean spirits were healed. And all the multitude sought to touch him; for power came forth from him, and healed them all.

This is Luke's prelude to the Great Sermon generally identified with the Sermon on the Mount; but the conviction here is that there is no way, logically, to view this as a report of the same sermon Matthew recorded. This sermon followed immediately upon the naming of the Twelve; Matthew's was long before that time. This sermon was on the "plain," Matthew's on the mountain; here Jesus stood, there he sat. This sermon has thirty verses in the record; Matthew's has over a hundred. The beatitudes, as uttered here, are unlike those in Matthew. The woes given here are not in Matthew at all etc., etc.

Efforts of commentators to "harmonize" this account with the Sermon on the Mount usually discredit one or the other accounts, sometimes both of them. For example Gilmour suggested that "Luke took over the sermon much as it stood in `Q,' and Matthew expanded it."[19] For those who are not familiar with such things, "Q" is the name assigned by scholars to an imaginary "source" which they fancy was used by the synoptic writers; what they forget to mention when they are referring to this imaginary "source" is that it has no historical existence whatever, has never been seen by anyone, and that it has no existence at all, in fact.

See the comments at the close of the previous chapter under "a" for discussion of Jesus' method of preaching the same sermon with variations at various times and places. "There is no reason why a teacher like Jesus would not repeat lessons as the occasion demanded."[20] Furthermore, it is folly to suppose that any gospel author reported everything Jesus said on any occasion. The very idea that the extended sermon recorded here by Luke, and which Jesus delivered in the presence of so great a multitude, was a mere utterance of these thirty verses, and nothing else, cannot be logically supported. These verses may easily be read in less than three minutes! Therefore, if this record in Luke is a report of the same sermon recorded by Matthew, it must be allowed that Jesus said everything recorded in both; but if, on the other hand, these were two different sermons at different places and times, it is still true that Jesus said everything recorded by both authors. Efforts to "harmonize these sermons" as being one discourse are not satisfactory. The agreement here is with Ash who made this "The Sermon on the Plain,"[21] and with Boles, who said, "Luke gives a record of the sermon which was repeated at some later time than the record given by Matthew."[22] Arguments based upon the similarity of content in the two sermons and upon the order and placement of various episodes contained in both are irrelevant, because a similar order and content would also have appeared in any repetitions of the sermon, whenever and wherever preached.

[19] S. MacLean Gilmour, op. cit., p. 112.

[20] Herschel H. Hobbs, op. cit., p. 116.

[21] Anthony Lee Ash, op. cit., p. 116.

[22] H. Leo Boles, Commentary on Luke (Nashville: Gospel Advocate Company, 1940), p. 134.