You are entering Matthew mid-book — and Matthew itself. The first Gospel arrives on this site at chapter 5: behind us (not yet on these pages) lie the genealogy, Bethlehem, the magi, Egypt, the baptism, and the wilderness temptation; immediately behind, 4:23-25's great crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, and beyond the Jordan. Seeing them, "he went up the mountain" and — the ancient teacher's posture — sat down (KJV "when he was set," an archaism worth a smile). Matthew's architecture is famous: the teaching gathered into five great discourses (chapters 5–7, 10, 13, 18, 24–25), and many readers since the church fathers have heard a deliberate echo — a new teaching delivered from a mountain, five blocks of instruction answering five books of Moses. Reported as a reading, not voted on; the chapter works either way. "And opening his mouth, he taught them" — the Semitic idiom for beginning solemn, deliberate speech; the scroll clears its throat.

🔴 A note on the red ink. Beginning with this chapter, this site prints the recorded words of Jesus in red — the convention promised on the library's roadmap "so it would be ready the day Matthew begins." John 1–2 and the risen Christ's words in Revelation 1–2 have been set in red to match. From verse 3 to the chapter's last word, everything on this page is one unbroken speech — and the Sermon runs on for two chapters more.

"Happy" — and why not "Blessed." Makarios is the Greek Bible's rendering of the Hebrew ashrei — the word Psalms opens with, the word this site met one page ago in Daniel 12:12, "Happy the one who waits." It declares a fortunate condition, an enviable state — not a blessing pronounced (Greek has a separate praise-word, eulogētos, for that). So this translation reads Happy, with the NWT ("Happy are…") and against the grand tradition — KJV, Geneva, and Douay all "Blessed"; TLB paraphrases the state itself ("Humble men are very fortunate…"). And no "are": the Greek writes none — Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοί, "Happy the poor," is a verbless exclamation in the ashrei mold, a pronouncement rather than a sentence, and every version on the shelf quietly supplies the verb. This translation waits for the Greek to write it: at v 11 it finally does (μακάριοί ἐστε, "Happy are you"), and the English follows in the same breath. Eight beatitudes (vv 3–10), framed by the same present-tense promise — "theirs is the kingdom" opens and closes the set, while everything between is future tense: the kingdom is the now that holds the not-yet. Then the camera turns: "Happy are you…" (vv 11–12).

The furniture of the promises. "The kingdom of the heavens" — the plural is real (tōn ouranōn), and it is Matthew's signature: alone among the evangelists he says "kingdom of the heavens" (a reverent Jewish sidestep of the divine name; Mark and Luke say "kingdom of God"). KJV flattens to "of heaven"; the NWT keeps the plural with us. "The meek shall inherit the earth" is Psalm 37:11 nearly verbatim — and tēn gēn is also simply "the land": the promise-currency of Genesis ("to give you this land, to inherit it," 15:7), widened to the world. The poor "in spirit" — ptōchoi means beggars, the destitute, not the modestly poor; Luke's parallel (6:20) has flatly "Happy the poor," and the two Gospels' forms are left to light each other rather than be harmonized. The set ends where the prophets ended: persecuted, lied about, rejoicing — "for so they persecuted the prophets before you."

Salt that goes foolish. The Greek of "loses its taste" is a small joke with teeth: mōranthē — literally "becomes foolish," the very root (mōros) of the insult "Fool!" that verse 22 will make actionable. Behind both may stand one Aramaic word (tafel, insipid/foolish): salt gone stupid. Can salt actually lose its savor? Dead Sea salt could — impure, mixed with gypsum, the sodium chloride leaching out until what remained was literally good for nothing but road grit, "trampled underfoot." The city on a mountain that cannot be hidden; the lamp under the modios (a grain-measuring basket, about nine liters — KJV "under a bushel," which gave English an idiom) — and on the lampstand instead: lychnia, the word Revelation's opening vision reaches for when it makes the congregations themselves the lampstands. "Let your light shine before men" — the chapter's only command aimed at being seen, and it routes the credit elsewhere: "that they may glorify your Father" — the Sermon's great word for God, arriving here first.

Not one iota, not one little hook. "Do not suppose that I came to tear down the Law or the Prophets" — katalysai, a demolition word, used of buildings — "but to fulfill." Then the most famous small-print clause in scripture: a Greek sentence pointing at Hebrew letters. The iōta stands for yod (י), the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet; the keraia ("little horn") is the serif — the tiny hook of ink that distinguishes one letter from its near-twin. KJV "one jot or one tittle" (jot IS iota, worn down by English mouths); NIV "the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen." "Until the heaven and the earth pass away" — Genesis 1:1's merism for everything, given an expiry clause. And verse 20 plants the chapter's quiet thread-word: unless your righteousness overflows (perisseusē) beyond the scribes and Pharisees — watch that word; it returns at verses 37 and 47, and the six cases that follow (anger, lust, divorce, oaths, retaliation, enemies) are all portraits of what overflow looks like.

The first "You have heard… but I say." Six times this chapter quotes the tradition and then goes under it, to the root. The quote is the sixth commandment; the root is anger — and this site's own shelf holds the proof text: the first murder began as anger in a face ("Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen?", Genesis 4:6). The escalation is a courtroom ladder: anger → "the judgment" (the local court); 'Raca' (Aramaic rēqa, "empty-head" — Matthew transliterated it and nearly every version since has left it standing: KJV "Raca") → "the council" (synedrion — the Sanhedrin word); 'Fool!' (mōre — the salt-word of v13) → "the Gehenna of fire."

Gehenna, kept as the name it is. Geenna is the Greek shape of gei-hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom below Jerusalem's walls — the child-sacrifice valley of the kings (Josiah defiled its burning-place, 2 Kings 23:10), which by Jesus' day had become the standing name for the fiery end of the wicked; its furniture — unquenched fire, the undying worm — comes from Isaiah 66:24, the same closing verse this site met beside Daniel 12:2's "abhorrence" one page ago. KJV translates it away as "hell fire"; the NWT keeps "Gehenna" — as does this translation: a real valley you can stand in, doing figurative work, and the reader deserves to see the geography. Also here, this page's first New Testament textual variant: the later manuscript mass reads "angry with his brother without a cause" (KJV, from the Byzantine text) — but the two earliest great codices (Vaticanus, and Sinaiticus's first hand) lack the word eikē. A one-word escape hatch, added early; the critical text this translation follows does not offer it. The section closes in small change: settle on the road, or pay "the last quadrans" — Rome's smallest coin (KJV "the uttermost farthing"; Douay "the last farthing"; NIV "the last penny").

The look with a purpose. The Greek of verse 28 is precise in a way sermons often are not: pros to epithymēsai — looking in order to desire, the cultivated look, the look as project — not the glance that happens to a person. The grammar aims at what the will does with the eyes, and the translation keeps it: "looks at a woman in order to desire her." Then the famous surgery: eye and hand, right eye and right hand (the favored ones), with skandalizei — "trips you up," from skandalon, the trigger-stick of a trap. Hyperbole with a straight face: no reader in the first century reached for a knife, and none was meant to; the point is that amputation is a bargain next to Gehenna.

The divorce sentence. "It was said: whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate" — Deuteronomy 24:1's get, the paper that protected the woman's right to remarry. The debate alive in Jesus' day ran between the school of Hillel ("for any cause," even a spoiled dinner) and the school of Shammai ("only for indecency") — and Matthew's exception, "apart from a matter of sexual immorality" (logou porneias), even echoes the shape of Deuteronomy's disputed phrase (ervat davar, "indecency of a matter"). Honest reporting: Mark 10:11 and Luke 16:18 carry this saying with no exception clause; Matthew alone has it, twice (here and 19:9). The versions differ only in how bluntly they name the exception (KJV "saving for the cause of fornication"; NIV "except for sexual immorality").

Closing the oath loopholes. The tradition said: don't swear falsely, and pay what you vow to the Lord. Around that rule had grown a casuistry of substitutes — swear "by heaven," "by the earth," "toward Jerusalem," "by my head," and the divine name stays technically unspent, the oath technically deniable. Jesus closes every exit with scripture's own furniture: heaven is "God's throne," the earth "the footstool of his feet" (Isaiah 66:1 — the third visit to Isaiah 66 in this site's last two chapters), and Jerusalem "the city of the great King" (Psalm 48:2) — note the preposition, swearing toward (eis) Jerusalem, the direction a vow faced. Even your head won't serve: you cannot make one hair white or black. So: "let your word be 'Yes, yes — no, no'" — and here the thread-word of verse 20 returns: what overflows beyond these (to perisson toutōn) is ek tou ponērou — "from the evil one," or "from evil": the Greek genitive is genuinely ambiguous, and the same ambiguity waits in the Lord's Prayer one chapter ahead (KJV "cometh of evil"; NIV "from the evil one"). James 5:12 quotes this saying nearly verbatim — the Sermon's earliest audible echo in another book.

An eye for an eye — what it was for. The quoted law (Exodus 21:24) was itself a limit: one eye for an eye, not a feud for an eye — a ceiling on vengeance, administered by courts, not a license for it. Jesus lowers the ceiling to the floor: "do not stand against the one who is evil" (antistēnai — a battle-line word). The three cases that follow are drawn with a reporter's eye for detail. The slap lands on the right cheek — from a right-handed striker, that is the back of the hand: an insult, a put-down, not a mugging; turning the other cheek offers the striker only an equal's blow. The lawsuit takes the tunic (chitōn, the shirt); handing over the cloak as well (himation) hands over the one garment Exodus 22:26-27 says even a creditor must return by sundown — the defendant walks out of court wearing the verdict. And "whoever presses you into service for one mile" — angareuō, a Persian word from the royal courier-post (Herodotus' angaroi), by Roman times the soldier's legal right to commandeer a civilian's back or beast for one mile — milion, a Latin loanword sitting in the Greek like a boot-print (KJV "whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile"). Matthew will use this rare verb once more: on the Cyrenian pressed into carrying a cross (27:32).

The quote with an addition. "You shall love your neighbor" is Leviticus 19:18. "And hate your enemy" is — nowhere. It is the only one of the six quotations that adds words the Law never says; Jesus is quoting the street version. And the street version had real addresses: the Qumran community's own rule commanded members to "love all the sons of light… and hate all the sons of darkness" (1QS 1:9-10) — a documented contemporary reading, canceled here at its root: "love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you." A second textual variant sits in verse 44: the KJV's beloved long form — "bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you… despitefully use you" — entered Matthew from Luke 6:27-28 by scribal harmonizing; the earliest witnesses carry the short, harder sentence, and the critical text this translation follows keeps it short.

The Father's weather, and the last word. The argument for enemy-love is meteorological: "he makes his sun rise on evil and good, and sends rain on just and unjust" — the sun that Genesis 1 hung "to shine on the earth," no address list attached. Even "the tax collectors" love their own (telōnai — remember the word: in chapter 9 this Gospel's own narrator will be found sitting in a tax booth); even "the Gentiles" greet their brothers — "what more are you doing?": the overflow-word of verses 20 and 37, third and last time. And the close: "You, then, shall be whole, as your heavenly Father is whole." Teleios — traditionally "perfect" (KJV "Be ye therefore perfect") — means complete, undivided, whole-grown: the word the Greek Bible uses where the Hebrew says tamim, the charge El Shaddai laid on Abram — "walk before me, and be blameless" (Genesis 17:1). Luke's parallel reads "be merciful, as your Father is merciful" (6:36) — the two versions light each other: the wholeness in question is love without a fence around it. And the grammar of the last sentence is the Decalogue's own: Ἔσεσθε, future indicative — "You shall be" — the Sermon closes its first chapter speaking the way the Law speaks.