Note 6 — Chapter II · THE ENVIRONMENT

Even as regards the moral ideal itself, finally, it is important to realize that what passes for the high-water mark of Christian ethic is really pre-Christian doctrine. It is customary to name the so-called Sermon on the Mount as the fine flower of gospel teaching; and of that document the precept of love to enemies is felt to be the finest word. Without asking how often it has been obeyed, Christians are wont to regard it as marking the difference in moral ideal between their lore and that of Jew and pagan. In point of fact, the noblest parable for its illustration is furnished by the pagan tale of Lycurgus and the young aristocrat who destroyed his eye; and the precept in the gospel is demonstrably Jewish. Not only is it, like the rest of the “Sermon” in general, fully paralleled in Old Testament and other pre-Christian Hebrew literature6: the gospel sentences are immediately adapted from the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, of which the priority is here self-evident. The text there runs: “Bless them that curse you, and pray for your enemies, and fast for them that persecute you; for what thank (have ye) if ye love them that love you? Do not the foreigners [ta ethnē, “the gentiles”] do the same? But love ye them that hate you, and ye shall have no enemy.” In the gospel (Mt. v, 44–47; rev. text) we have: “Do not even the tax-gatherers the same?” and again: “Do not even the foreigners (ethnikoi) the same?” The old textus receptus, now curtailed, has actually been amplified in imitation of the Teaching; but the substitution of “tax-gatherers” (telonai) for “gentiles” tells of an earlier modification. In the Teaching, a primarily Jewish document, the gentiles, “the strangers,” are quite simply indicated as religiously alien in mass to the Jew: for the gentilizing Christists the moral had to be pointed as between the faithful and a class proscribed throughout the empire.