The Sunday Interview: Did Jesus Invent Western Morality with Dr. Bart Ehrman
Dr. Bart Ehrman argues that Jesus revolutionized Western morality by universalizing altruism, shifting focus from tribal loyalty to caring for strangers through apocalyptic urgency. While acknowledging later shifts under Paul and coercive elements in Constantine's era, Ehrman asserts Christianity's dominance by the fifth century embedded this ethic into institutions like hospitals and orphanages. The discussion concludes that despite Christianity's dark history, its legacy of aiding outsiders persists today as a cultural norm inherited even by modern atheists. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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You all ever had a chance to meet your heroes?
Sometimes it goes terribly, as they say.
But for me, it was a great conversation because we welcome to the show Dr. Bart Ehrman, who is a New Testament scholar, but somebody that many of you probably know as a writer, a blogger, somebody who is a podcaster, one of the most influential public scholars in religion over the last two decades.
He's written New York Times bestsellers, including Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God.
And the triumph of Christianity.
He's also just created popular audio and video courses and so many things.
He's reached millions and millions of people.
We are here to talk about his new book, Love Thy Stranger, which to me is actually a really, really big book.
We go through the argument of the book, but then we kind of discuss the philosophical aspects about it.
And there's one question I want you to keep in mind before we go right to the interview, and that's this Did Jesus implant in Western Culture, whatever that means, whether that's ancient Rome, Western Europe, the United States, whatever the West means, and that's a whole other discussion.
Did he implant in some of these cultures the phenomenon of altruism, of caring for somebody who is not your own, not your family member, not your somebody who's part of your group, somebody who's simply another human being who needs help?
That's what we argue and debate about at the end of this episode.
I don't think we actually agree.
Dr. Ehrman and I, but I think we did have a good discussion that generated a lot of new thoughts for me.
I'll give you a few more of my thoughts at the end for subscribers and kind of give you some reflections on this interview.
But without further ado, here is Bart Ehrman speaking with me about his new book, Love Thy Stranger.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar, How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, co host of this show, and welcoming for the first time somebody that many of you are going to be very familiar with, and that is Dr. Bart Ehrman, who's the author of the new book, Love Thy Stranger.
As I just said, just told you about Dr. Ehrman's just extensive corpus, fantastic published scholarship, and surely many of you've listened to him on podcasts, seen him on YouTube, public talks, and so on.
So thank you for joining me.
Really appreciate it, Dr. Ehrman.
Thanks for having me.
Love thy stranger.
Dominance vs. Universal Ethics00:02:33
I'm not going to lie, this is an ambitious book, and your thesis is a big one.
I'm going to summarize it.
Page two.
My argument in this book is that the impulse to help strangers in need is embedded in our Western moral conscience because of the teachings of Jesus.
And so there's a lot to defend in that thesis.
And at the end, I want to come back and see if I can ask you a few questions about that.
But I'd rather start with the mechanics of your thesis and how you get there.
And I think the first sort of Building block is the idea that in the Mediterranean world, the larger Mediterranean world in which Jesus appears as a Jewish person, the idea of loving thy neighbor, loving thy stranger, was not built into Greek or Roman religions.
Rather, those religious frameworks in general were based on the idea of dominance.
Is that right?
And how can we sort of set the stage here by understanding this theme of dominance rather than love?
The first thing I'd say is that Greek and Roman religions themselves were actually not particularly interested in ethics at all, the religions.
And so religions were cultic practices of prayer and sacrifice.
And the gods were not overly concerned about how you behaved.
That's different in Judaism, of course, and within Christianity.
But that's not to say that in the Greek and Roman worlds, people were not interested in ethics.
It's just that ethics was not part of religion.
It's really about common sense, it's about community, it's about philosophy, but religion didn't have much to do with it.
But the idea, the point you're making is the right one, is that throughout this culture, Domination was simply an accepted ideology.
It's the basic sense that if you have power, you have the moral right to assert the power.
And that there's no moral objection to the powerful subjecting the weak.
And so it doesn't matter whether you're talking about a city state or any kind of your local village or individuals.
Men are stronger than women, so they can dominate women.
The city is stronger than that one, so you dominate that one.
Masters are more powerful than slaves.
So the idea, these issues are not debated in the Greek and Roman world.
It's just assumed that if you have power, you can assert it.
I can't resist the temptation, but one of the things that came up for me reading your book was just the appeal over and over again in our current moment of people to the Roman Empire, and especially men who I think are really into this theme of domination.
Paul and the Intramural Shift00:14:34
And so I'll leave it.
I'm not going to take us on that rabbit, you know, down that rabbit trail.
But reading your book really, really, really highlighted a lot of those statements that we have from political figures, public leaders, and so on and so forth.
This leads us, I think, to the distinction of Judaism.
And the argument you make, and again, I'll summarize and you tell me where I'm wrong or what we need to add, is that there is a deep and abiding sense in the Israelite ethos that to take care of one's neighbor,
one's family member, somebody within the Israelite community was the guiding north star of religious practice, whether that was at the temple, whether that was in the Torah, whether that was in any component of that religious framework, loving someone else.
And caring for someone else was built in.
Do I have that right?
And what else do we need to know there?
It's absolutely right.
The Torah has a lot of commandments in it, obviously, 613.
But two, a lot of Jewish teachers would agree, the two really main ones were that Deuteronomy 6, you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength.
And Leviticus 19, 18, you should love your neighbor as yourself.
But in that verse, in Leviticus 19, 18, Explain to somebody, we just read the verse.
It explains that love your neighbor refers to your fellow Israelite.
And so it's an important move within Judaism that it's not talking about just friends and family.
Unlike in other circles, you might see, you know, it's just friends and family, people you're genetically related to, socially related to.
Within Israel, it's any Israelite.
And so if they're a stranger to you, it doesn't matter.
You're supposed to help them.
And the other point to make about this is, I think, the one we're assuming, which is that.
To say you love your neighbor doesn't mean to have a good feeling about them.
This is not talking about a feeling or an emotion.
This is talking about how you treat somebody else.
And if you treat yourself by feeding yourself when you're hungry and clothing yourself when you don't have clothes, et cetera, then you should do that for your neighbor as well, even if they're a stranger.
Okay, so we have a distinction here.
And I think, you know, one of the things I just want to make clear before we move forward, you know, if we were teaching class, we'd want to say, look, we're talking in generalities, but in comparison to a Greek framework or a Roman framework, there's built into the Jewish framework, what will be known as Judaism and what was known as a kind of Israelite religion here, the idea that to take care of others is part of one's duty in loving God.
I mean, is that the fairest summation of the distinction between these various worldviews?
Yeah, I would say so.
Because in the Greek and Roman world, being obedient to God, worship God, was not connected directly with helping others.
And the idea of helping anybody in need outside of your close knit groups was not a thing either.
And would this apply?
I'm sure there's folks listening, biblical scholars, people who are familiar with the late antique world, folks who are just wondering well, does this apply to all the varieties of Judaism?
When Jesus arrives on the scene, does this apply to every different group that might have been part of the fabric of Judaism?
Of the Jewish world?
Well, it does.
I mean, we're not saying that every Jew followed it.
You know, or that, or anywhere we're saying that every Christian in our government today follows the teachings of Jesus instead of the ideas of dominance.
We're not saying that.
But within Judaism, everybody would have agreed that this is a major teaching of Torah and that it needs to be followed.
Okay.
So that really sets up what you argue is the revolution that Jesus brings.
And, you know, I think anybody who knows you, and I just want to make sure folks listening have this in their minds, is You know, I think one of the reasons you have been such an overwhelmingly helpful and popular and really effective public scholar for decades is your ability to look at the Bible unflinchingly.
I mean, you really are somebody who's broken down the realities of the ancient world, the teachings of Jesus, the development of the New Testament for people in ways that have been, I think, for them, revolutionary.
So you are not somebody, you know, if somebody were just to pick up this book and assume that, oh, this is somebody who's really into, Promoting Jesus at all costs without any kind of critical lens or distinction, they would be really mistaken.
So I want to make sure we get that out there before we do this.
The revolution of Jesus is a revolution of loving everyone regardless of who they are.
And the apocalypticism of Jesus is a key component of that.
Is that the main thrust of his innovation?
Yeah, I think it is.
And, you know, just to emphasize, yeah, I'm not a, you know, this is not an apology for Christianity or, you know, I'm not a Christian.
And so it's not that.
I'm trying to approach this thing historically.
But what I would say is that Jesus had a form of Judaism that was common in his day that you've called apocalypticism.
It's not an ancient word, it's what we call it today.
And there's a view that the day of judgment was coming soon.
And that God was going to intervene to destroy everything that was opposed to him, these powers of evil that are in the world that are making life so horrible for people, and destroy everybody who sided with them.
And that Jesus thought this was coming within his own generation, his disciples would live to see it, and so it's coming soon.
And this radicalized this ethic within Judaism because you don't have long, and because God's the God of the whole world, he's not just going to bring salvation to Israel, he's going to bring salvation to the world.
That meant That love your neighbor did not mean simply love your Israelite.
It meant love anybody in the world who is in need.
And the criterion for engaging in this kind of activity is need.
It's not being related to the person socially, genetically, in terms of the same ethnicity, the same religion, the same nation, anything like that.
It's if they're in need, that's the criterion.
And that became Jesus' emphasis.
And I think it's not anti Jewish or anything like that, it's within the Jewish tradition.
But it's a distinctive take on it.
And does the apocalypticism play into that?
I mean, I guess, like you, I was also in my youth an evangelical.
I converted at age 14, and it became very clear to me that the logic of the theology I was learning was anybody who dies without knowing Jesus will go to eternal damnation.
So, in my 15 year old brain, my 16 year old brain, it was like, why would I go to college?
Why would I do that?
I should just be out on the street corner.
I should be asking everybody I can find about Jesus.
Their relationship with God.
And so, you know, I really had a radicalism at that moment that kind of scared my church elders.
They kind of loved that I was this devout, but they kind of were a little bit worried about me because I needed to calm down.
Does Jesus' apocalypticism play into this love for anyone in need, or how does those pieces fit together?
I think it directly affects it in two ways.
He thought that the day of judgment was coming soon and that it was going to affect the entire world.
Since it's going to affect the entire world, God's concerned about the entire world.
He's concerned about everybody, not just Israelites.
And so it has this kind of universalizing effect that it's affecting everybody.
Your care of others should affect everybody.
But it also creates the kind of urgency you're talking about.
If the end is coming sometime next month, it's not a time for half measures.
And so that's why Jesus says things like to a rich man who wants to know how to enter into this coming kingdom, Jesus says, self.
Everything you have and give to the poor.
Now, over time, people, followers of Jesus said, Well, look, he didn't really mean that.
You know, or he didn't mean it for me anyway.
He meant it for that guy.
But this is the kind of thing that Jesus really taught.
And I think he really meant it.
I think there's good evidence.
He really meant it.
And the reason is you don't need your wealth.
What you need is to be on God's side.
And to be on God's side, you help people in need.
That's how you get into the kingdom.
And so it was a revolutionary ethic.
And that was really quite, when taken literally, it's really quite extreme.
But it's because of the same thing.
The end's coming soon.
I'm not going to lie, the story of Lazarus and the rich, you know, Jesus, the rich man, this was one of the reasons that made me doubt my faith because I want, I internalized that ethic.
And when I started living it out, it was the Christians in my life and in my church that were like, hey, calm down, pal.
You know, he didn't really mean that.
Like, you got to relax over there.
And it just didn't make sense to me.
And so that caused me to want to investigate further.
All right.
So Jesus teaches this radical apocalyptic ethic of helping anyone in need.
He dies.
We're taping this on Good Friday.
So, a Good Friday into Jerusalem is crucified, and then on Sunday, his followers celebrate his resurrection.
We then get the Apostle Paul, who, of course, becomes what I tell my students is the most influential Christian in history.
Jesus is not a Christian, Jesus is Jewish.
His entire ethos, life, family, religion is Jewish.
Paul is the most influential follower of Christ, despite the fact, as you point out, he never met him.
Really starts writing years after Jesus has left earth.
What happens in this radical ethic of helping those in need when we get to the Apostle Paul?
Is it only an intra Christian kind of ethic, or does Paul continue with the universalism that Jesus presented?
So it's a really interesting question because Paul also was an apocalyptic Jew.
He also thought the day of judgment was coming soon.
In his case, though, he thought Jesus was the one bringing it, and that was a big difference.
He still has that basic framework.
But when you get to Paul, you're in a situation where you have churches spreading throughout the Mediterranean, many of them by Paul himself.
And you start having communities and then larger communities.
And these communities themselves have need.
Most people who are converting to Christianity are lower class and poor, many of them may be destitute.
And church leaders like Paul have to decide well, okay, if we're going to help the needy, shouldn't we help our own first?
And, you know, if you've got limited supplies, these are not rich people.
So you don't have that much money to distribute.
And Paul and others started saying, look, you need to take care of those within the church.
So Paul becomes completely intramural in his ethics.
He agrees with Jesus that you should help others, but the universalizing idea that you should help those outside your faith community, you don't find that in Paul.
You certainly find him raising money for churches and for the poor, but it's always within the Christian church.
And that becomes.
It becomes a big issue in Christianity over the centuries.
What do we do with our funds when we have so many people suffering inside, even though Jesus said, help everybody?
There may be some people wondering and having this question in their mind.
It's not really part of your book.
And so, excuse me if you feel like this is a tangent, but how does the Pauline ethos of the intramural care for the Christian rather than of anyone in need relate to the ethos of the early church in Acts, the gathering of those who were there with Jesus, apparently, supposedly, according to the Gospels, following him, part of his ministry, Peter, James, and so on, those folks that in many ways were in the trenches with Jesus.
And then here comes Paul a couple of years later, and he kind of Becomes the head guy.
Is there a difference in that axe ethics rather than the Pauline ethics?
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Okay, yeah, so.
So, the book of Acts is very interesting because it's an account.
After you have the four accounts of Jesus' life and death, resurrection of the Gospels, Acts picks up the story after that with how Christianity then started to spread.
And it's very interesting in the first couple of chapters because there are massive conversions in Jerusalem, according to Acts.
Thousands and thousands of people are converting to follow Jesus, and they form communes.
They sell everything they have and give their money to the apostles to distribute to the poor.
And so, this is showing that they're implementing Jesus' teachings.
Paul comes along later in the book of Acts and in real life.
He came along several years after this whole thing had been going.
And there clearly was tension between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles, Peter and James.
Paul himself describes it.
I mean, he gets in a knockdown, dragout argument with Peter.
And so, there are tensions.
There do not seem to be tensions in their basic overall views about giving, though.
One of the major features of Paul's ministry.
That he talks about in a number of his letters is that he's collecting money for the saints in Jerusalem.
So there's some kind of famine going on in Jerusalem.
And he's getting money from these Gentile churches that he started off in Corinth, you know, or Philippi or Thessalonica, often, you know, way off in what we think of as Greece, in order to give the money to the saints in Jerusalem because they're in need.
And so he still has this idea you need to help people in need, but it's intramural.
And my sense is probably the people in Jerusalem were intramural as well.
So, if we pick the story back up and Paul slightly alters Jesus' teaching about giving to those in need, and he turns it more into an intramural Christian sense rather than a universal sense, how do we get back to your thesis that Jesus' teachings are really the reason for a kind of universal sense of altruism in Western conscience?
Yeah, well, it continues to be intramural for centuries.
But after about three or four centuries, so intramural means within the walls.
Constantine and the Good Samaritan00:15:27
Within about four centuries, the walls surround all of the Western world because the world converts to Christianity.
And so now, everybody in need is going to be a Christian by the fifth century.
And so it ends up, it's a problem for like two or three centuries where they have these debates what to do.
But once the entire empire converts, so the empire doesn't convert right away, right?
And when Constantine converted in 312, there were maybe 5% of the empire that was Christian.
But by the end of that century, about 50% are.
By the end of the next century, Just about the whole empire is Christian.
And so it's, you don't have this conflict anymore, intramural and extramural.
And then, you know, the argument would be over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, you know, we really get to a place where we see the development of something called Christendom, a Christian world that develops in not only the, you know, the areas surrounding Jerusalem, not only in places like Corinth and Ephesus and Greece, not only in Rome, but throughout Western Europe.
We get missionaries to Ireland and we get the development of Christendom in Western Europe writ large.
And so the thesis would be that the original kernel of this sense of altruism would, would, Would be found in the revolutionary teaching of Jesus and his understanding of those who are in need and being on the side of God.
Is that, you know, am I following the thread there?
Yeah.
So the deal is that when people convert to Christianity, they start attending Christian meetings, either in a church or outside of a church or, you know, but they congregate with Christians.
And among the things they talk about are not just that Jesus died for our sins, but how are we to behave?
You know, what makes us Christian?
And the ethical message that's driven time after time after time in all of our records about all these preachers is.
You have to give of yourself for others.
You need to be willing to sacrifice yourself for others, at least to some extent.
So, in one way, one of the interesting phenomena is that in the Greek and Roman worlds, the wealthy people were expected to give to support their community, for example.
But the poor people weren't expected to give anything because they didn't have much money.
Christianity democratized giving.
So, even if you're poor, you can give something.
You can give somebody a meal, you can let them sleep on your floor.
You know, you can visit them when they're sick, and all of this count.
These are all acts of altruism.
And the Christian message, though, is that this needs to be for anybody who's in need, not just those who are close to you.
And that's preaching day after day in all these churches for centuries and centuries.
And it just becomes common sense then that that's what we need to do.
We need to help people in need.
All right.
So if I play, I got to put on my devil's advocate hat now, and I got to ask the questions I know folks in my community are going to be asking and see what you think here.
So, on one hand, I think there's probably a lot of folks listening who are like, you know, this makes sense because when I think of the current pope, you know, the Pope Leo, the American pope, he seems to be teaching something along these lines, maybe some of what Pope Francis was teaching.
I can find this kind of teaching in the social gospel and other places.
You know, there's various touch points people are going to look for to kind of understand the thesis.
All right.
One question I have would be if, as you say, by the fifth or sixth century, most of the empire is Christian, does it hurt the thesis that much of that Christianizing was done by force or coercion?
Basically, a leader in Constantine and those who followed saying, hey, it'd be really good if you converted.
You know, if you want influence, if you want power, if you want to be on the side of the empire and Rome and so on, this is the way to go.
So, if much of the Christianizing of the empire, and you may not agree with this framing, is done in and through a kind of missionary effort that's not always just about winning hearts and minds, does that somehow damage the idea that altruism is still the kernel of what's being taught in this Christian tradition that's spreading across the ancient world?
It's an important question.
I have a book called The Triumph of Christianity that talks about how Christianity spread and took over the Roman world.
And one of the things I stress in the book is that there was very little coercion involved.
Constantine actually didn't care if people converted.
It seems weird, but he did not try to convert people.
And we have solid records of this.
We have even writings from his own hand that there were things he didn't like about the pagan religion.
He didn't like sacrifices, for example, but he did not insist on people becoming Christian.
You get more of that kind of coercion thing later with Theodosius I at the end of the fourth century.
But even there, it's not really like people tend to think.
You know, they tend to think that there were all these forced conversions.
And so we don't have much record of that.
But it's a really important question, though.
If people aren't sincerely Christian, how does this ethical teaching influence them?
And I think the answer is that you just look empirically at what people talk about when they talk about ethics and how people behave over the centuries, which is, you know, it's not.
Crazily easily documented, but it's fairly easily documented that this becomes the standard ethic of the West, whether people did it or not.
So, another question that arises if, according to the thesis, the revolution that Jesus implements is to care for all those in need, not just those who are Israelite like you, if that is the sort of Jewish innovation that he makes, could one argue that, say, if I'm in a Christian empire in the fifth or sixth century, and everyone around me for the most part is a Christian, that when I care for them,
even when they're poor, even when they're vulnerable, even when they're in need, That I'm caring for them as someone who is like me in a way that's analogous to how the Jew would have looked at a fellow Jew, a fellow Israelite before Jesus, in the sense of, yes, I'm caring for those in need, but I'm doing so as part of an intramural, intra Christian way that's actually not all that different from what the Israelite would have done before Jesus.
Yeah, I think there's probably some truth in that.
And, you know, the reason that I say Jesus revolutionized the Ethical conscience of the West is because these Jewish groups didn't take over the world.
You know, the Israelites didn't become the world.
If the Israelites had become the world and, you know, it converted the Roman Empire, which I don't think could have happened for a number of reasons, but if they had, then this whole thing might have been a result of, you know, Rabbi Hillel.
But if they didn't, that didn't happen.
The other thing to stress, though, is that the other is, you know, the other for Jesus, it's not just a religious identity.
Today, in our world, there are millions and millions of Christians who want nothing to do with millions and millions of other Christians.
You know, as you can see just in our immigration policies.
I mean, if the immigration policy were based on religion, we were leaking out all these people from your Latin America or Mexican, you who are Christian.
But we do.
Yep.
So, yep.
Yeah, I guess that was my biggest question as I thought about this if the idea was, excuse me, if the idea was that Jesus says to love, as the book title says, love the stranger,
and that one of the principal examples you give is the parable of the Good Samaritan, then it strikes me that maybe that fifth century person who is giving to the needy is giving to a fellow Christian, and then all of the sort of medievalists, Jump into my brain, right?
I'm listening now to my medievalist friends who are going to say, yeah, the Christian took care of the Christian, but they sure had a lot of hostility to the Jew or to the Muslim in the medieval world.
And that is proof of the non universalizing of Jesus' ethic.
You know, what would you say to those kinds of examples?
Well, I'm not saying that everybody like internalized it and acted on it.
Clearly not.
Clearly not.
Right.
But the point of the book is that in the Greek and Roman worlds that Christianity emerged out of, or just take the Roman Empire that it emerged out of, there are very, very clear ideas about where you give your resources, who you are concerned about, who you focus on.
And they are explicit in places that you don't take care of people who are not connected to you just because they're in need.
Quite the contrary.
Even authors like very brilliant ethical teachers, like moral philosophers like Seneca.
Say, look, you don't give chunks of money to somebody who's destitute.
They'll just waste it, you know?
And what would be the point?
And so, my point is that within Christianity, there develops this idea that you're not just supposed to help your family and friends.
And that's rooted in Judaism's idea of love your neighbor yourself, but it's extended to those who are not even your neighbor anymore.
To people who, you know, so as you can see, I'm, you know, I were talking, I'm up in my mountain house, which is near Asheville, North Carolina.
And I was here, I was in this house when Hellene hit.
And it was amazing over the next couple of weeks how money was flowing in from people who knew nothing about anybody here.
They didn't know them, you know, but they started sending money here.
And it wasn't because they were Christian.
It's just they were just, you know, they're, you know, it's because they're in need.
And some people felt like I need help people.
Yeah.
That's, yeah, I think that's, that may be, that may be one of my, my final questions is if we bring it into the, the present day and we think about an idea that, you know, as you say in the, in page two, this, this, this sense of universal care for those we're not connected to is, is really the result of Jesus' revolution.
I have, I, I want to sort of get, bring us into 2026 and, and, you know, the, the, the example of Hurricane Helene or, An example you give at the beginning of the book, where you're a young student in Chicago and there's a runaway car on the street, and you jump in and there's no brakes to the car and you drive it.
I won't ruin the story and tell all of it, but you save the day and you did so for a woman and her child that you never knew.
They were not part of your family, not part of your neighborhood, whatever.
I guess my question still goes back to okay, the Romans and the Greeks said, who cares?
Don't give money to the destitute.
They'll just waste it.
The Jewish ethos is give and help to those in need who are part of your group.
And then Jesus comes along and says, no, no, no, no.
You need to be on the side of God by being on the side of the needy, and the needy are anybody.
Doesn't matter.
And then when I turn to Christian examples from the late antique world, the medieval world, I'm wondering, all right, is that Christians helping Christians in ways that might have been just similar to the Jew helping the Jew, even if the Jew and the Christian are distinct from the Roman and Greek ethos?
And then when I turn to your example of people helping in Hurricane Helene or when you helped that woman in Chicago all those years ago, is it possible that the modern nation state takes the place of ancient Israel such that when I help a fellow American or a fellow Chicagoan?
I am still helping somebody who's in my group, even though the kind of group identity markers and bonds and barriers have shifted from a Jewish identity to an American identity or Chicagoan identity or neighborhood identity, such that this is not about universal love for the needy, as Jesus taught, but is in fact still an intra group care in more of the pre Jesus ethic.
Does that make sense as I point out those examples from like the modern day?
It does.
It does.
And what I'd say to that is that.
Many people today support groups like Doctors Without Borders, who are working in places like they're working in places that are not American and they're not Christian.
And you did not have things like that in the ancient world.
You just didn't.
So, of course, within America, when you're helping people in North Carolina, you know, if you're a Christian, you're probably helping people who are either Christian or have come from Christian roots.
But, you know, we have care agencies that go throughout the world that are helping, you know, in Sudan and in Somalia, and in places that we, you know, they are so foreign to our thinking in terms of the, you know, not the neat aspect, but I mean, just their lives, just what they think and live and how they live and stuff.
But we help them.
In the ancient world, you didn't have that.
So you're right that if Judaism had taken over the world, you may well have had something like this.
It may be in some other religion took over the West, you know, maybe Buddhism took over the West, you know, or something, but it didn't.
So my point is, is that That this is an intervention that we can trace historically to Jesus.
And I'm not saying it had to be that way.
And I'm certainly not saying that people are implementing it down the line.
All right.
One of the points of my book is how the Christians have to soften his teachings because nobody wants to sell everything he gives to the poor.
But the basic kernel there, which he gets, of course, he gets from his Jewish roots, he extends it beyond Judaism to anybody who's in need.
And that's affected all of us, even those of us who are atheists, agnostics.
It doesn't matter if we're in the West.
We have this driven into our system now and ultimately goes back to the teachings of Jesus.
That was going to be a follow up question is all right, so I'm listening and I'm a big fan of yours, right?
I'm a listener out there in Columbus, Ohio or Portland, Oregon or Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I'm an atheist and I've read all your books and I'm so on board.
I grew up evangelical and here I am today, an atheist.
Are you saying that when I participate in a drive to help those in need through my local humanist organization or through Atheists United, and my care for others is something that's part of my personal ethic, should I think of that as an atheist or an agnostic or as a humanist as still owing itself to Jesus' teaching?
Or is it possible that the modern day non believer can think of their care for others as coming from another source, from just Human decency or belief in human rights, or something along those lines, is it such that the modern day non believer needs to still trace their care for others to Jesus, who they probably don't see as their savior or even really somebody that they look to as a role model?
Yeah, it's a great question.
And those of us who are atheists and agnostics or whatever we are, when we feel like helping people in need, We don't do it because we're trying to follow Jesus.
Human Decency Beyond Jesus00:08:21
So I'm not saying that.
Yeah, yeah.
I am not trying to follow Jesus when I make my donations.
It's like, you know, in the sense that that's why I feel some kind of obligation.
In this book, I'm talking about a historical reality that I think is important to recognize.
And I'm not saying it's going to change your behavior or that you need to rethink why you do things.
We do have a sense of what it means to be a good person, what it means to be a moral human being.
We have that sense because we inherited it.
It is in our genes.
It's become in our genes, even though it wasn't in the genes of ancient Greeks and Romans.
And my question is how did it get into our genes?
It's because Christianity took over the world, and this is the ethic that was preached all the time and drummed into people until people thought it was their common sense.
So, people today who live in America, they may not have had Christian parents.
They may have had Christian parents.
They probably had Christian grandparents, probably, but not necessarily.
But the grandparents almost certainly had Christian great grandparents.
And you can trace the Christian line all the way back, whether you go to patrilinear or matrilinear, you're talking about centuries and centuries and centuries of people who are Christian.
And we don't invent our own morality.
It's not like we sit down when we're seven and kind of get out a scratch pad and figure out how we want to behave, you know, and like just out of the top of our head.
We have certain senses of what's right and wrong.
My argument in this book is that this particular sense that if somebody's in need, we feel like helping them, whether we do or not, we feel like we got to help them somehow, that that wouldn't be in our culture.
We don't know if it would have been in our culture for some other reason.
The reason it is in our culture is because of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, which is based on the teachings of Jesus.
So it's a historical observation.
And part of the point for the atheists and agnostics among us, among whom I include myself, is to recognize that Christianity has done a lot of horrible things over the centuries.
You could list a very long list, not just the pogroms and the inquisitions and the crusades.
There's a very long list of very dark, a very dark side of Christianity.
There's also a good side.
And I think it is not, I don't think it's right if you're either a historian or just a human being to ignore the good in something without, without, you know, trying to explain the bad.
The bad is awful and horrible and we should despise it, but there's also a good side.
And I think, especially in this age when people are so bifurcated in their opinions about everything, politics, social agendas, whatever, it's useful to look at the other side sometimes and at least recognize there's something good there.
And I think this is something good in Christianity.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm no, I understand what you're being.
First of all, I understand the historical case, and I'm you know, it's something I've been pondering over the last week or so as I've been reading the book.
And it's brought up questions for me about, well, on a number of fronts.
I used to be one of the leaders of the secularism unit at the American Academy of Religion.
And you know, one of the debates you get when you enter into the study of the secular in the United States in a global perspective is these the very category of the secular is often a parasite on.
The category of the religious, which in many cases is really the category of the Christian.
And so every time one is trying to be secular, they are working against a category they're emerging from.
And as I read your book, honestly, that's what was on my mind.
And I'm happy for you to push back and say, well, it's a bad reading or it's not what I intended.
But there was a sense here almost that if I believe in universal human rights, if I have a belief that every human, regardless of who they are, if they're Ukrainian, if they're Gazan, if they are somebody who's been hit by a hurricane in North Carolina, even though I live in Seattle, There's a sense that the human rights discourse and the human care discourse really is a Christian inheritance.
And I think that's the case you're making.
I'm happy for you to push back on me here.
You could find it in other cultures too, by the way.
You can find it.
But I'm saying in the West, yes.
If we came from the Roman world, yes.
That's where it came from.
But again, I'm not talking about your gut feeling about it or kind of your sense.
Oh, no, I know.
I'm talking about history.
What happened historically to make this happen?
Because you could show it wasn't back there.
In the Greek and Roman worlds, you can show it came to be into the world and how did it get historically?
Yeah.
No, I know it's a historical argument.
I guess what I'm just trying to, I know, here's what I'm doing I'm thinking through like people who are listening, right?
And I'm thinking through like there's a Hindu person in Atlanta who grew up in the United States.
And I'm trying to figure out if that person is thinking to themselves, well, I'm Hindu, even though I'm somebody who grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.
And I have this impulse also to care for others.
And do I need to wrestle with the fact that institutionally and historically, according to your argument, the source of that care may come from participating in a culture that inherited the kernel of Jesus' ethics, or it came from my Hindu teaching and understanding, or it's a mix of both and it's probably impossible to disentangle them?
I guess I'm trying to work through the kind of mind frame, right, of someone like that.
As you say, you know, and you just said, well, maybe this comes from other cultures too.
And so maybe there are folks listening who are like, well, I do have that kind of ethic, but it didn't come from Jesus.
It came from someone else.
And I guess you're making the argument that that's entirely possible.
Well, there are good people in other parts of the world, yes, who are not crazy.
You don't have a Christian background.
So I'm asking how it is that people in the Western tradition have this impulse.
And I don't see any reason for anybody to wrestle over it about within themselves.
If they have the impulse, I just hope they act on it.
But I'm just saying historically, you can't explain its emergence in basically we're talking about Europe and European influenced areas and in parts, of course, of the Middle East and Africa coming to America at some point.
And that That when it comes to America, it's already in the ground.
I mean, this is it.
This is what it means.
And so I don't think there's any reason to kind of worry about it or wrestle with it.
It's just, it's an interesting historical phenomenon that we ought to recognize that Christianity did this bit of good in the world.
It's not just a small bit.
I mean, arguing in my book, as you know, that Christians in the West invented public hospitals and they invented orphanages and old people's homes and disaster and private charities and governmental assistance.
You can document these are Christian inventions in the West.
And so it sounds like I'm an apologist.
I'm not an apologist.
I mean, I'm just saying.
Oh, no, no, no.
I'm not.
No, no, no.
Please don't misunderstand me.
I know you're not an apologist, and I'm not trying to force you into that corner.
I'm more thinking through, I know there's good people in other parts of the world, but I think about the specific claim you're making, which is a universal ethic for the needy.
And so I'm not trying to make you out to be an apologist.
It's more for me thinking through the.
I get it.
I know that you're saying, hey, who cares where it came from as long as you have that impulse to care for others.
That's good.
But I do think there's going to be somebody who's like, well, I'm an atheist.
I was never Christian.
Both parents were atheists, and we always cared for others.
Are you saying I need to attribute that to Christianity?
And that's the wrestle I think I'm sort of trying to walk through.
So I'm not saying you need to do it.
I'm saying that if you look at it historically, it is the case.
And even if your grandparents are atheists, if you lived in the West, your ancestors from 200 years ago were not atheists.
Well, before the Enlightenment, before the Enlightenment, they were not atheists.
So, yeah, how would you say it?
So, it gets had morality gets handed down through social connections, and your social connections going back are Christian for century after century after century.
Most of us, most of us, not everyone, but most of us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you for answering those questions.
I mean, I have more, but I'm not going to take up your whole day.
I'm pretty famous for, you know, being able to do this for three hours, and I don't think you have that kind of time.
So, the book is Love Thy Stranger.
Weekly Roundup and Blog Updates00:01:32
Can you tell us?
Places people might link up with you, or the best place, you know, if you're doing things online, seminars, webinars, if you're going to be at bookstores, what's the best way to make sure people know how to access all that?
The thing is just to Google me.
And the thing I would like people to know about is a blog that I do.
I don't know if you know about it, but this is actually today's the 14th anniversary of my blog.
I've done it for 14 years now.
I post five times a week on all issues dealing with the history of early Christianity, the New Testament, historical Jesus from a scholarly point of view.
People have to pay a small membership fee to belong to the blog.
But I give every dime of it to charities that deal with hunger and homelessness mainly.
And so we've raised over $3 million from this blog.
Amazing.
And I don't get a dime out of it.
But so if people just look up the Barterman, just look up Barterman blogs.
But they can look at it because they get this.
You know, I do this stuff every day, five times a week, talking about all this kind of material.
It's amazing.
And I will say, somebody who does public scholarship, your prodigious output is inspiring.
And sometimes I get tired and I think, well, you're doing it five days a week and you've written all these books, so I can get up and do it too.
So thank you for that inspiration.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for being here.
As always, we'll be back later this week with It's in the Code and the Weekly Roundup and everything we do here.
You can go to straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and get all the info about all of our programming and events and everything else.