By retaining the final phrase of Matthew 5:20, “ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven,” Joseph anchored the new text to the old and then continued with the text from Matthew (v. 21). Thematically, the added text picks up and expands on “commandments” (Matt. 5:19). In 3 Nephi, the law and the commandments become different sets of religious requirements. The law refers to the Mosaic law, while the commandments apparently refer to Nephite teachings about the Atoning Messiah. Christ declares that he has given both sets to the Nephites, and both are binding upon them. In this case, however, he emphasizes the “commandments, which I have commanded you at this time,” not the continuation of the Mosaic law stressed in Matthew.
Because the New World lacks a group comparable to the rigid Pharisees, they did not hear Jesus’s shocking statement: “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus’s listeners in the Old World naturally assumed that they were morally inferior to the hyper-observant Pharisees. This status-reversing statement of Jesus, one of the most shocking in the New Testament, must have hit his Old World listeners with supreme rhetorical force. They would have considered such a statement impossible.