thumb|right|Jesus taught turning the other cheek during the [[Sermon on the Mount.]]
"Turn the other cheek" is a phrase in Christian doctrine from the Sermon on the Mount that refers to responding to insult without retort. This passage is variously interpreted as accepting one's predicament, commanding nonresistance, or advocating Christian pacifism.
Scriptural references
The phrase originates from the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament. In the Gospel of Matthew chapter 5, an alternative for "an eye for an eye" is given by Jesus:
In the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke chapter 6, as part of his command to "love your enemies", Jesus says:
Parallels in the Pauline letters
The same non-retaliation ethic appears, in the same Greek construction (the verb ἀποδίδωμι, "repay," with the preposition ἀντί, "in place of"), in two letters of Paul the Apostle:
- — "See that no one repays (ἀποδίδωμι) another with (ἀντί) evil for evil, but always seek after that which is good."
- , — "Never pay back (ἀποδίδωμι) evil for (ἀντί) evil to anyone. … Never take your own revenge … 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' says the Lord. … Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." The Babylonian Talmud (Bava Kamma 83b) preserves evidence that "an eye for an eye" was already used in early Jewish discussion as a shorthand for these three texts.
John Nolland reaches the same conclusion by a different route: the opening prohibition is incomplete in itself, and its positive counterpart must be deduced from the four examples that follow, none of which urges passive toleration. Nolland accordingly proposes the translation "you are not to set [yourself] against one who does evil," with the understanding that the form of "setting against" in view is specifically "retaliation in kind."
Cultural context of the backhand slap
The specification of the right cheek is exegetically significant: for a right-handed assailant facing the victim, striking the right cheek requires the back of the hand, which in Jewish honour-culture was the more dishonouring of the two strikes.
The Greek verb ῥαπίζειν, used in Matthew 5:39, refers not to serious bodily harm but to a public insult; it appears in for a face-slap and in the Septuagint of and for blows of public humiliation.
W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr. note: "Matthew evidently mentions the right cheek in order to make plain that the reference is to the backhanded insult." Craig S. Keener adds that the response (freely turning the other cheek) "demonstrates that one does not value human honor," a refusal of the honour-shame logic that would otherwise demand legal redress for the insult. John Nolland describes the response as a deliberate alternative to counter-self-assertion: "the moral strength of the one who … signals his preference for suffering wrong over feeding the spiral of violence."
The scholar Walter Wink, in his book Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, interprets the passage as encouragement to subvert power structures of the time. For example, Wink interprets the next verse from the Sermon on the Mount as a way to make the oppressor break the law. The Roman postal law of Angaria allowed Roman authorities to demand that inhabitants of occupied territories carry messages and equipment for exactly one mile, but prohibited forcing them to go any further, else risk disciplinary action. In this situation, the nonviolent interpretation sees Jesus as criticizing an unjust and hated Roman law as well as clarifying the teaching to extend beyond Jewish law.
The "nonviolent resistance" reading has been engaged extensively in the scholarly literature. Nolland surveys it in his NIGTC commentary bibliography while himself concluding that the Matthean saying is "not necessarily an endorsement" of any single social-political strategy: the limited range of examples allows Jesus to "make the fundamental point in all sharpness without the need to grapple with the very real difficulty of defining boundaries of applicability."
See also
- Christian pacifism
- Live by the sword, die by the sword
- Matthew 5:29, Matthew 10
- Tolstoyan
- Violence begets violence
- Just war theory