“Agapé” in the Great Shema

Many years ago I started wondering why an ancient Greek word started being used again after not being used for hundreds of years. That word is “agapé.” 

In the 1920’s a Swedish pastor wrote a book about "agapé" in the New Testament. Slowly Christians started using it as people realized that the word “charity” was actually a translation of it. But I wondered how “charity” could be a translation of “agapé.” It turns out that “caritas” is the Latin translation.

Clergy started quoting from the Swedish book in their sermons. I heard the quotes from as widespread a list of preachers as Billy Graham and Rev. Martin Luther King. Then after World War II, agapé started being used in the names of churches and youth choirs. 

At first I couldn’t trace back its origin any farther than to find out it was very important to the first Christians. But what did they think it meant? I finally realized a mistake had been made in the 19th Century. For some strange reason, Bible translators started translating it as “love,” even though it was very clear that whatever the first Christians thought it meant, it didn’t mean love. 

So where did the first Christians get the word? Well, after years of searching, I found it in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures (made by 70 scholars in Egypt a century before Jesus). It was in the most famous passage in Deuteronomy — called the “Great Shema” (because ‘Shema’ is the ancient word, which is — as usual — weakly translated in English as ‘hear’ or ‘listen,’ even though that is far too calm a word for its full meaning). 

You see ‘Shema’ is a Call word: commanding a spiritual experience of the faith community. It is used like blowing the shofar horn: gathering the whole people into a worshipping experience. When those 70 scholars started translating the Great Shema they would have known that it was very important what word they chose to express the way of answering the call to bring each worshiper’s whole being (“all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength”) into a profound experience of divine Presence. 

But they probably realized that no commonly used Greek word carried that full meaning of spiritual power. And that spiritual-experience word they chose was ‘agapé.’ That then becomes the key to the meaning of agapé. Then when the 70 scholars translated Leviticus, they made the profound leap to have that spiritual experience be the basis for what forms the community of the faithful people — the call is extended to “your neighbor as yourself;” thus making the spiritual meaning of agapé the basis for forming a community in worship. Then in the Gospels we have Jesus make the final huge, radical, profound leap to call for that spiritual experience extended to enemies. 

And so the Greek version of the Gospels used ‘agapé.’ I saw that was the reason St. Paul used the word ‘agapé’ to point to the power of spiritual experience.