Charles R. Lightner

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...

Dr. Harry J. Gensler is a Jesuit priest, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University and author of over a dozen books including “Ethics and the Golden Rule” published in 2013 (Routledge). Gensler Is one of the few true golden rule scholars, having written his doctoral dissertation on the rule in 1977; one of only two dissertations (in English) that have been written on the rule. ...

This is just a brief note on terminology. There are many who term the Golden Rule an ethic of reciprocity. In fact, one of the few books written in English that is devoted to Golden Rule study and analysis is subtitled “The Ethics of Reciprocity in World Religions” (edited by Neusner and Chilton, 2008). Both Jeffrey Wattles and Harry J. Gensler (whose book I’ll write more on soon) ...