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AshwinV comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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Former christian here. Every once in a while, I catch myself about to--or worse, in the middle of--recounting an explanation like the one you just gave for which I have no evidence other than some pastor's word. On more than one of those occasions, the recalled explanation was just wrong. I haven't googled your explanation here, so it's possible that there's lots of evidence for it, but my prior for that is fairly low (it seems like a really specific piece of cultural information, and it pattern matches against "story that reinterprets well known biblical passage in a way that makes the inconvenient and obvious interpretation incorrect").
I'm incredibly pessimistic about the abilities of the average christian pastor at weighing the evidence for multiple competing historical hypotheses and coming up with the most correct answer (it's basically their job to be bad at this). I know that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but as a rule I no longer repeat things I "learned" in a church setting unless I've independently verified it.
(Oh, and: my apologies if you came by that story via a more rigorous process.)
I was interested enough to google, and found some relevant links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_the_other_cheek has (unlinked, presumably offline) references for an explanation like that.
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/9385 has more of the argument and says "resist not evil" is a biased or incorrect translation invented by King James' bible translators.
From the above page (by Walter Wink): "Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. His entire ministry is at odds with such a preposterous idea." - I had noticed that a lot of his behaviour described in the bible was inconsistent with this doctrine. He makes more sense without it.
This seems strange. I don't know Greek so I can't look at the closest to original text, but I can read some Latin. So I looked at the Vulgatus which is both a) Catholic and b) predating the KJV by many centuries. That uses the phrase here "Non resistere malo" means something like "don't resist the bad" but might be closer to "don't fight bad things".
Alright, wikipedia has better evidence than I expected, although I'm also not going to read the referenced book.
Wink's piece is coherent and well-put, but doesn't seem like great evidence-- I cannot tell if he mentally wrote his conclusion before or after making those arguments, and I can't tell which elements are actual features of ANE culture identified by historians and which are things that just sounded reasonable to him.