Finding, Reconstructing, and Forging a Jewish Background to Jesus’s Double Love Command

In his justly praised work on the historical Jesus, John Meier argues that the “Double Love Command”—Love of God, Love of neighbor—constitutes a piece of Jesus’s authentic, original teaching. No teacher before had singled out these two commandments and prioritized them in precisely the way Jesus did.

Another advocate of the Jewish Jesus, David Flusser, argued that Jesus’s teaching echoed a wider Jewish universalism. Yet Flusser struggled to identify Jewish backgrounds to Jesus’s Double Love command. Flusser pointed to some arguable parallels in unquestionably Jewish texts (like Jubilees). Flusser’s stronger parallels come, however, from disputable evidence, such as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (the Christian nature of which is now widely acknowledged) and the Jewish Two Ways discourse (which Flusser himself, working with van de Sandt, reconstructed).

A related matter has come to the fore more recently, with Idan Dershowitz’s attempt to rehabilitate the Deuteronomy manuscript offered for sale in 1883 by Moses Wilhelm Shapira. Here too we find a curious juxtaposition of love of God with love of neighbor, a factor that has long been recognized as evidence that the text is either from the early Christian era (Allegro, Teicher) or a modern forgery (Guthe, Rabinowicz).

Progress on this matter will be made when three points are taken into consideration. First, we must separate the history of Jewish universalism writ large from the Double Love command per se; there is plenty of evidence for a pre-Christian Jewish universalism. Second, we must appreciate the fact that disputes about the originality of the Double Love command go back to ancient times. Third, we must recognize that the patterned efforts of forgery and reconstruction underscore the glaring gap that undergirds Meier’s argument: there is no indisputably ancient Jewish, pre-Christian articulation of the Double Love Command per se.