The Sermon on the Mount:

The Sermon on the Mount, the teachings ascribed to Jesus in Matthew 5:3-7:27, virtually saturates Kierkegaard’s authorship. At times he bases entire discourses on portions of it, often he directly quotes verses from it, and most frequently he echoes its distinctive phrases. Such traces of the Sermon on the Mount can be found in every genre of his corpus, ranging from the journals, to the pseudonymous works, to the signed literature. Because of the magnitude of the Sermon on the Mount’s influence upon his work, it will not be possible to examine all the instances in which he alludes to it or borrows from it. Another article in this volume deals intensively with Kierkegaard’s employment of one key passage concerning the birds of the air and the lilies of the field: Matthew 6:25-33.1 This article focuses on two other portions of the Sermon on the Mount that were crucial for Kierkegaard: the Beatitudes contained in Matthew 5:3-11 and the exhortation to “enter through the narrow gate” found in Matthew 7:13-14.