Where was the Sermon on the Mount given?

What Matthew says

Matthew gives no name, only a direction.

Seeing the multitudes, he went up onto the mountain. When he had sat down, his disciples came to him. He opened his mouth and taught them

The Greek has the article, to oros, “the mountain,” a word that can also mean the hill country in general. Jewish teachers sat to teach, so Jesus sits. Three chapters later he “came down from the mountain” (Matthew 8:1), and his next stop is Capernaum (Matthew 8:5). So Matthew pictures high ground near the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, a walk from the town Jesus made his base.

Why a mountain matters to Matthew

Mountains carry Matthew’s story. The devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world from “an exceedingly high mountain” (4:8). Jesus feeds four thousand on a mountain by the lake (15:29–38), is transfigured on another (17:1–2), speaks about the end of the age on the Mount of Olives (24:3) and sends the eleven out from a mountain in Galilee (28:16). Many scholars hear an echo of Moses, who received the law on Sinai: a new teacher gives the law its deepest reading from a mountain of his own. The setting is theology as much as geography.

Luke’s level place

Luke stages it differently. Jesus spends the night praying on the mountain and chooses the twelve at dawn (Luke 6:12–16). Then he comes down.

He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a crowd of his disciples and a great number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon

His sermon is shorter, thirty verses (Luke 6:20–49) against more than a hundred in Matthew 5–7, with four blessings and four woes. Hence the name Sermon on the Plain. Readers have joined the two since Augustine, who suggested that the level place was a flat shelf on the side of the same mountain (Harmony of the Gospels 2.19). Most modern scholars see two evangelists arranging a shared store of Jesus’s sayings, each with his own setting.

The Mount of Beatitudes

The hill shown to pilgrims today rises above the northwest shore, between Capernaum and Tabgha, in Israel. The tradition is old, though not original. In the 380s the pilgrim Egeria was shown a cave on the slope above Tabgha where, she was told, the Lord had spoken the Beatitudes; her words survive in a later collection made by Peter the Deacon. A small Byzantine church stood lower down the hill, closer to the water.

The church on the summit was finished in 1938 to a design by the Italian architect Antonio Barluzzi. It has eight sides, one for each beatitude in Matthew 5:3–10, and its porch looks out over the lake. In March 2000 Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass on the hillside for a crowd of young people.

No one can prove this is the spot. But the hill fits what Matthew describes: high ground above the lake, a short walk from Capernaum, with a slope where a crowd could sit and listen.