Charles R. Lightner

Professor Kristin Scheible, then of Bard College, is a scholar of Theravadan Buddhism and wrote on the Golden Rule in that tradition for the Neusner-Chilton conference. She raises two points in her first few sentences that are both crucial to the Buddhist view of life and differentiate it from traditional western religious thinking. 1. The idea of reincarnation as a continuous and ...

Th. Emil Homerin, Professor of religion at the University of Rochester, wrote the paper on the Golden Rule in Islam for the Neusner-Chilton conference and volume. Professor Homerin opens his paper noting that “pre-Islamic Arabs regarded the survival of the tribe, not the individual, as most essential”. The influence of that tribal primacy is echoed in the discussion of the Islamic app...

The sub-title of this paper by Professor Olivier Du Roy is “from Origen to Martin Luther”. Origen’s teachings on the subject date to 230 CE and Martin Luther’s to his first public sermon in 1510. So Du Roy essentially picks up in time were Chilton ends and extends the subject through the Christian line from the period of the early Church Fathers to the Reformation. Du Roy holds doc...

Professor Chilton is a scholar of both early Christianity and Judaism. He has published widely, served on the faculties of a number of prestigious institutions, and was the co-convener of the conference that resulted in the Neusner-Chilton edited volume. Chilton’s contribution to that volume is a paper titled: “Jesus, the Golden Rule and Its Application”. He opens his paper with th...

Professor Mahnaz Moazami, then of Columbia University, contributed the paper on the Golden Rule in Zoroastrianism to the Neusner-Chilton volume. She opens her paper with a statement that the Golden Rule “is a well-entrenched concept in Zoroastrian ethics”. Zoroastrianism is the religion of the ancient Iranians, which flourished in the third through the seventh centuries CE. The Ave...

Jacob Neusner; one of the conveners of the 2008 conference on the Golden Rule and co-editor of the resulting volume of papers; wrote his paper on the Golden Rule in Classical Judaism. Neusner was a rabbi ordained by The Jewish Theological Seminary and held a doctorate in religion from Columbia University. He was a prolific author, editor and translator with nearly 1,000 titles in his ...

Professor Robert M. Berchman of Dowling College wrote on this subject for the Neusner-Chilton conference and volume of papers. He identifies two immediate issues facing the classicist: “There are no words in Greek or Latin that translate into English as reciprocity”, and “The general definition of the Golden Rule …treat others as we want, and would want, others ...

Professor Baruch Levine of New York University contributed a paper to the Neusner-Chilton volume titled “The Golden Rule in Ancient Israeli Scripture”. Levine’s approach is scholarly, as opposed to religious, and he defines “ancient” as including what is typically known as the Hebrew Bible. That is: he looks to the texts of the Tanakh and not to the later rabbinic literature. Levin...

The collection of papers edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton differs meaningfully from the books on the Golden Rule written by Jefferey Wattles and Harry Gensler. First, it is a collection of fourteen scholarly papers by authors with varied academic, religious and philosophical backgrounds. But the authors are academics and the papers are academic. I make that point to distingui...

Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, distinguished scholars and prolific authors, edited a volume of papers prepared for a conference on the Golden Rule in 2008. Fourteen papers were collected in a book titled “The Golden Rule: The Ethics of Reciprocity in World Religions”, which is impressive in both breadth and depth of analysis. I will address a number of issues raised in several of th...