Where was the Sermon on the Mount?

Question

Accepted Answer

Matthew does not name the mountain: “seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain”, and when he came down he “entered into Capernaum”. The traditional site is the Mount of Beatitudes, the hill above Tabgha on the north-west shore of the Sea of Galilee, a little west of Capernaum, where the Church of the Beatitudes was built in 1938; the map point stands at Capernaum, about 33 km north-east of Nazareth and 127 km north of Jerusalem in a straight line. No one can say which hill it was: any of the slopes above the lake fits the Gospel's words, and the tradition is a pilgrims' choice, not a memory. Luke tells the same sermon on level ground: Jesus “went out into a mountain to pray”, chose the twelve in the morning and “came down with them, and stood in the plain”, before a crowd “out of all Judaea and Jerusalem, and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon”. Readers have long reconciled the two by a flat shelf on the hillside, and the slopes above Tabgha have such terraces; many scholars hold rather that Matthew's mountain is a setting with meaning, a new Sinai where the new law is given, and that Luke's plain makes room for the crowds, so the question of a spot does not arise. Both Gospels set the sermon early in the Galilean ministry, when Jesus was based at Capernaum. The tradition at Tabgha is old. A note from Egeria's travels, preserved by Peter the Deacon, says that near the seven springs rises the mountain with the cave to which the Saviour climbed and spoke the Beatitudes; a small Byzantine chapel found in 1935, dated by its excavator Bagatti to the fourth century and by others to the sixth, stood on the slope just above the road at Tabgha, and the Franciscan church of 1938, by Antonio Barluzzi, eight-sided for the eight Beatitudes, stands higher up the hill with the lake spread below. In the Middle Ages pilgrims were shown instead the Horns of Hattin, the twin-peaked hill west of Tiberias, a tradition of the Crusader period, since left behind.