their encyclopedic context in historical Greek usage, especially in hellenized Second Temple Judaism. We will discover that these two important concepts do much to explain the Sermon. The overall thematic vision of the Sermon rests on these two pillars—the eschatological and virtue-ethics ideas of makarios (typically but unhelpfully translated “blessed”) and teleios (typically but unhelpfully translated “perfect”). Both of these are central in the Jewish Scriptures and in the Greco-Roman virtue tradition,