Commandments

chapter 3 Commandments

I. 1. There are two Ways, one of Life and one of Death; but there is a great difference between the two Ways. 2. Now the Way of Life is this: First, Thou shalt love God who made thee; secondly, thy neighbor as thyself; and all things whatsoever thou wouldst not have done to thee, neither do thou to another. . . . II. 1. And the second commandment of the Teaching is: 2. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not corrupt boys; thou shalt not commit fornication. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not use witchcraft; thou shalt not practice sorcery. Thou shalt not procure abortion, nor shalt thou kill the new-born child. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods. 3. Thou shalt not forswear thyself (swear falsely). Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not speak evil; thou shalt not bear malice. 4. Thou shalt not be double-minded nor double-tongued; for duplicity of tongue is a snare of death. 5. Thy speech shall not be false, nor vain, but fulfilled by deed. 6. Thou shalt not be covetous, nor rapacious, nor a hypocrite, nor malignant, nor haughty. Thou shalt not take evil counsel against thy neighbor. 7. Thou shalt not hate any one, but some thou shalt rebuke and for some thou shalt pray, and some thou shalt love above thine own soul (or, life). The Didache1

The Ten Commandments in the Western Church

Like the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments entered Christianity as a text largely taught orally.2 Unlike the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus did not give his followers specific words. The Gospels contain no recitation of the ancient Exodus or

1 Philip Schaff, ed., The Oldest Church Manual Called The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (New York, 1885), 162–70. 2 Dominik Markl, ed., The Decalogue and its Cultural Influence (Sheffield, 2013).

Deuteronomic text.3 The Didache is perhaps our earliest evidence of the ways his followers understood Jesus to have both continued and offered a trans- formative gloss on what Moses received on Mount Sinai,4 here at Matthew 22:34–40:

When the Pharisees hear that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gath- ered together and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”5

For Augustine, whose thought shaped western Christian considerations of the Ten Commandments, this and its like in Mark 12:28–34 provided the organizing principle that divided the ten into the two tables, between amor dei and amor proximi, love of God and love of neighbor—one concerning humankind’s relationship to God, one concerning humankind’s relationship to one another.6

3 For an inventory of the Ten Commandments in the New Testament, see Craig A. Evans, “The Decalogue in the New Testament,” in The Decalogue through the Centuries: From Hebrew Scriptures to Benedict XVI, ed. Jeffrey P. Greenman and Timothy Larsen (Louisville, 2012), 29–46. For a comparison of the Hebrew texts as well as a consideration of variations in the tradition of the texts, see Innocent Himbaza, Le Décalogue et l’histoire du texte: Etudes des forms textuelles du Décalogue et leurs implications dans l’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament (Fribourg, 2004). 4 On the Didache and the Ten Commandments, see Guy Bourgeault, S.J., Décalogue et morale chrétienne: Enquête patristique sur l’utilisation et interpretation chrétiennes du décalogue de c. 60 à c. 220 (Paris, 1971), ch. I. On the Decalogue in early Christianity, see in addition, Philippe Delhaye, Le Décalogue et sa place dans la morale chrétienne (Liège, 1963), Ch. III; Robert M. Grant, “The Decalogue in Early Christianity,” Harvard Theological Review XL (1947): 1–17. Jörg Mielke argued nearly thirty years later that they are not foundational to law in medieval Europe, Der Dekalog in den Rechtstexten des abendländischen Mittelalters (Aalen, 1992). 5 The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version, ed. Michael D. Coogan, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 2001). The note at 22: 36: “Rabbi Hillel is said to have responded to this question in the Talmud, (b. Shabb. 31a), ‘What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary; go and learn it.’” See also Mark 12:28–31 and Luke 10:25–28. 6 On Augustine and the Ten Commandments, see Wilhelm Geerlings, “The Decalogue in Augustine’s Theology,” in The Decalogue in Jewish and Christian Tradition, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow and Yair Hoffman (New York, 2011), 106–17; Himbaza, Le Décalogue et l’histoire du