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Expects Yuge Games
Ross Douthat: Bart Ehrman, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Bart Ehrman: Thanks for having me.
Douthat: So it’s the week of Easter. It’s Holy Week for Christians. And we’re appropriately going to talk about Jesus — as a historical figure, as a religious figure, and how those two aspects fit together, which are questions that have been central to your own work, your scholarship and your celebrity, as an academic and popular writer.
But I want to start with your latest book, which focuses on Jesus as a moral revolutionary, I guess you would say — someone who helped bring a new mode of ethics into the world. And the title is “Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.”
So let’s start with the subtitle. What was so transformative about Jesus’ moral message?
Ehrman: A lot of my students assume that before Jesus came along, there wasn’t morality in the Greek and Roman worlds. My university is in the South, and so Southern students, most of them raised Christian, who just assumed that morality came with Christianity — that’s absolutely not right.
I am absolutely not arguing that Jesus introduced the idea of love or the idea of altruism into the world. What I am arguing is that we, today, almost all of us — whether we’re Christian, agnostic, atheists, whatever we are in the West — when there’s a disaster that happens, we feel like we ought to do something about it. There’s a hurricane, there’s wildfires, there’s an earthquake, and we feel like we ought to do something. We might send a check, for example, or we retire and we decide to volunteer in a soup kitchen. We’re helping people we don’t know and probably never will know, and who we may not like if we did get to know them.
So why do we help them? My argument in the book is that sense, that we should help people in need, even if we don’t know them, ultimately derives from the teachings of Jesus. In Greek and Roman moral philosophy at the time, this was not an issue at all — you were not supposed to be helping people just because they were in need. Jesus based it in large part on his Jewish background, but with some transformations of what he himself knew growing up. He is the one who made this part of our conscience.
Douthat: How much of the change is about strangers versus about, let’s say, enemies? Or is this an overlapping category? Because obviously, one of the starkest things that Jesus says, in terms of the moral radicalism you’re describing, is: “Love thy enemy.” And one of the most famous parables that relates to this is the parable of the good Samaritan.
What is the parable of the good Samaritan? Why don’t you describe it in your own words?
Ehrman: [Chuckles.] Well, it is a good illustration of the issue because the parable is that there’s a Jewish man who’s been going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the route, he gets attacked by a group of thugs who beat him up, steal what he has and leave him naked beside the road.
Later, a priest from the temple is going on the same road, sees him, and walks on the other side and bypasses him. He doesn’t do anything.
And then a Levite, who is one of the assistants in the temple, comes down, sees him, bypasses him on the other side.
But then a Samaritan comes along. The backdrop of the story is that the Samaritans were understood to be the enemies of the Jews. The Samaritan comes by and he sees this man, and he goes over and he helps him.
So that happens. And then Jesus asks the person he’s talking to: Which one of these was the neighbor? Well, it was the Samaritan.
The idea is that if you’re going to love your neighbor, it doesn’t just mean somebody who’s within your own religion or your own ethnicity or your own nation. It means, if somebody’s in need, that’s your neighbor. That’s what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.
So Jesus is getting the idea of love your neighbor and even love your stranger as yourself from his Jewish heritage. But within Israel, it’s “Love your fellow Israelite as yourself.” And Jesus is now universalizing it.
Part of the thesis of my book is that that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the West, including the invention of public hospitals — orphanages, old people’s homes, private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, governmental assistance to those who are poor — all of those are Christian innovations you can establish historically.
Bart Ehrman: Thanks for having me.
Douthat: So it’s the week of Easter. It’s Holy Week for Christians. And we’re appropriately going to talk about Jesus — as a historical figure, as a religious figure, and how those two aspects fit together, which are questions that have been central to your own work, your scholarship and your celebrity, as an academic and popular writer.
But I want to start with your latest book, which focuses on Jesus as a moral revolutionary, I guess you would say — someone who helped bring a new mode of ethics into the world. And the title is “Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.”
So let’s start with the subtitle. What was so transformative about Jesus’ moral message?
Ehrman: A lot of my students assume that before Jesus came along, there wasn’t morality in the Greek and Roman worlds. My university is in the South, and so Southern students, most of them raised Christian, who just assumed that morality came with Christianity — that’s absolutely not right.
I am absolutely not arguing that Jesus introduced the idea of love or the idea of altruism into the world. What I am arguing is that we, today, almost all of us — whether we’re Christian, agnostic, atheists, whatever we are in the West — when there’s a disaster that happens, we feel like we ought to do something about it. There’s a hurricane, there’s wildfires, there’s an earthquake, and we feel like we ought to do something. We might send a check, for example, or we retire and we decide to volunteer in a soup kitchen. We’re helping people we don’t know and probably never will know, and who we may not like if we did get to know them.
So why do we help them? My argument in the book is that sense, that we should help people in need, even if we don’t know them, ultimately derives from the teachings of Jesus. In Greek and Roman moral philosophy at the time, this was not an issue at all — you were not supposed to be helping people just because they were in need. Jesus based it in large part on his Jewish background, but with some transformations of what he himself knew growing up. He is the one who made this part of our conscience.
Douthat: How much of the change is about strangers versus about, let’s say, enemies? Or is this an overlapping category? Because obviously, one of the starkest things that Jesus says, in terms of the moral radicalism you’re describing, is: “Love thy enemy.” And one of the most famous parables that relates to this is the parable of the good Samaritan.
What is the parable of the good Samaritan? Why don’t you describe it in your own words?
Ehrman: [Chuckles.] Well, it is a good illustration of the issue because the parable is that there’s a Jewish man who’s been going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the route, he gets attacked by a group of thugs who beat him up, steal what he has and leave him naked beside the road.
Later, a priest from the temple is going on the same road, sees him, and walks on the other side and bypasses him. He doesn’t do anything.
And then a Levite, who is one of the assistants in the temple, comes down, sees him, bypasses him on the other side.
But then a Samaritan comes along. The backdrop of the story is that the Samaritans were understood to be the enemies of the Jews. The Samaritan comes by and he sees this man, and he goes over and he helps him.
So that happens. And then Jesus asks the person he’s talking to: Which one of these was the neighbor? Well, it was the Samaritan.
The idea is that if you’re going to love your neighbor, it doesn’t just mean somebody who’s within your own religion or your own ethnicity or your own nation. It means, if somebody’s in need, that’s your neighbor. That’s what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.
So Jesus is getting the idea of love your neighbor and even love your stranger as yourself from his Jewish heritage. But within Israel, it’s “Love your fellow Israelite as yourself.” And Jesus is now universalizing it.
Part of the thesis of my book is that that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the West, including the invention of public hospitals — orphanages, old people’s homes, private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, governmental assistance to those who are poor — all of those are Christian innovations you can establish historically.