The Crowds
The audience of the Sermon on the Mount
“Now seeing the crowds, he went up to the mountain and when he sat down, his disciples approached him” (Matthew 5:1).
In any Bible you may turn to, you will typically find a break between chapter 4 and 5 in the Gospel of Matthew and likely a heading that reads “The Sermon on the Mount” (the two English Bibles near me, an ESV and a New Jerusalem Bible, both have this title). In quite a few Bibles the next three chapters (5-7) will all be in red letters, indicating they are words of Jesus. The lack of Jesus’s teaching before this might tempt some to go directly here and to neglect what has come before as simply introduction.
To do so, though, would be to your detriment because what comes before (and after) these three chapters frames this section. For today, we will only consider the opening phrase.
Now seeing the crowds
This opening phrase to chapter five presupposes the previous verses:
And he [Jesus] went around the whole Galilee teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and every weakness among the people. And the report about him traveled to the whole of Syria and they bore to him to him all in bad shape with all sorts of diseases and those afflicted with torments and the demonized and the moonstruck and the paralyzed—and he healed them. And many crowds followed him from the Galilee and Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and across the Jordan (Matt 4:23-24).
When Matthew invoked “crowds” in 5:1, he wasn’t talking about fifty or a hundred people, but thousands. And these thousands were not just from the region of Galilee (the region to the west and northwest of the Sea of Galilee), but from the whole of Syria, which would refer at least to modern day Lebanon and over to Damascus, then to the south toward Egypt. Then Matthew lists the Decapolis—a region of Greek cities in the area of the Golan and northern Jordan today, Jerusalem and Judea to the south, and across the Jordon, which would be central to southern Jordan today. In other words, people from a radius of up to a hundred miles all around came to hear Jesus and to bring the sick for healing (Jerusalem was about 80 miles to the south).
And while Jesus began his focus among the Jews, the crowds came from far outside Jewish territory.
When news spread about a miracle worker, people came, lots of them.
Consider for a moment Jesus’s strategy. Authentic healing led to wide-flung reports that led to massive crowds that led to a massive audience for his call for changed thinking and the proclamation of the coming of God’s kingdom … that led finally to his teaching about kingdom thinking.
But back to the crowds. These were people from all walks of life and most of them were likely poor—only a small portion of people in that largely agrarian society had a comfortable life. These people were desperate for hope and the reports of Jesus sparked the hope of hope for many.
They did whatever they could to get to Jesus.
Another issue interests me with regards to the crowds. When Jesus spoke, what language did he use? As I went through college and seminary and PhD studies, the almost universal answer was Aramaic, the language of Syria that was used in the Persian period as the common language of their empire. The Gospels indicate on several occasions that Jesus used Aramaic, so the conventional thinking is that he always used it. I question the conventional wisdom (and others do now). Jesus certainly knew Hebrew from his Jewish upbringing, but he also would have known Greek.
Galilee was as much Greek influenced as Jewish, and Syria and the Decapolis were very Greek. Major trade routes right through Galilee made Greek as common as Aramaic. The town where Jesus took up residence, Capernaum, was right alongside a major international highway. Jesus also may have also known some Latin, since the Romans were present (Jesus conversed with Pilate in either Greek or Latin).
The constant for these crowds was Greek.
Virtually everyone would understand Greek whether or not they could speak it or read it. What would be the best language to preach the Sermon to “the crowds”? Greek. Jesus may have and probably did teach in both Aramaic and Hebrew for Jewish only audiences, but Greek when needed to communicate with more geographically diverse audiences (like with the Gerasene demoniac in the Decapolis).
These crowds (Matthew tends to use the plural ochloi for very large groups and the singular ochlos for a smaller groups) are prominent in Matthew, who shows Jesus as a true prophet of the people. Jesus drew thousands over and over in Galilee—the feedings of the 5000 and 4000 (actually much larger with women and children) are just two examples—and he continued to draw them on the way to Jerusalem.
And though so many were there for healing, Jesus always took the opportunity to teach. There is no way to know how many times he taught the content of the Sermon on the Mount, and we see a similar “Sermon on the Plain” in Luke 6.
Later, the crowd(s) became an impediment to those opponents of Jesus who wanted to kill him (“Though they desired to kill him, they feared the crowd, because they held him as a prophet” Matt 14:5). When Jesus got to Jerusalem, the leaders had to work in secret for fear of the crowd (Matt 21:26 and 46).
Yet even the crowd could morph into a mob.
Though crowds hailed Jesus as a coming king on entering Jerusalem at the beginning of what we call Passion Week, days later, the Jewish leaders had turned them into a unified force—a mob—calling for Jesus’s crucifixion.
When Jesus ascended that hill outside of Capernaum to initiate his teaching ministry with the Sermon on the Mount, he could only do what he came to do: tell the plain truth of God to the people. Whether they heard the message and changed their thinking was up to them.
Observations on the Greek text
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When he saw the crowds (Matt 5:1a)
Ἰδὼν δὲ τοὺς ὄχλους
For such small phrase, there is a surprising amount to say. The four-word phrase is composed of a nominative masculine singular aorist active participle ἰδὼν (from ὀράω), a conjunction δέ, and a direct object phrase τοὺς ὄχλους. Each bears a certain weight.
The conjunction δέ—always post-positive like γάρ—has a particular function. Though it is usually seen as a contrast, “but,” it actually serves a broader purpose. Δέ is a marker of development in an argument or narrative. Whereas καί shows some sort of continuity with what comes before, δέ develops what comes before.* Matthew uses δέ at this point to set a small break with what came directly before, even though the crowds are the same. He is saying, “I am moving this story along.” In this case, δέ is kind of like a paragraph marker.
The participle ἰδών introduces what discourse analysis terms a “temporal frame”: “when he saw.” Any participial clause prior to the verb serves as some sort of framing device by giving background for the action of the main verb to come.* The aorist tense of the participle indicates that the participle’s action occurs prior to the main verb; not “while seeing the crowd,” but “when he saw the crowd.”
Finally, the direct object of ἰδών is the accusative phrase τοὺς ὄχλους. I have already discussed “crowds” in the main entry. But what about the article τούς? A significant principle for interpreting Greek is taking every article seriously and particularly; what does this article mean here? In this case τούς is an anaphoric article. Anaphoric is simply a technical term indicating a previous mention of the noun it goes with.
That previous mention is easy to find; Matt 4:25 (the verse before 5:1) has ὄχλοι πολλοί “many crowds.” Notice that there is no article in front of ὄχλοι. Typically the first mention of a new character or group occurs without the article and subsequent references have the article. So technically we could translate our phrase as “When he saw the previously mentioned crowds.”
Items marked with * are insights drawn from Stephen Runge, Discourse Grammar of the New Testament.
An Invitation
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