"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" is one of the most quoted sentences attributed to Jesus and one of the least examined. It arrives in Matthew 5:44 after a setup that most readers pass over: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'"
That quotation has a problem. The first half is Leviticus 19:18. The second half is not in the Hebrew Bible at all. No command to hate enemies appears anywhere in it, and several passages point the other way.
What follows from that observation shapes the whole passage. Matthew 5:38–48 is not a contrast between a merciful Jesus and a vengeful scripture. It is an intensification of a commandment already there, delivered to people living under occupation, in scenes—a slap, a lawsuit, a soldier's demand—that are specific enough to date.
In brief: Matthew 5:43–48 pairs Leviticus 19:18 with a phrase, "hate your enemy," that appears nowhere in the Hebrew Bible; the closest known parallel is in the Dead Sea Scrolls' Community Rule. The command that follows uses agapaō, love as action rather than feeling—Luke's parallel spells it out as doing good, blessing, and praying. Its stated ground is not the enemy's merit but God's indiscriminate provision of sun and rain. Christians have disagreed about its scope for nineteen centuries, and the disagreement is over whether it governs inward disposition, personal conduct, church practice, or the state.
The unit runs from Matthew 5:38 to 5:48, in the NRSVUE:
You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, and if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well, and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. >You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Luke has a parallel in a different sermon, on a plain rather than a mountain, and it is worth reading alongside because it makes the same command concrete. Luke 6:27–28: "Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you." Luke closes the section not with "be perfect" but with "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (6:36).
Leviticus 19:18 reads, in the JPS translation: "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against members of your people. Love your fellow as yourself: I am God." The verse before it forbids hatred: "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart."
Nothing in the Hebrew Bible commands hatred of enemies. Several passages command the opposite in concrete terms. Exodus 23:4–5 requires you to return your enemy's wandering ox and to help raise their fallen donkey. Proverbs 25:21: "If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink."
So where does the second half of Matthew 5:43 come from? Scholars generally point in two directions, and neither yields a biblical command.
The closest known written parallel is sectarian. The Community Rule from Qumran, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, instructs members to love the sons of light and hate the sons of darkness. That is a specific group's rule for a specific boundary, not a teaching of Judaism at large.
The other explanation is inferential: a popular extension of the love command's stated scope. Leviticus 19:18 says "members of your people." Someone drawing the obvious contrast could arrive at "and hate your enemy" without any text saying it—which is exactly the move Matthew's Jesus is refusing.
The six units in Matthew 5:21–48 are conventionally called "the antitheses," because their "you have heard… but I say to you" pattern looks like Jesus setting himself against Moses. That label has carried an enormous amount of anti-Jewish preaching, in which a legalistic Judaism is corrected by a compassionate Jesus.
The text resists that reading in its own terms. Matthew 5:17 has Jesus say he came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them, and the units that follow do not relax any commandment—they extend it. Yale Divinity School's study guide to the Sermon on the Mount describes the pattern as building a fence around the Torah: one will never murder if one does not become angry. Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament scholar who reads Matthew from within Judaism, argues in Sermon on the Mount: A Beginner's Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven that these are intensifications rather than antitheses, and that treating them as a rejection of Judaism misreads a first-century Jewish teacher addressing Jewish disciples.
The last unit is the one where this matters most, because it is the only one whose "you have heard" quotation is half invented. Reading 5:43 as "Judaism taught hatred of enemies" attributes to a whole tradition a sentence its scriptures do not contain.
Bible Odyssey, the public scholarship project of the Society of Biblical Literature, covers the structure and the disputed label in its overview of the Sermon on the Mount.
The Greek verb in 5:44 is agapaō. English "love" imports a set of expectations about warmth and affinity that the imperative cannot plausibly be demanding of someone toward their persecutor.
Luke's version removes the ambiguity by listing the actions: do good, bless, pray. Matthew names one directly—"pray for those who persecute you"—which is the smallest concrete thing the command can mean and the hardest to fake. You cannot pray for someone's good while working for their ruin.
This is why the passage does not require anyone to feel differently before obeying it. It asks for conduct and for regard: treating the enemy as someone whose good you can want. The feelings are not the instruction.
The two rhetorical questions in 5:46–47 make the same point from the other side. Loving those who love you and greeting your own circle are not wrong; they are simply not distinctive. The command asks for something that is visible precisely because it is not reciprocal.
Matthew 5:45 supplies the ground, and it is worth noticing what it is not. The reason to love enemies is not that they will change, not that they deserve it, and not that it will work.
The reason is that God "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." Enemy-love is presented as an imitation of a God whose provision does not sort recipients by merit. The clause before it—"so that you may be children of your Father in heaven"—makes the resemblance the point.
Then 5:48: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." The Greek teleios carries the sense of complete, whole, or brought to its end more readily than the sense of flawless that English "perfect" suggests. Luke's parallel at 6:36 says "be merciful," which is either a different tradition of the saying or an interpretation of it. Either way, the two Gospels do not close the section with the same word, and a reader who knows only Matthew will hear a demand for moral flawlessness that the passage may not be making.
Enemy-love does not begin at verse 43. It is the conclusion of a unit that starts at 5:38 with three concrete situations, all of them public, all of them familiar to people under Roman rule in first-century Judea.
"An eye for an eye." The formula comes from Exodus 21:23–25 and appears twice more in the Torah. In its original setting it functions as a limit—the penalty may not exceed the injury—rather than as an encouragement to retaliate. Rabbinic law developed it toward monetary compensation. Reading 5:38 as "the old law demanded vengeance" inverts the verse it quotes.
"Do not resist an evildoer." The Greek verb anthistēmi carries a range from "oppose" to "resist by force," and the rendering matters enormously. "Do not resist" produces one ethic; "do not retaliate in kind" or "do not oppose in court" produce others. The variation is real and is not settled by translation choice alone.
The right cheek. A blow to the right cheek from a right-handed assailant is a backhand—a gesture of contempt from a superior to an inferior rather than a fight between equals. On an influential modern reading associated with Walter Wink's Engaging the Powers, turning the left cheek denies the aggressor the insult and forces an encounter between equals. It is a compelling account and it is not the only one; readers should know it is a twentieth-century interpretation, not a datum of the text.
The shirt and coat. The scene is a lawsuit over clothing, which implies a debtor poor enough to be sued for garments. The outer cloak was protected under Exodus 22:26–27, so surrendering it exceeds what any court could take.
The mile. "Anyone forces you" translates angareuō, a loanword denoting requisition of labour or transport by an occupying authority. A soldier could compel a civilian to carry a load. The second mile is offered where the first was extracted.
Read together, these are not instructions for a person with options. They are responses available to someone with very few—refusing both retaliation and mere compliance, in public, in a way that leaves the other party holding something they did not expect.
Christians have never agreed on how far this passage reaches. The disagreement is not between people who take it seriously and people who do not; it is about which sphere it governs.
|
Reading |
Associated with |
What it does with 5:38–48 |
|---|---|---|
|
Early nonparticipation |
Tertullian, De Corona; Origen, Contra Celsum VIII |
Takes it as barring Christians from bloodshed and, for many pre-Constantinian writers, from military service |
|
Inward disposition |
Augustine, Letter 138; taken up by Thomas Aquinas |
Reads the precepts as governing the heart's readiness rather than every outward act, allowing force used without hatred |
|
Two kingdoms |
Martin Luther |
Binds the Christian as a person while leaving the duties of public office under a different rule |
|
Literal nonresistance |
The Schleitheim Confession (1527) and the Anabaptist traditions |
Takes it as binding on the church, including refusal of the sword and of magistracy |
|
Interim ethic |
Albert Schweitzer |
Reads it as an ethic for a short interval before an expected end, not a durable social programme |
|
Deferred kingdom |
Dispensational readings |
Assigns it primarily to a future kingdom rather than to present social arrangements |
|
Nonviolent resistance |
Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894); later Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. |
Reads it as active, public, and political—resistance without violence rather than withdrawal |
|
Costly discipleship |
Dietrich Bonhoeffer |
Takes it as a concrete demand on the disciple, in a life that also ended in conspiracy against a state |
|
Third way and transformation |
Walter Wink, Glen Stassen |
Reads the three scenes as creative initiatives that expose domination rather than submit to it |
Augustine's letter is the hinge for most of Western Christianity's subsequent position. Writing to Marcellinus in response to the charge that Christian teaching made loyal citizenship impossible, he argued that these precepts pertain to the inward disposition of the heart rather than to the outward act, so that patience and benevolence are held inwardly while the outward action does what most benefits those whose good one seeks. The letter is available in full at New Advent.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on pacifism sets out the resulting tension directly: the problem for Christian thinkers has been reconciling the pacific commandments of Jesus with the apparent necessity of force to defend the innocent, with pacifism and the just war tradition developing alongside each other rather than one displacing the other.
Nothing in that table is a neutral summary. Each row is a position with a constituency, and a reader who is told there is a single Christian view of enemy-love is being told something that has not been true since the fourth century.
It does not tell anyone to stay in danger. These verses have been used to tell people to remain in abusive homes, marriages, and workplaces. That application does not follow from the text. Its three scenes are a public insult, a lawsuit, and a soldier's requisition—single encounters in public between strangers or adversaries, not an ongoing pattern of violence inside a household. Christian pastoral guidance across traditions has increasingly said so explicitly.
It does not deny that enemies exist. The passage names persecutors as persecutors. It asks for a particular response to them, not a redescription of them as something else.
It does not require an emotion. Agapaō in this context is action and regard. Luke's list—do good, bless, pray—is what the command specifies.
It does not settle state policy on its own. Whether an instruction to disciples scales to armies, courts, and borders is precisely the question the table above is answering in nine different ways. Anyone who tells you the answer is obvious is choosing a row.
It is not a contrast with Judaism. The love command is Leviticus. The hate clause is not scripture. Matthew 5:17 disclaims abolition. Any reading built on Jewish vengefulness is built on a sentence the Hebrew Bible does not contain.
This is the general approach set out in the guide to comparing religions without flattening their differences, applied to a single passage with an unusually loaded reception history.
It means acting for an enemy's good rather than feeling warmly toward them. Matthew 5:44 names prayer for persecutors; Luke 6:27–28 adds doing good and blessing those who curse you. The stated reason is imitation of a God who "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good," not the enemy's merit or a likely outcome.
Not from the Hebrew Bible, which contains no such command. The closest known written parallel is in the Community Rule among the Dead Sea Scrolls, a sectarian text instructing members to hate the sons of darkness. It may also reflect a popular inference from Leviticus 19:18's "members of your people."
The passage's three scenes are a public backhand, a lawsuit over clothing, and a soldier's requisition—single public encounters, not an ongoing pattern of violence in a household. Reading it as a requirement to remain in an abusive situation extends it well past what the text addresses, and Christian pastoral guidance across traditions increasingly says so.
The Greek teleios leans toward complete, whole, or brought to its intended end rather than morally flawless. Luke's parallel closes the same section with "be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (6:36), which suggests the demand concerns wholeness of regard rather than an impossible standard of conduct.
Christians have answered differently for nineteen centuries. Early writers such as Tertullian and Origen read it as barring bloodshed; Augustine read the precepts as governing inward disposition, which opened the way to just war reasoning; Anabaptist traditions read it as literal nonresistance; Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King read it as active nonviolent resistance. The disagreement is over scope, not sincerity.
Matthew 5:17 has him say the opposite—that he came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them. The units in 5:21–48 extend commandments rather than cancel them, and "an eye for an eye" in its original setting at Exodus 21:23–25 limits retaliation rather than requiring it.
Matthew places the teaching on a mountain within a longer sermon and closes with "be perfect"; Luke places it on a plain, spells the command out as doing good, blessing, and praying, and closes with "be merciful." Luke also lacks the "you have heard that it was said" framing entirely.
The verse everyone knows is the fourth line of a five-part argument. Before "love your enemies" comes an eye for an eye that limited vengeance, a slap that was an insult rather than a fight, a lawsuit over a poor man's clothing, and a soldier's legal right to make someone carry his load. After it comes a reason that is not about enemies at all.
Take the sentence out of that setting and it becomes a slogan that can be pointed at almost anything—at a war, at a workplace, at a person being told to endure what they should not have to. Leave it in, and it stays what it appears to be: a demanding instruction to people who had very little power, grounded in a claim about how God treats those who have not earned it.
For the same territory in another scripture, the Quranic deep dive on forgiveness works through the vocabulary behind verses like "repel evil with what is better," and the Quran and Bible comparison sets the enemy-love command beside Jewish and Muslim sources without merging them. The Sermon also contains the passage behind what Christianity says about anxiety, one chapter later.
Open Plurilore with the Christianity source guide in view, read Matthew 5:38–48 alongside Luke 6:27–36, and see how much of the difference between them survives into the version you were taught.
Read Ecclesiastes on meaning, mortality, work, pleasure, injustice, and why achievement cannot secure a life that remains temporary and uncertain.
