Catholic Peace Traditions - New Testament

New Testament

To Christians, the New Testament is first and foremost the “gospel of peace.” In the New Testament God is described as the God of peace and love itself. Christ is the peaceful king, the way to peace, and peace itself. Jesus’ message is the summation of peace found in the Hebrew shalom. Yet here all the meanings of peace inherited from the Jewish tradition and translated into the Greek of the New Testament are deepened and expanded.

According to the New Testament, Christ brings reconciliation of humanity to God and of humans to one another, healing, nourishment, and renewal to the world, liberation to the poor and oppressed. He is described as fulfilling the promise of the messianic kingdom of the Christian religion and the peace that the prophets preached, and bringing wholeness and fulfillment, the deepest meanings of peace. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5:1-16) and his Sermon on the Plain (Lk. 6:20-45) combine with his call to "love your enemies" (Mt. 5:38-48) to encapsulate his teachings on peacemaking.

Eirene is the word that the New Testament generally uses for peace, one of the twenty words used by the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible used in the largely Greek-speaking Jewish communities throughout the Greco-Roman world. It is chiefly through the Septuagint’s use of Greek that the Greek word eirene became infused with all the religious imagery and richness of the word shalom in the Hebrew Bible that had evolved over the history of the Jewish people. Eirene therefore contains not only the earliest meanings of shalom, such as the opposite of war, security, order, harmony, and a greeting or farewell, but it also takes on all the meanings of healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and wholeness that Jesus taught was the new meaning of the kingdom. Subsequently, the use of the Greek Bible as the basis for St. Jerome’s Vulgate translation into Latin then brought all the new meanings of eirene to the Latin word pax and transformed it from a term for an imposed order of the sword, the Pax Romana, into the chief image of peace for Western Christianity.