To try to distinguish between loving God and loving others, from Jesus’s perspective, was to miss the point entirely. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.īut then he added that a second commandment was also crucial: to love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:17-18). When Jesus was once asked what the most important commandment for Jews to follow was, he responded by quoting the Hebrew Shema prayer.ĭeuteronomy 6:4-5 (ESV) Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. But Jesus spoke a language called Aramaic, which uses a different word than the Hebrew for love, and the early Christians wrote the gospel accounts in Greek, which uses the word “agape” ( ἀγάπη ) for “love.” Rather than using a dictionary definition of all these Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words, Jesus’s earliest followers had their very conception of love changed by what they’d seen him say and do. Jesus’s quote from Mark is an adaptation from the Leviticus 19:17-18, originally written in Hebrew. Understanding the biblical theme of love lies in the original languages of the Bible – Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Mark 12:31 Love your neighbor as yourself. This is actually a restatement of something else Jesus said in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus said “Do to others what you would want them to do to you” in Luke 6:31). What does it really mean to love someone? Ancient Greek gives us some insight.
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