Friendship and friends in the Greco-Roman world and in the New Testament. A discrete hermeneutical approach

The concepts of friendship and friend are not fixed in the writers of the ancient world, but mutate and evolve. In the Greco-Roman era, according to current common sense, a friend is one who will stand by and help his friend when in need. At the same time, important characteristics of friendship idealized by the ancient philosophers are the communal ownership of material goods, the equality and like-mindedness of friends, and the willingness to sacrifice for the “other self”. In the writers of the New Testament, the concepts of friendship and friend are presented in a different conception. Friendship and friend take on a new dimension here, especially with the preaching of the Apostles. All Christians are friends with one another, beyond local and cultural limitations, as they are bound together by a common faith in the resurrection of Christ. Friendship between man and God is possible, provided man lives according to the divine will. This is why Jesus Christ is the archetype of the true friend, who sacrifices his life to redeem man from the bondage of sin and give him eternal life. An intertextual approach to the texts of the Greco-Roman world and the New Testament writers allows us to understand the variety of uses of the concepts of friendship and friend within them, the evolution of their meaning and the content they acquire each time, depending on the author’s purpose. However, there is a difference; in the writers of the Greco-Roman world friendship is sought and won from the side of man; in the books of the New Testament friendship springs from God’s love for man, and it is God who takes the decisive step to reach out to and redeem man from sin and corruption.