«Amaos los unos a los otros»

The command to love one another is the moral center of Shmuel Ash’s reading of Jesus and the imagined drama he builds around Judas Iscariot. It links Jesus’s teaching of universal love, forgiveness, charity, and compassion to Judas’s hope that the crucifixion will reveal divine love to the world. Yet the command’s promised transformation never occurs: Jesus dies, and the crowd does not receive the revelation Judas expects.

A Command Shmuel Takes Seriously

Shmuel rejects the claim that Jesus’s words are persuasive merely because they can be repeated as a set of admirable teachings. In conversation, he argues that accounts of Jesus which do not confront the message of universal love, forgiveness, charity, and compassion miss what matters most. He says he is an atheist and does not believe Jesus was God or the Son of God, but loves Jesus and the words attributed to him. The distinction is essential to Shmuel’s position: reverence for the command does not depend on assent to Christian theology.

Shmuel’s response also sets his reading apart from historical Jewish polemics that he has been studying. The sources he considers include hostile portrayals of Jesus and Christian belief, as well as Jewish writers who treat Jesus more sympathetically or critically. What Shmuel finds inadequate is not simply disagreement with Christianity, but the failure to engage the ethical force of Jesus’s message. The command therefore becomes a test of interpretation: a reading must reckon with the love it asks people to practice, rather than stop at disputes over identity, miracles, or doctrine.

Judas’s Hope at the Crucifixion

In Shmuel’s reconstruction, Judas does not arrange the crucifixion out of contempt for Jesus. He believes that Jesus, having performed miracles, can descend from the cross and thereby make the world recognize his divinity. Judas becomes the organizer of the event, using his influence among Pharisees and priests to bring about Jesus’s execution. The familiar story of betrayal is thus turned inside out: the act that appears to condemn Judas is, in Shmuel’s account, undertaken in expectation of a revelation.

That expectation culminates in the command to love one another. As Jesus suffers on the cross, Judas remains convinced that the crucified God will rise, free himself, and address the astonished crowd with this teaching. The words are imagined as the public consequence of the miracle: divine power would authenticate a command meant to change human relations. In the scene’s stark irony, however, the hoped-for declaration never comes. Jesus dies in agony, and the teaching that Judas expects to be proclaimed remains a hope rather than a delivered message.

The Gap Between Message and Outcome

The command’s force in the novel lies partly in the distance between its universal reach and the violence surrounding it. Shmuel insists that love, forgiveness, charity, and compassion deserve serious engagement; his Judas imagines that one miraculous demonstration could make the whole world recognize their truth. But the crucifixion does not produce the transformation Judas anticipates. The narrative gives the command enormous moral scope while withholding the triumphant public scene that would seem to guarantee its success.

This gap also clarifies why Shmuel can love Jesus’s words without believing in Jesus’s divinity. The command matters as an ethical demand, not as proof that supernatural power has intervened. Judas, by contrast, stakes everything on the miracle that will vindicate Jesus and make the world accept him. Their positions meet in the importance of the teaching but diverge over what could make it effective: for Shmuel, its value survives disbelief; for Judas, its hoped-for public force depends on a revelation that never arrives.

Narrative and Interpretive Significance

The phrase gathers the novel’s religious and ethical arguments into a single imagined utterance. It is not presented as a historical confirmation of what Jesus said at the cross; it belongs to Shmuel’s reinterpretation of Judas and the crucifixion. In that retelling, Judas’s supposed betrayal becomes an attempt to stage the proof that would make love universally acknowledged. The reversal makes the command at once the purpose of his plan and the measure of its failure.

The result is a distinction between proclaiming love and bringing about a world governed by it. Judas can arrange the spectacle, but cannot control its outcome; Jesus’s death does not turn the crowd into witnesses to the message he hoped would follow. The command remains powerful precisely because the story does not claim that its utterance automatically repairs the world. Its moral demand persists beyond the failed miracle and beyond the competing historical arguments through which Shmuel approaches Jesus.