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The Sermon on the Mount, Part III: Matthew 5:38-6:18

The Sermon on the Mount, Part III: Matthew 5:38-6:18

Last updated on: October 29, 2026 at 9:03 pm by Gabriel Blanchard

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The Sermon on the Mount, Part III: Matthew 5:38-6:18 2026-10-29T21:03:37-04:00 Gabriel Blanchard

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The Sermon on the Mount, Part III (Matt. 5:38-6:18)

Two-page spread from The Sermon on the Mount
(1845) by Owen Jones, an illuminated manuscript
version of Matthew 5-7, showing the Our Father
and its immediate context.

The Lord, in one of the best-known parts of the Sermon on the Mount, provides midrash on two more mitzvot*. This brings the total number of commandments he has commented on to six—vv. 21, 27, 31, 33, 38, and 43—in three loosely-themed pairs: two on self-restraint (against anger and against lust), two on fidelity to commitments (against divorce and against oath-taking), and two on benevolence (against retaliation and, finally, against any limit on the “range” of our benevolence). Intriguingly, his rulings on the first, second, and fourth* mitzvot which he discusses “place a hedge around the law,” in the usual style of a Prysha*: so as not to draw near to murder, avoid even anger; so as not to draw near to adultery, avoid even lust; so as not to draw near to blasphemy, avoid even oaths. Meanwhile, those on the third, fifth, and sixth effectively overturn the* miztvot in question: there shall be no more divorce, no more retaliation, no more limitations upon good will.

Yeshua then passes to the subject of religious hypocrisy, which is the kind of vice that naturally shows itself most easily in public religious practice. He addresses three of the most prominent religious duties of contemporary Judaism, namely almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. The fact that he selects three is again striking: with the repetition of the final Beatitude in 5:11, we wound up with nine Beatitudes, followed by six antitheses between the text of the Torah and Yeshua’s halakhic applications. I’m not clear what this nine-six-three structure means—maybe it’s no more than a mnemonic device.

Matthew 5:38-6:18, RSV-CE

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’a But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil.b But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who begs from you,c and do not refuse him who would 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 sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect,d as your heavenly Father is perfect.d

A tzedekah or synagogue alms-box, ca. 1820,
now housed in the National Museum of
American Jewish History in Philadelphia, PA.

“Beware of practicing your pietye before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

“Thus, when you give alms,f sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocritesg do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners,h that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you pray, go into your roomi and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.j Pray then like this:

Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
—On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our dailyk bread;
And forgive us our debts,l
—As we also have forgiven our debtors;
And lead us not into temptation,
—But deliver us from evil.

For if you forgive men their trespasses,l your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.m

“And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you fast, anoint your headn and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

Matthew 5:38-6:18, my translation

Part of Blessed Are the Peacemakers (1917)
by George Bellows.

“You have heard that the message was: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.a I tell you not to stand against an evil [person]:b but whoever slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other to him; and to him who wants the law on you to take your tunic, remit your mantle also; and whoever impresses you [into service] for one mile, go two with him. To him who asks of you, give,c and to him who wants to borrow from you, do not turn away.

“You have heard that the message was: You will love your neighbor and you will hate your enemy. I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who hunt you; thus, you will become sons of your Father in the heavens, because his sun rises on evil [people] and good ones, and he rains on just [people] and unjust ones. For if you love those who love you, have you any repayment? Don’t even tax officials do the same thing? Or if you greet only your brothers, what excess do you do? Don’t even the nations do the same thing? So you will be finished,d as your heavenly Father is finished.d

“Be mindful not to do your justicee before people, to be seen by them; for if you are not, you have no repayment from your Father who is in the heavens. So whenever you give charity,f do not sound a trumpet before yourself, like performersg do in the synagogues and in the avenues, so that they may be glorified by people; ‘amin, I tell you, they are well out of it with their repayment. When you are giving charity, your left [hand] must not know what your right is doing, so your charity is in secret; and your Father, who sees in secret, will give back to you.

“And whenever you pray, do not be like performers; because they love to stand in synagogues and on the corners of broadwaysh to pray, so they may appear to people; ‘amin, I tell you, they are well out of it with their repayment. Whenever you pray, go into your storeroomi and, having closed the door on yourself, pray to your Father in secret; and your Father, who sees in secret, will give back to you. Praying, do not yammer on like the nations, for they deem that they will be listened to in their much-wordiness; so do not be like them, for your Father knows what needs you have before you ask him.j So you will pray like this:

The Our Father in Greek from the Church of
the Pater Noster (part of a Carmelite nunnery on
the Mount of Olives). Photo by Anton17, used via
a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source).

“Our Father in the heavens: your name, be it hallowed—your kingship, come—what you want, come that to be, as in heaven, on earth also; our bread on which we subsist,k give us today; and remit us our debts,l as we too have remitted our debtors; and do not bring us into trial, but draw us away from the evil [one].

“For if you remit people their trespasses,l your heavenly Father will also remit you; yet if you do not remit people, neither will your Father remit your trespasses.m

“Whenever you fast, do not become sullen-faced like performers, for they disfigure their faces so as to appear to people as fasters; ‘amin, I tell you, they are well out of it with their repayment. When you fast, perfume yourselfn and wash your face, so you do not appear to be fasting to people, but to your Father in the secret [place]; and your Father, who sees in the secret [place], will give back to you.”

Textual Notes

a. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth/Eye for eye and tooth for tooth | Ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντὶ ὀφθαλμοῦ καὶ ὀδόντα ἀντὶ ὀδόντος [ofthalmon anti ofthalmou kai odonta anti odontos]: Two things need to be said about this law, which does appear in the Torah. It tends to draw criticism, despite its surface text being, when you stop to think about it, about as obviously and exactly fair as a penalty system can be (when applied to deliberate injuries, anyway—there’s perhaps room to dispute when an injury is wholly or partly accidental). The first is, this law was not imposing revenge upon a culture as a requirement. It is generally agreed by commentators that the “eye for an eye” rule was a limit upon how much revenge one could take for an injury.

And second, from a very early stage if not from the very beginning,1 this law was understood by the judges of batym din2 as indicating not literally gouging out eyes or bashing in teeth, but paying punitive fines. This was a very common feature of the justice system in a world that lacked extensive prisons, and it wasn’t a regional quirk. The Anglo-Saxon word ᚹᛖᚱᚼᛁᛚᛞ [werġild], (apparently) compounded from ᚹᛖᚱ “man” and ᚼᛁᛚᛞ “payment, price,” was a standard legal term for the financial compensation paid to the surviving relatives of victims by those found guilty of murder or manslaughter3, 4; it remained current in English, as a word if not a practice, well into modernity. (J. R. R. Tolkien uses it in the chapter “The Council of Elrond,” with the usual modern spelling weregild, to describe Isildur’s claim upon the One Ring. The term is plainly an archaism even there, and fantasy even before Tolkien’s day tended to be “backwards-facing” and therefore more tolerant of obsolete language; but even with those allowances, he seems to have considered it the sort of word a Briton in the 1950s would, at worst, have no great difficulty looking up.)

b. Do not resist one who is evil/not to stand against an evil [person] | μὴ ἀντιστῆναι τῷ πονηρῷ [mē antistēnai tō ponērō]: Obviously the Lord does not mean this absolutely; he himself displayed limited passive resistance during his Passion, to the extent of not answering many questions from both religious and civic authorities. Moreover, the Church has since determined a far greater range of responses to evil than “limited passive resistance” are morally licit. This is partly tied up with the particular example chosen by Christ here: turning the other cheek in response to a slap in the face. Then as now, a blow of this kind was a severe insult; it is this—disgrace, rather than danger—which the Sermon on the Mount is instructing us to accept with equanimity. (We may also be called to accept danger, and to do so with the Lord’s example in mind; but there are other reasons than mere selfish pride which may instead move us to protect ourselves in those circumstances, especially if there are people depending on us for their well-being.)

c. Give to him who begs from you/To him who asks of you, give | τῷ αἰτοῦντί σε δός [tō aitounti se dos]: It’s kind of flabbergasting to observe that, in response to this command from the Lord, such a large fraction of practicing Christians in this country just say “No.” Not even make excuses for not keeping it, but flat-out go into denial about it being a command he gave at all, and reject with contempt and indignance the very idea of keeping it. This is not a good sign.

d. perfect … perfect/finished … finished | τέλειοι … τέλειός [teleioi … teleios]: The Greek adjective comes from the term τέλος [telos] “end,” both in the sense limit, finish, conclusion and in the sense goal, purpose, objective. Once upon a time, the English word “perfect” was a better match: its ultimate ancestor is the Latin verb perficere “to finish,” or more literally “to through-make.” Hence, “imperfect” was not originally a synonym for “flawed,” but merely meant “incomplete,” giving rise to e.g. the grammatical use of the word imperfect.

e. Beware of practicing your piety/Be mindful not to do your justice | Προσέχετε δὲ τὴν δικαιοσύνην ὑμῶν μὴ ποιεῖν [prosechete de tēn dikaiosünēn hümōn mē poiein]: My choice of the word “justice” here is really not very satisfactory; it’s motivated by my desire to translate as consistently as possible, even if the sense of certain words have to be stretched, and this one is stretching. I don’t have proof for this, but I have a hunch that δικαιοσύνη here, “justice” or “righteousness,” is translating the Hebrew term צְדָקָה [tz’dhåqåh] (or more probably, translating the Aramaic word that conventionally represented צְדָקָה in the first century). We have run across a similar usage to this one already in the Gospel of Matthew, back in chapter 1’s description of St. Joseph.

f. alms/charity | ἐλεημοσύνην [eleēmosünēn]: This word technically means “pity, mercy” (as in Kyrie eleison), but was also used as a term for alms, very like “charity” in English.

Mosaic depiction (c. 120) of tragic and comic
masks used in ancient drama from Hadrian’s
Villa, about 10 miles outside Rome.

g. the hypocrites/performers | οἱ ὑποκριταὶ [hoi hüpokritai]: A ὑποκριτής [hüpokritēs] (the singular of ὑποκριταὶ) was a stage actor. Although drama was not to my knowledge an art form ancient Jews went in for very much, it was still a thriving industry in early Roman Empire: Seneca the Younger (the Stoic philosopher and, uh, tutor to the Emperor Nero in the latter’s youth—whoops) was a celebrated playwright in his day. One of the many conventions of classical drama that we have since dispensed with is that the actors wore masks aligning with the character or characters they were playing. The parallel to religious hypocrisy that lies in playing a role rather than being the role is obvious, and is then doubly and trebly accented by the manifest artificiality of actors’ masks, especially given the masks’ complete fixity of expression—a trait which I have to assume a segment of the populace in antiquity must have loathed as nightmare fuel.

h. at the street corners/on the corners of broadways | ἐν ταῖς γωνίαις τῶν πλατειῶν [en tais gōniais tōn plateiōn]: The word γωνία meant “corner, angle,” as when we speak of polygons, many-sided and therefore many-cornered shapes. Broadways is also a literal translation of πλατεῖαι [plateiai], a derivative of πλατύς [platüs]; the name “Plato” comes from the same root, which is why it equates precisely with the name “Brad.”

i. room/storeroom | τὸ ταμεῖόν [to tameion]: This word typically meant a windowless chamber in the interior of a house, used as a pantry or for some similar purpose.

j. for your Father knows what you need before you ask him/for your Father knows what needs you have before you ask him | οἶδεν γὰρ ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὧν χρείαν ἔχετε πρὸ τοῦ ὑμᾶς αἰτῆσαι αὐτόν [to tameion]: This reminder has long been, and remains, a considerable help to being honest in prayer: clearly, we are not likely to catch the Almighty off-guard with unforeseen information! In its way, this points us toward one of the important purposes of prayer. Although idioms like Make your requests known to God appear often enough in the Bible, they clearly are idioms, and we are not telling God anything he does not already know (and indeed, know far more vividly than we do). A lot of people can’t see any point in prayer for this reason. If God knows what we need and is half as benevolent as Christians maintain he is, what on earth is the point? Doesn’t it make more sense to see prayer as a primitive habit borne of an anthropomorphic, indeed a childish, idea of what God is—like animal sacrifice, where the smell of cooking meat was supposed to soothe God’s anger over sin!

There are a few things to be said about this, one of them being that atoning for sin was not the only, or even the primary, purpose of sacrifice in the Mosaic Covenant. There were about seven or eight regular forms of sacrifice at the Temple, not counting occasional offerings for holidays and unusual life events; of these seven or eight, only two—the חַטָּאת [chaṭå’th] and the אָשָׁם [‘åshåm], literally “purification” and “guilt”—were about pardon for transgression. Other varieties, like the thanksgiving offering (referred to in Greek as an εὐχαριστία [eucharistia]), were as or more important.

3rd-c. fresco from the catacombs depicting
Christians at prayer (source).

As for what the purpose of prayer is, C. S. Lewis (as usual) hit the nail on the head:

We are always completely, and therefore equally, known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not. But though this knowledge never varies, the quality of our being known can. … Ordinarily, to be known by God is to be … in the category of things. We are like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulæ … But when we (a) become aware of the fact—the present fact, not the generalization—and (b) assent with all our will to be so known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled this sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active … we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view. … The Person in Him—He is more than a person—meets those who can welcome or at least face it. …

This talk of “meeting” is, no doubt, anthropomorphic … That is why it must be balanced by all manner of metaphysical and theological abstractions. But never, here or anywhere else, let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective.
—Letters to Malcolm IV

k. daily/on which we subsist | τὸν ἐπιούσιον [ton epiousion]: The term ἐπιούσιον is a famous problem. It’s what’s known as a hapax legomenon, something said only once—but usually this means “once in an author’s corpus,” not, to all appearances, “once in the surviving corpus of Koiné Greek as a language”! The word seems to be a form of an unattested adjective *ἐπιούσιος [epiousios]. This is itself apparently a compound made of the preposition ἐπί (meaning “on, upon” or “to, onto, against,” but in compounds often taking meanings like “over” or “after, in addition to”) plus a masculinized form of οὐσία [ousia], which usually means “essence, substance”—for οὐσία is derived in turn from one of the many forms of the verb εἰμί [eimi], “to be.” Thus, ἐπί + ούσιος5 appears to mean something like “upon which we exist.”

This may make “daily” sound like a good, concise alternative to clunkily explaining what the (probable) word ἐπιούσιος (theoretically) means, since the bread we live on is what we eat from day to day. However, there’s a problem: that equivalence of exist with live, while conventional in English, isn’t really part of Greek idiom.6 If anything, ἐπιούσιος would seem to imply something more directly metaphysical than “daily bread” in the literal sense of the phrase—something closer to the still-famous quote from the poet Epimenides of Crete, “In him we live and move and have our being.” Accordingly, this is sometimes interpreted as a prayer specifically to obtain the Eucharist. However, whether because the Eucharist had not been instituted yet or because he meant this clause to be of broader application, or for both reasons, other interpretations are possible, so I opted for a rendering that (I hope) gestures in the metaphysical direction, as it were, without nailing its trousers to the mast.7

l. debts … trespasses | τὰ ὀφειλήματα … τὰ παραπτώματα [ta ofeilēmata … ta paraptōmata]: Alternation between these two metaphorical synonyms for sin is quite common in contemporary Judaic literature, and remains so in Christian jargon to this day. No doubt this partly due to texts such as this one.

m. For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses/For if you remit people their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also remit you; yet if you do not remit people, neither will your Father remit your trespasses | ἐὰν γὰρ ἀφῆτε τοῖς ἀνθρώποις τὰ παραπτώματα αὐτῶν, ἀφήσει καὶ ὑμῖν ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος· ἐὰν δὲ μὴ ἀφῆτε τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, οὐδὲ ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ἀφήσει τὰ παραπτώματα ὑμῶν [ean gar afēte tois anthrōpois ta paraptōmata autōn, afēsei kai hümin ho Patēr hümōn ho ouranios: ean de mē afēte tois anthrōpois, oude ho Patēr hümōn afēsei ta paraptōmata hümōn]: This may be the single most terrifying verse in the New Testament (though it has stiff competition, from elsewhere within the Sermon on the Mount). It is worth regularly recollecting exactly what forgiveness is, in order to grasp why this is true. I’m not sure why, but we seem to be extremely prone to imagining that forgiveness is other things. Below is a list of several things which forgiveness is not. Not all of them are sins in their own right—some of them are; others are neutral; one or two are positive goods. The crucial point is simply that they are different things from forgiveness.

The “Ladder of Divine Ascent” ikon (12th c.)
preserved in the Monastery of St. Catherine
on Mount Sinai.

Pretending that an injury done to us didn’t hurt (when it did), or wasn’t wrong (when it was).
Saying no more out loud about an injury while privately stewing over it, so it poisons our treatment of the person we have “forgiven.”
Deciding we’d rather tough out the effects of an injury than deal with the drama of correcting it.
Deciding we are simply above being bothered by an injury, a là Nietzsche’s “master morality” thing.8
Choosing not to think about an injury, merely for our own peace of mind.
Getting revenge. (You might not think we could mistake this for forgiveness: I have a hunch that this is far too stupid a mistake to believe it’s never been made.)
Excusing or rationalizing an injury because the person who did it does lots of other good things.
Recognizing that the injury done to us was, in fairness, not truly the injurer’s fault, and we have no reasonable cause to resent them.

That last one can be particularly difficult to accept; but, unlike the next-to-last one, it’s the sort of case that excuse properly applies to. “To excuse” is, in the Latin, the preposition ex “out of” plus the noun causa “case, cause, charge, legal grounds.” The derived verb excūsāre thus literally means something like “to find cause for exemption (from a law or penalty),” or “to dismiss charges (implicitly, due to special circumstances).” That is a fine thing, but it belongs to the virtue of justice: if someone truly does have an excuse for something, what that means is that holding it against them is unjust, not fair play, an offense in its own right. Behavior that needs an excuse is obviously not ideal, but rejecting a reasonable excuse is unreasonable. This is a point on which the Judaic idea of צְדָקָה from note e above—a “righteousness” that includes not merely the stern duties of justice, but the warmth of humaneness, generosity, and pity—is a critical corrective to our strangely truncated idea of the Law.

Forgiveness, though. Forgiveness demands even more from us than being righteous and reasonable. Forgiveness is choosing to be reconciled to someone who has either done the inexcusable, or has at any rate injured us without excuse. Of course, a lot of wrongdoing is not black-and-white; often, an offender will have some excuse for what they have done, yet not enough to render them blameless. It is at precisely the point where excuse runs out that forgiveness picks up. That is its nature. This is why, although other words for it (like absolution, pardon, and remission) are also appropriate, it’s good to make a point of calling it “forgiveness” at least some of the time: because it is inherently a gift given, not something anyone could ever demand on any grounds at all.

And that is why it is so frightening to be informed that we shall be forgiven exactly as we forgive other people. That rule is so indisputably and exactly fair, it’s—even if you were sorry, how could you possibly appeal for mercy in the face of such a rule? You’d have to have a judge who was infinitely … oh right.

Lavender flowers (lavender was often an
ingredient in ancient perfumes, as it is today).

n. anoint your head/perfume yourself | ἄλειψαί σου τὴν κεφαλὴν [aleipsai sou tēn kefalēn]: This suggests a little more than just one’s daily grooming; perfumes would be used specifically for festive occasions. I take this to mean, not “spruce yourself up as fully as you would for a party,” but something more like “make a little extra effort so as to be completely inconspicuous,” which suits the rest of the text better.

Footnotes

1See this article from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia on the lēx tāliōnis (“law of retaliation”) for further details.
2Unless I’m sorely misinformed, batym din is the plural of beyt din (a Judaic religious court, a.k.a. a rabbinic court).
3Ancient Germanic societies, though we imagine them under intensely Wagnerian stage lighting, were not generally keen on the death penalty, at least not as imposed in an explicit way by public authority. Their harshest punishment was usually outlawry. This approached the death penalty, because anyone could injure or even kill an outlaw with no legal repercussions for doing so, and murder was among the few offenses that could get you outlawed, so there’d almost certainly be someone who wanted revenge on any outlaw. But even under this system, outlawry didn’t necessarily require anybody to harm you (there were regional variations about this), and it might be possible simply to escape to somewhere your status as an outlaw was unknown. Furthermore, a person could be outlawed as a fixed-term penalty; e.g., in ᚴᚱᚬᚾᛚᛆᚾᛏᛁᚴᛆ·ᛌᛆᚴᛆ [Grœnlendinga Saga] (“The Saga of the Greenlanders”), Erik the Red is noted to have been outlawed by his local thing (the Norse word for a parliamentary gathering; to this day, the Icelandic legislature is known as the Althing, and yes, that does just mean “the all-thing,” and I love how dumb that sounds in English)—anyway, Erik the Red is noted to have been outlawed, yet returns to Iceland only three years later, seemingly indicating that his outlawry was short-term.
4If you’re wondering, yes, the Anglo-Saxon wer “man” is also present in the compound werewolf. It’s the (now expired) English cognate of the Latin vir “man, male.” The term goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, and has further cognates: one is the Sanskrit वी॒र [vīra] “man, hero; husband,” which forms the latter part of the name taken by the founder of the Jain religion, Mahavira; another is the Icelandic word ver “husband”; a possible third is the Ancient Greek ἱέραξ [hierax], though if so, the meaning had changed to “hawk”!—on the assumption that the ancestral PIE term, *wiHros, was derived from the verb *weyh1– “to hunt,” so that the primitive meaning of the noun was “hunter.” If you weren’t wondering, well, too bad, I’ve told you already.
5It has to take the masculine form, i.e. the one ending with -ος in the nominative singular, an ending cognate with the Latin nominative singular masculine ending –us (which in Old Latin had once been –os). The reason the adjective must take the masculine is that Greek adjectives have to “agree” in gender with the nouns they modify (like in Spanish), and it so happens that the word for bread, ἄρτος [artos], is masculine.
6Greek idiom does sometimes conflate to be with to be present, but this is a little different.
7“WOOLLEY: You mean, nail his colors to the mast. APPLEBY: No, nail his trousers to the mast. Then he can’t climb down.” (From Yes, Minister, Season 2, Episode 7: ‘A Question of Loyalty,’ written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn.)
8There is a concealed joke here. See, this sort of forgetfulness of injuries really does exist; Nietzsche was even more or less correct in attributing it to the “heroic temperament” he so admired, i.e. the loud, unreflective, cheerfully violent type of person who fights for the fun of it and bears no grudge when he loses. The real archetype of this personality, which is a fairly uncommon one, is not a Greek hero—even Achilles is, frankly, much too prone to resentment to qualify—but Tulkas, one of the superhuman Powers in Tolkien’s Silmarillion. One can arguably trace the same lineaments in the historical person of Clovis I, and in the eponymous hero of the novel Peter Pan. The joke isn’t (just) that the degree of unreflectiveness required to maintain such a personality is in truth quite rare among adults, and therefore can hardly have characterized any entire civilization, as Nietzsche wrongly and groundlessly pretended it did in Ancient Greece: the joke is that nobody who was like that would give a damn about Nietzsche or his ideas in the first place.

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October 22, 2026

The Sermon on the Mount, Part II: Matthew 5:13-37

True or False: Paul commanded Timothy to rebuke older men harshly.

Select your answer to see how you score.

TRUE FALSE