neighbor: any fellow human being one is called to love as oneself
In the New Testament this word almost always means a person: your neighbor, the fellow human being alongside you in life. It carries far more weight than the plain English word suggests. It became the anchor of one command, quoted again and again, love your neighbor as yourself, drawn from the book of Leviticus. That single line is treated as a summary of the whole law.
The deepest question the New Testament asks about this word is not what it means but how far it reaches. When a lawyer asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor, he was raising a question people genuinely argued about at the time: does neighbor mean a fellow member of my own people, or every human being? Jesus answered with the story of the Good Samaritan, and instead of drawing a line around who counts, he turned the question inside out. He asked which man had acted as a neighbor to the wounded stranger. Neighbor, in his telling, is not a category you inspect from the outside but a role you take up by showing mercy.
Paul and James lean on the same command but apply it in different directions. Sometimes the neighbor is anyone at all, as in Romans; sometimes the focus narrows to fellow believers building each other up. The word itself does not change; what shifts is the circle the writer has in view.
The warmth of the term is easy to miss. Modern readers can hear neighbor as merely the people who live nearby, but here it names the other person you are responsible to, wherever you meet them.
Whether the parable of the Good Samaritan widens the meaning of neighbor to include everyone, or instead exposes the attempt to define who counts as a neighbor as a moral evasion.
- majorityThe parable universalizes the love command: nearness and need, not group membership, make someone a neighbor.; J. A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV (Anchor Bible, 1985), 884; K. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 2nd ed. (2018), 357
- minorityThe parable does not widen the word but overturns boundary-thinking itself; its shock is that rescue comes from a despised Samaritan, so the hearer identifies with the victim in the ditch.; A.-J. Levine, Short Stories by Jesus (2014), 77-116
Disputed
How far the command to love your neighbor reaches: whether neighbor in Leviticus 19:18, and so on the lips of Jesus and the New Testament writers, meant a fellow member of one's own people or every human being.
- majorityThe neighbor of Leviticus 19:18 is the fellow Israelite; the command to love the resident foreigner in Leviticus 19:34 is a separate, deliberate extension rather than a redefinition.; J. J. Collins, in The Ways That Never Parted / Meier discussion (summary of the critical consensus); J. P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 4 (2009), 651; J. Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 (Anchor Bible), 1654-56
- minorityLeviticus 19:34 deliberately universalizes 19:18, so the neighbor is any human being.; R. E. Friedman, Love Your Neighbor: Only Israelites or Everyone?, Biblical Archaeology Review 40 (2014)