"Love Your Enemies," the Golden Rule, And Ancient Reciprocity (Luke 6:27-35)‪.‬

The golden rule introduces a note of reciprocity into Luke 6:27-35 that seems dissonant with the instruction's inaugural command to "love your enemies." Rudolf Bultmann's judgment that the rule expresses "naive egoism," though tenacious, is not universal; many argue that the rule surmounts crude self-interest. (1) Nevertheless, interpreters of the passage have been markedly averse to viewing Jesus' command to love enemies in terms of reciprocity, feeling that, no matter how others-oriented the golden rule's formulation, its unmistakable recourse to the logic of reciprocity ethics renders it morally inferior to the altruistic, unilateral stance of "love your enemies." By the same token, its presence here is thought to blunt the edge of Jesus' authentic ethic. This view arises from defective understandings of reciprocity dynamics. Reciprocity is in fact basic to the ethic that Luke 6:27-35 seeks to inculcate. After assessing some leading attempts to account for what seems to be a clash of ethical perspectives, we will locate the passage's moral exhortation within practices of social exchange in traditional societies, aligning these with descriptions of Greco-Roman reciprocity conventions, with particular attention to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Seneca's De Beneficiis.