"A diligent and carefully argued exercise in the historico-critical method, Hans Dieter Betz' Essays present the Sermon on the Mount (SM) as a pre-Matthean composition coming from a Jewish-Christian community engaged in the polemical process of constructing an identity vis- -vis mainstream Jewish (Pharisaic) groups on the one hand and emerging Gentile Christianity on the other. It is this process that prompts the SM compiler(s) to rethink and rework...