| abstract | - In Christianity, the Beatitudes (from Latin beatus, meaning "blessed" or "happy") are blessings from Jesus recorded in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke. The blessings in Luke refer to external situations while those in Matthew refer more to spiritual or moral qualities. This opening of the sermon was designed to shock the audience as a deliberate inversion of standard values, but this shock value has been lost today due to the commonness of the text. Four of the beatitudes are found in Luke's Sermon on the Plain. Luke's Sermon has four woes in addition to the four beatitudes, and Matthew uses a similar four woes elsewhere for use against the Pharisees. Biblical scholar and author Robert H. Gundry has argued that Matthew wanted to keep the eightfold structure and consequently had to create four additional sayings. Similar sayings are also recorded in a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls and in Jewish sources predating the Christian era. According to the two-source hypothesis, the Beatitudes originate with the lost saying gospel Q. Matthew and Luke each incorporated Q into their respective stories differently. Matthew consolidates Jesus' sayings into five important scenes, of which the Sermon on the Mount is one. Luke preserves the shorter and more shocking versions of the original, blessing those who are poor and hungry, while Matthew spiritualizes these blessings ("poor in spirit", "those who hunger and thirst for righteousness"). These verses are quoted early in the Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom as part of the sequence called the Third Antiphon, or the Third Typical Antiphon, it is common in the Russian and Monastic Use of the Liturgy, which continues to be the liturgy most often used in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
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