Ben F. Meyer 
Five Speeches that Changed the World [PDF ebook] 

Scratch the surface of Western culture and you will find signs of its Christian foundation. In laying these foundations, argues Ben F. Meyer, no ancient texts contributed more than the Gospel of Matthew, thanks to its primacy in the liturgy. The hallmark of his Gospel is its discourses: the Sermon on the Mount, the Missionary Discourse, the Parable Discourse, the Ecclesial Discourse, and the Eschatological Discourse–five speeches that changed the world.

About the author

Ben Meyer (1927-1995) studied with the Jesuits, his studies taking him to California, Stasbourg, Gottingen, and Rome, where he received his doctorate from the Universita Gregoriana in 1965. He taught briefly at Alma College and at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley before joining the faculty at Mc Master University in 1969, where he taught in the Department of Religious Studies until 1992. Meyer’s areas of specialization included the historical Jesus, the early expansion of the Christian movement, and the hermeneutics of Bernard Lonergan. He authored several important monographs, including ‘The Aims of Jesus’, ‘The Early Christians’, ‘Critical Realism and the New Testament’, ‘Christus Faber’, ‘Reality and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship’, and ‘Five Speeches that Changed the World’.