Christianity has no valid claim over the Golden Rule.
Ever read the
Pirke Avoth? "The Saying of the Fathers". You should. It was required reading in my Rabbinic Literature class in 1971. It includes the story of
Pharisee Rabbi Hillel's encounter with a gentile who demanded that he recite the whole of the Law while standing on one foot.
In the first season of
Star Trek (I'm talking TOS, back in 1966), one "Bar-David" wrote a screenplay,
Dagger of the Mind, which contained a reference to that encounter, though instead of "rabbi" it was "philosopher".
The way that ancient academies operated was that the students memorized all the writings they studied; Jewish jeshivas continued that tradition, such that their students memorized an entire encyclopedia, which was the Talmud. So the challenge was for the rabbi to recite the entire Torah (AKA "First Five Books of the Bible", ie, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) while standing on one foot. The leader of the Sadducees ran that idiot off, with a stick, just exactly as that idiot deserved. But Rabbi Hillel, leader of the Pharisees, responded with:
quote:
Do not to others that which you do not want to be done to yourself. That is the whole of the Law. The rest is just explanation. Now go do it!
The Golden Rule. And "the spirit of the law". All by a Pharisee rabbi. At 20
BCE. A full fifty years before that "Yeshua bar Yoseph" was supposed to have regugeritated it fifty years later.
Duh?
Edited by dwise1, : Link to Wikipedia article on "Dagger of the Mind"