Relations of Love in Texts Read by Early Christians

Abstract

Religious texts talk about love. The present paper comments on a few texts read by early Christians. There are several texts in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint), and in the New Testament, where the specific Jewish-Christian word agapē, translated “love”, occurs. The texts were originally used in contexts where relations between humans followed norms that are not immediately recognizable to us, and words describing relations refer to experiences, emotions and ideas partly foreign to late modern readers. In the Gospel of John love is envisaged in hierarchical relations. God is the supreme. John’s Jesus calls him the Father. Jesus has kept his Father’s commandments, and Jesus passes the commandment to love on to believers, those below him in the hierarchy. In the book of Deuteronomy Jewish and Christian readers could hear that the Lord had “set his heart in love” on their ancestors (Deut 10). The assertion is surrounded by several commandments, expressing what the Lord requires of those involved in the divine love relation. These formulations seem originally to have been couched in the political language of the time. How relevant can these texts be for late modern notions of divine love and human love?