Friendship traditions in the New Testament: An overview

Abstract

This article describes the main contours of Greco-Roman and Jewish friendship traditions, and considers some of the ways that these traditions were adopted and adapted in New Testament texts. The survey suggests that early Christian writers drew on friendship traditions as a way of articulating certain important values relating to the need to establish a distinctive social identity and forms of ethical practice. In emphasizing the relationship between identity, practice and relationship with God, some New Testament authors locate friendship in a broader covenantal framework in which God is the ultimate benefactor, often acting through mediatory figures to whom the communities can relate as ‘friends’.