Should we love or hate our brother?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The collision is vivid: Luke 14:26 — "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" — set against Leviticus 19:17-18 ("Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart... thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself") and 1 John 3:15 ("Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer") and 4:20-21. Taken at the surface, the same canon both forbids hatred of one's brother as murder and requires hatred of one's family as the price of discipleship.

The standard harmonization is the Semitic-idiom defense, deployed by D. A. Carson, Darrell Bock's BECNT *Luke*, and most Lukan commentators, and it has real linguistic warrant. The Greek miseō here renders an underlying Semitic sanēʾ that frequently functions comparatively — "to love less," "to prefer over." Genesis 29:30-31 is the paradigm: Jacob "loved also Rachel more than Leah," and the very next verse says Leah was "hated" (senûʾah) — clearly meaning less-loved, not despised, since she is simultaneously the bearer of his firstborn. Deuteronomy 21:15-17 uses the identical "loved/hated" pairing for two wives in a purely comparative legal sense. Decisively, Matthew 10:37 preserves what is almost certainly the same Q logion in the softer comparative form: "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." Joseph Fitzmyer's Anchor Bible *Luke* and François Bovon's Hermeneia *Luke* both acknowledge the comparative function of miseō in 14:26, and the Matthean parallel suggests that Matthew (or his tradition) already heard the absoluteness of "hate" as needing rephrasing. At the lexical level, then, the contradiction softens substantially: Luke 14:26 demands that allegiance to Jesus outrank every kinship tie, not literal emotional hatred.

What the idiom defense cannot fully neutralize is the rhetorical and theological force of Jesus' kinship teaching across the tradition. Even granting "love less," the demand is for a radical subordination — and elsewhere outright rupture — of family bonds that the Levitical and Johannine love-ethic frames as incompatible with covenant love. John Meier's *A Marginal Jew* (vol. 1) argues that the historical Jesus genuinely demanded a break with conventional kinship structures: "let the dead bury their dead" (Matthew 8:21-22), the redefinition of family in Mark 3:31-35 where Jesus sets aside his mother and brothers ("Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother"), and the explicit prediction of family-against-family division in Matthew 10:34-36 ("I came not to send peace, but a sword"). Dale Allison's *Constructing Jesus* corroborates the disruptive social profile of the early Jesus movement. So the entry is reaching for something real: the movement's ethic genuinely strained against the household-centered piety of its world. And 1 John 3:15 — equating hatred of a brother with murder, denying such a one eternal life — leaves no semantic slack; Raymond Brown's Anchor Bible *Epistles of John* reads it as a flat absolute. There is no smooth path from "hate father and mother" to "love thy neighbour as thyself" without interpretive labor on the verb.

Where the critical reading lands: moderate contradiction. The Semitic-comparative reading, secured by Genesis 29, Deuteronomy 21, and the Matthew 10:37 parallel, resolves the surface tension — apologists are right that miseō is hyperbolic and comparative. But the underlying ethic of kinship-rupture in the Jesus tradition still pulls against the Levitical-Johannine love command once one stops softening the Greek; critics are right about that remainder.