Thoughts on Bart Ehman's Book Love Thy Neighbor (3/22/26)

Since Friday, Irene and I have attended sessions at the Virginia Festival of the Book here in Charlottesville. Yesterday, we went to a Bart Ehrman event. Bart Ehrman, Wikipedia here, is a prominent biblical scholar. Wikipedia opens with: “Bart Denton Ehrman (born October 5, 1955) is an American New Testament scholar whose research focuses on the textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity.” I have been a fan of Ehrman’s for many years and have read many of his books.

Yesterday’s event was titled “Love Thy Neighbor.” As often with such events, the speaker was promoting a book: Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West, here. The central claim of this book, as Professor Ehrman presented it, is that Jesus’ message was a radical departure from the Hebrew religion in the Second Temple period in which Jesus preached/taught. That central claim does not sound right to me. My background is that I have spent inordinate amounts of time on the Hebrew Bible, principally the Torah, through over 25 years of attending weekly Torah Study. At the end of the event, I told Professor Ehrman that I think he overstates his claim; in effect that he gave Jesus too much credit, that Jesus was a Jew, and that Jesus just spun the Torah as Jesus understood it. I think what Jesus did do through a process of spinning by his followers over the years to make the Hebrew Bible message palatable to non-Jews. But in terms of core moral imperatives, there is and has been more likeness than difference between Jews and Christians. In that sense, the radical message was in the Hebrew Bible.

This morning, I submitted the issue to Microsoft CoPilot AI tool. CoPilot answers in the first person ("I"). (I leave the font and presentation as presented in CoPilot; also, the only source I cited was Erhman's book):

Here is a clear, scholarly critique of Bart Ehrman’s claim in Love Thy Stranger that Jesus “expanded” the Hebrew Bible’s ethic by universalizing love of the stranger. I’ll ground the critique in mainstream biblical scholarship and in the Hebrew Bible’s own legal and ethical traditions, and I’ll use the sources you provided.

⭐ Summary Critique

Ehrman is right that Jesus radicalized the practice of enemy‑love and unconditional altruism, but he overstates the discontinuity with the Hebrew Bible. The Torah already commands love for the gēr (resident alien) without ethnic or religious qualification, and Second Temple Judaism already contained universalist strands. Jesus intensifies, dramatizes, and prioritizes these themes—but he does not invent them.

1. What Ehrman Claims

From the publisher’s summary and his public comments, Ehrman argues:

• The Hebrew Bible’s “love your neighbor” ethic was inward‑facing, focused on one’s own community.
• Jesus introduced a new, revolutionary obligation to love strangers and enemies unconditionally.
• This ethic transformed Western moral consciousness.

This is the thesis critics on his blog are responding to.

GHS 60 Alumni Reunion on June 8, 2026 (3/16/26)

To the Greenwood High School Class of 1960 Alumni:

After last year’s successful reunion, a decision was made to have another reunion this year. The reunion will be on June 8, 2026, at Port Grill on Lake Greenwood, here (formerly the Dock) starting at 4:30 pm. There will be a $15 per person charge that covers food. Drinks will be separately charged and paid.

For planning purposes, it will be helpful for those intending to advise  in advance if you plan to attend. You can do that by emailing me at jack@tjtaxlaw.com and I will forward it to the Pat Henderson Brooks who is the principal mover on this reunion.

Typewriting (aka Typing) War Stories (1/30/26)

I just communicated with a GHS60 Alumnus about my typewriting journey, started in HS at the insistence of my mother who was a secretary. Here is the communication, somewhat pared down:

I took typing in HS, I believe it was called personal typing. I got reasonably proficient. 

After HS, I went in the Army and had one other opportunity to develop my typing skills. I joined the Army Reserve with 12 classmates from GHS. We were offered the opportunity to stay together for the six months of active duty for training (Basic and some advanced) if we agreed to go into Advanced Infantry Training (AIT). So, my mother responded to a Colonel who wrote a serial form-type letter to all parents about what training we were getting. She responded on Office of the President stationery because she was the secretary for the President of Abney Mills. (Not only did the stationery say that, but in fact my mother shared the same physical office as the President and did that for the 20+ years she was there.) In any event, the Colonel must have thought I was important, because he came out into the field to meet me during Basic Training. I had no idea why he did that, but he did ask whether I might prefer going into some other Army specialty such as clerk typist rather than AIT. I declined, saying that I wanted to stay with my buddies in AIT. If I had accepted that offer, I would have honed my typing skills beyond the high school experience.

I also took typing in college in the business school at USC (after going on active duty in the Army in 1960). Just one semester. As I recall, I was the only male in the class, so that was a positive. I may have marginally increased my typing skills in that class.

So, I came out of college as a reasonable typist. 

While in college, I did Army Reserve duty in Columbia with a JAG unit. About the only typing I did was to type up the paperwork for my promotions for the Colonel to sign. 

I also received court reporter training at the Naval Justice School in Rhode Island. Although we used "monkey masks" to repeat into a recorder everything that went on in the mock courtroom, we then had to type up the recording in standard transcript format. Given the rigor of that training, good typing skills were required.

One college anecdote. At USC, I was a history major requiring a senior thesis. In the history department, the senior thesis was a big deal. I consulted with my favorite history teacher about the topic; that teacher then reviewed the thesis, including three or maybe four rounds of drafts. (He was a very exacting professor who worked hard and expected his students to work hard as well.) I turned in my first draft in handwriting. I went to his office for the review. I knocked on the door. He asked me to come in, close the door, and sit down. As I was closing the door and sitting down, he asked me “Mr. Townsend, do you know what I think of when I see sloppy handwriting?” I responded “No, sir.” He said “A sloppy mind.” I got the point.  (Actually given the tone of his question, I could have made a good guess; but as a side note, he had already graded me A on two examinations I took in handwriting, so he must have gotten over my horrible handwriting.) My later drafts were typewritten. My thesis won the outstanding senior thesis award for that year. That award was based on the content, rather than the typewritten presentation, but the typewritten presentation may have helped at the margins.

GHS 60 Alumni Project (5/18/25)

 I have started a project to gather and present data on Greenwood High School Class of '60 Alumni ("GHS 60 Alumni"). The project is described with appropriate links in the page at the right of this blog entry that can be accessed here.

On the Bible and Poetry (12/5/23)

Many years ago, I taught a course on poetry in the Hebrew Bible. The course was inspired by Jim Kugel's The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader's Companion with New Translations (Free Press 2012), Amazon here, but I drew on other sources as well.

For those who may be interested, I refer readers to Michael Edwards, The Bible and Poetry (The Paris Review 6/12/23), here, where the author discusses poetry in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible (consisting of the Old Testament which is close to the Hebrew Bible, although interpreted differently, and the New Testament).  

First of all, a caveat, that the following quote may indicate a Christian bias: "There are fewer poems in the New Testament, but they give even more food for thought."

With that caveat, here are some good excerpts that may whet readers' appetite to read the whole article:

It is true that the border between verse and a cadenced prose is not easy to determine in either the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Greek of the New: translators judge it differently. It may also be that the poems spoken by Jacob, Simeon, and many others come not from them but from the authors of the books in which they appear. The result is the same. We find ourselves constantly in the presence of writings that invite us into the joy of words, into a well-shaped language, in a form that demands from us the attention that we give to poetry and awakens us to expectation.

Certain scholars of the Bible have long known that the poetry is not there simply to add a dash of nobility, or sublimity, or emotive force to what the author could have said in prose. They learned from literary critics what the critics had learned from poets: poetry is in itself a way of thinking and of imagining the world; it discovers with precision what it had to say only by saying it; the meaning of a poem awaits us in its manner of being, and meaning in the customary sense of the word is not what is most important about it.

Should we not ask ourselves if the presence of so many poems changes not only the way in which the Bible speaks to us, but also the kind of message, announcement, or call that it conveys? How must faith perceive biblical speech? What does this continual turn to poetry imply about the very nature of Christianity?

Balaam and the Talking Donkey - a Lesson for Us (7/15/22)

We covered the story of Balaam and the talking donkey last week in Torah Study. (The Balaam and talking donkey episode is in Numbers 22, here.  A Torah.com offering, Do Animals Feel Pain? Balaam’s Donkey vs. Descartes (thetorah.com  here) is wonderful midrash (in an expansive sense) on that story. Remember that Balaam rebukes the donkey for no appropriate reason.  Then, according to this midrash, The Angel Sides with the Donkey, here.  That is a comforting thought for all of us metaphorical and real donkeys.  Some snippets.

Just how appropriately it [the donkey] has behaved and spoken is confirmed when the angel rebukes Balaam. First, he repeats the animal’s complaint, in the same words the donkey uses, thereby validating it (v. 32).

Second, he makes Balaam aware that everything the donkey has done was for his own good and that he owes the animal his life (vv. 32–33).

Balaam is forced to apologize and admit his sinful behavior, pleading that the reason he erred was because, unlike his donkey, he did not know the angel was there (לֹא יָדַעְתִּי כִּי אַתָּה נִצָּב לִקְרָאתִי).

How often do we act inappropriate when we do not recognize that the Angel or God is there?

Also,

Animal Suffering in the Torah

The story of Balaam’s donkey is an extreme instance of something we see elsewhere in the Torah, that animals have feelings and it is incumbent upon humans to take this into consideration. In contrast to Descartes’ notion, which circulated widely and had a detrimental influence on the treatment of animals (as can be seen in Solomon Maimon’s story),[6] the Torah never doubts that animals feel pain and that a goat is most certainly not a drum.

A wonderful lesson.

More on Midrash - On Pharaoh and Egyptians as God's Creatures Too (8/2/21)

In my Torah Study Book Study group, we are currently reading (finishing this week), Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's Moses: A Human Life, here.  Zornberg has a particularly interest in midrash, and continues that interest in this book.  I have other postings on midrash on this blog, so those wanting more on midrash can click the link at the bottom of this blog entry.

I recently sent this email to our group:

You may be interested in this offering from TheTorah.com: Prof.Edward L. Greenstein, Where Are God’s Tears in Lamentations?, here:

The opening sets it up nicely:

Tears abound in Lamentations: the poet cries, the people cry, even the city cries, but God does not. In contrast, the gods and goddesses of ancient Near Eastern city laments, cry along with their people. Midrash Eichah Rabbah, seemingly uncomfortable with such a callous depiction of God, rereads Lamentations to include God weeping.

That is just the opening.  A really good read.

This reminds me of the midrash I mentioned that I got from Avivah Zornberg about God rebuking the angels who were celebrating the death of the Egyptians by drowning.  I originally heard this in a Krista Tippett interview of Zornberg back in 2005.  The audio and transcript of that interview, titled The Transformation of Pharaoh, Moses, and God, is here.  Here is the relevant excerpt: