Um dos quatro termos gregos — os outros são philia, eros e storgué — que podem ser traduzidos para o português como “amor”. Não é um termo clássico, embora sua forma verbal apareça ocasionalmente em Plutarco   e em Xenofonte  . Na Septuaginta  , é usado catorze vezes em relação ao amor sexual (Jr 2,2 etc.) e duas como contraposição a ódio (Ecl 9,1). No Livro da Sabedoria, é utilizado para descrever o amor de Deus (3,9) e o amor à sabedoria (6,18). A carta de Aristeias (229) considera-o alicerce de força da piedade. Nos evangelhos, é o termo mais importante para expressar o amor. Esse amor é a base da relação entre o Pai e o Filho dentro da Trindade (Jo 17,26) e também constitui a atitude fundamental de Deus para com os homens, manifestada de maneira primordial no fato de o Filho encarnar-se para morrer na cruz e assim expiar os pecados do gênero humano (Jo 3,16). Como sinal de gratidão, o dever do ser humano é manifestar esse amor-ágape a Deus (Mt   22,37) e a seu próximo, incluindo os inimigos. Esse amor — novo mandamento deixado por Jesus — constitui o maior distintivo da conduta cristã (Jo 13,34; 15,12) e deve ser semelhante ao amor de Deus (Mt 5,43-48). W. Barclay, Palabras...; D. Flusser  , o. c.; J. Klausner, Jesús de Nazareth, Buenos Aires 1971; E. Schweizer - A. Díaz Macho, o. c. (César Vidal Manzanares)

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Before opening up this topic by a review of some relevant areas of moral philosophy, I want to touch briefly on a very different approach to the matters I am discussing. I have in mind the injunction in the New Testament to love our neighbor as we do ourselves. In this passage the word for “love” — in the Authorized Version it is translated as “charity” from the Latin caritas — is the Greek word agape, not eros. [1] I mention this because there is a question about what word would best convey the character of the mode of feeling toward other people that is at issue here. I have proposed “caring-about” as a rendering of Heidegger  ’s Fürsorge; it has definite advantages over “love,” with its connotations of romantic and sexual passion. Even so, it is a bit on the anemic side; and the Greek agape has much richer   nuances of meaning, some of which seem to me to be applicable to this situation. Unlike eros, which suggests a passionate and possessive attachment, agape is a love divorced from desire and undeterred by the great, often unattractive commonalities of our human nature. [2] It acknowledges our shared condition of life and our prof ound similarities across all the lines that normally divide us; and it is able to respond to this often quite grim perception of our lives with a measure of hope. It is the kind of perception that has what I can only call our “creatureliness” as its object. This word, of course, suggests the drawback of agape as a word for this feeling - the fact, namely, that it is closely tied to the notion of a creator and his presumptive feelings toward his “creatures.” Here I can only appeal to the queer sort of Feuerbachian logic by which we reappropriate a notion of which we must, after all, already have had some understanding before attributing it to the creator we postulate. In any case, I want to be able to equate the “caring-for” I have in mind with the kind of perception and feeling for one another that the word agape expresses. I do so because it seems to me to be much more appropriate to a moral condition as equivocal as our own than are the bursts of life-affirming enthusiasm that have been characteristic of some of the more familiar traditions of melioristic thought. [OLAFSON, Frederick A.. Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 83-84]