Bart D. Ehrman is an acclaimed scholar and New York Times bestselling author who looks at New Testament texts, early Christianity and the historical Jesus. I was introduced to his work in seminary 20 years ago, and I continue to benefit from his scholarship and the relevance of his conclusions. He is recently retired from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and his forthcoming book Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West, is an essential look at how we are called to expand the circle of our acquaintances by the teachings of Jesus and the scope of our love and concern. I’m so grateful to be able to offer this edited version of our conversation.
Greg Garrett: I was doing some research into your writing of this book, and I think you described it as a slow train coming, which is a thing I’m familiar with. They don’t all just jump out. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you felt led to write this particular book on the ethical teachings of Jesus. I wonder if you, from a scholarly standpoint, could talk a little bit about why this was a book at this stage of your career you really wanted to write.
Bart Ehrman
Bart Ehrman: Well, it was not going to be my next book. I wasn’t planning on writing this book. I had something else in mind, but I had just written an academic book called Journeys to Heaven and Hell that was published with Yale University Press about this phenomenon that you get in ancient literature, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Ancient Near Eastern, of people being given guided tours to the places of the blessed and places of the damned.
While writing this book, I realized one thing that happens in these journey texts from antiquity is that whoever’s writing these things, they may or may not believe there’s actually an afterlife, but they’re writing these texts in order to show how you ought to live now in light of what’s going to happen then.
One thing that struck me was that there are pagan texts and there are Christian ones that both deal with the problem of wealth and what the problem of wealth is. And in the pagan texts, like Lucian of Samosata, the problem is that if you invest completely in getting a lot of money and then you die, you’re miserable because you don’t have your things anymore. It’s like rich people, it’s all they wanted. Now it’s taken away.
“In the Christian texts and also in the pagan texts, the point is don’t be attached to your wealth.”
Whereas in the Christian texts and also in the pagan texts, the point is don’t be attached to your wealth. In the Christian texts, it’s giving your money away to the poor that gets you into heaven. I got really interested in that concept of the different ways of understanding how charitable giving works. And my original idea for the book was to do a book on charitable giving, on how Christianity provided a new vision about that, how what really mattered was not just giving to your family and friends, which you obviously do, and not just giving to people who are socially related to you in some way or to your community, not using your great wealth to build a building with your name on it, but to give to people who were poor and in need, who needed clothing and shelter and food, and that became the emphasis.
So I was going to write a book on that, and I sent it to my editor at Simon & Schuster and she really liked it. And then she said: “I don’t think it’s a big book. It sounds really interesting. I’m not sure you’re going to have 8 million people buy this book.”
And so she said, “If you thought about writing a book about love. We need a book on Christian love.” But then I thought about it and ties into charity and charitable giving. So the book ends up being about how the teachings of Jesus were different from what you get in the Greek and Roman moral philosophers and even from what you get in Judaism to some extent about love and charitable giving and forgiveness — which is another manifestation of love different from the material thing about charitable giving. But in interpersonal relationships, forgiveness is another kind of giving. I wrote the book because I got interested in this, then I really got hooked into the ideas of charity and love and forgiveness.
GG: The book does take us through the pagan and Jewish understandings of happiness, forgiveness, ethics. And then of course what you’re arguing from the subtitle all the way through the book is that Jesus becomes this transformational figure in how we think about morality, how we think about giving, how we think about love and forgiveness. I wonder if you could help frame where or how you see the shift taking place in the New Testament texts. What are the distinguishing things about the life and ministry of Jesus?
“In interpersonal relationships, forgiveness is another kind of giving.”
BE: Clearly Jesus has completely Jewish roots. He’s Jewish, grew up on Jewish culture, kept the Torah, learned the Torah, became a Jewish teacher. I mean, it was all Jewish all the way through. Most of Jesus’ teachings can be replicated in other Jewish texts and other Jewish teachers.
Every Jewish teacher has his or her own emphasis and Jesus had an emphasis that may have been pushed heavily by other teachers. His basic ethics are rooted in the same thing most Jewish teachers had, which is the love commandment, Leviticus 19:18, you should love your neighbor as yourself.
In Leviticus, that commandment is clearly directed toward your activities and actions toward fellow Israelites. And even in Leviticus, it’s not an emotion. It’s not commanding people to feel something for someone else. It’s about how you treat other people. And that’s the view throughout most of the Hebrew Bible, how you need to treat Israelites even if they’re strangers to you. Even if they’re not socially or biologically connected to you, if they’re Israelites, you’re supposed to treat them the way you treat yourself.
That also includes immigrants. People who come in and settle within Israel and take on Israelite ways, you’re to treat the immigrants like Israelites, but it’s not a commandment to treat the Canaanites that way or the Moabites. I mean, in Numbers, Moses tells his armies to destroy them. But it is a shift from Greek and Roman thinking. It’s a difference from Greek and Roman thinking that you take care of strangers who are in your community, even if they’re strangers.
Jesus radicalizes that. In part, I think he radicalizes it because unlike Leviticus and most of the Hebrew Bible, he has more of a Jewish apocalyptic view on the world, that the entire world is going to be redeemed. It’s not just that Israel’s going to be redeemed, but God’s going to redeem the entire world and it kind of universalizes his thinking.
God is really concerned with restoring this world to the place it was meant to be in the beginning. And since it’s a universal vision, then loving your neighbor means not just loving your Israelite neighbor, it means loving anybody in the world who has need.
“Loving your neighbor means not just loving your Israelite neighbor, it means loving anybody in the world who has need.”
And so it universalizes this view beyond what I think you get in the Hebrew Bible and beyond what we have record of the Jewish teachers at the time teaching.
When I say the teachings of Jesus revolutionized the world, of course I mean I’m quite clear he’s getting these from Judaism, but he has his own distinctive take, as other Jewish teachers do.
The thing about Jesus though, is that his followers ended up taking over the Western world and that’s why this became the ethics of the West, because of the conquest of Christianity.
GG: A working title for this book was The Origins of Altruism. One of my great teachers was Dr. King. On his last night on the planet, he was in Memphis talking with his audience about how we needed to develop a dangerous unselfishness. That was the speech version of that. But when he did a preaching version, he always called it “dangerous altruism.”
It’s that dangerous altruism or dangerous unselfishness that Jesus is talking about in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which is one of the central roots of this teaching. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why that word “altruism” had originally been a spark for this project.
BE: When I decided to extend this thing into issues of love, along with charitable giving, I started thinking a lot about altruism and what we can know about it. I’m a New Testament scholar. When I do a book like this and I’m talking about something else, I have to read widely in other fields outside my own, which is great.
Altruism is discussed in a number of different disciplines — evolutionary biology, psychology, philosophy — they’re all angles to getting toward this idea of altruism. I had to wrestle with issues of altruism and egoism, what altruism actually is. Is there such a thing as pure altruism, like can any act be really just altruistic or not?
I read a lot of philosophy, and I read a lot of psychology, and I read evolutionary biology, and just kind of figured this all out. And when I was tentatively calling it Origins of Altruism, which I kind of liked, my start in the book was going to be that I don’t mean there was no altruism before Jesus. I mean, we wouldn’t survive as a species if it is every person for themselves, right? You can’t survive. You’d be picked off one by one. So it’s written into our DNA that you have altruistic actions toward your group. Whether you’re a honeybee or a human, you’ve got that.
“Jesus emphasized and taught a different kind of altruism.”
What I was going to talk about, though, is how Jesus emphasized and taught a different kind of altruism, the altruism that is not based only on those socially and biologically related to you, not only those in the community, which is what our DNA gives us, that in fact you are to behave well in self-sacrificing ways to people who are in need, whoever they are, whether they’re related to you or not. And it doesn’t matter if they’re your same nation, your same race, your same ethnicity, your same … .
None of that matters.
If they’re in need, you’re to help them. And that’s a different kind of altruism, and it struck me that’s the case.
And I ended up realizing you probably know that the word agape is not used in secular Greek. I mean, you won’t find it in Greek writers, period, until the Septuagint. Christians picked up on it and agape becomes the big term, but agape really in a way is in the Christian sense, the way the Christians end up using it, a Greek word for altruism.
When Paul talks about agape, he’s not talking about loving your spouse. I mean, he’s not opposed to your loving your spouse, but it’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about behaving in a way that’s in the best interest of another, even if it means a sacrifice to the self. I was really kind of stuck on this altruism thing as an intervention, kind of a different kind of altruism.
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.