Luke 10:27

Lk. here puts into the mouth of the lawyer an answer combining as co-ordinate the religious and the ethical, which in the later incident reported in Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34, is ascribed to Jesus. The unity of these interests is, as Holtz. (H. C.) remarks, the achievement and characteristic of Christianity, and one may legitimately doubt whether a man belonging to the clerical class in our Lord's time had attained such insight. Divorce of religion from morality was a cardinal vice of the righteousness of the time, and we see it exemplified in the following parable: priest and Levite religious but inhuman. In Lk.'s time the conception of religion and morality as one and inseparable had become a Christian commonplace, and he might have been unable to realise that there was a time when men thought otherwise, and so without any sense of incongruity made the lawyer answer as he does. But, on the other hand, it has to be borne in mind that even in our Lord's time there were some in the legal schools who emphasised the ethical, and Mk. makes the scribe (Luke 12:32-33) one of this type. ἀγαπήσεις, etc.: Deuteronomy 6:5 is here given, as in Mark 12:31, with a fourfold analysis of the inner man: heart, soul, strength, mind.