Added 10/31/26 9:40 pm:
I decided to update my MS Copilot discussion of Bart Ehrman’s
book (that discussion is the original discussion below). The update refines my thoughts to: Jesus made Jewish concepts acceptable
to the much larger population (primarily in the West) which was not Jewish and
bought into the Christian narrative thus absorbing core concepts of Judaism. I remind readers of my mantra that Jesus was a Jew. I suppose that depending upon one's religious beliefs, that statement should be that: Jesus is a Jew.
My refreshed refinement is based on the updated response that
may be viewed in detail here.
The conclusion in the updated response is:
My [ChatGPT's] conclusion
I therefore would not describe Jesus's teachings as
simply restatements of Judaism, but neither would I describe them as a
fundamentally new ethical system superseding Jewish morality.
A more historically defensible formulation is:
Jesus took ethical principles already deeply embedded in
the Hebrew Scriptures and contemporary Jewish moral discourse and subjected
them to a radical extension: he weakened the boundaries determining who was
entitled to one's love and beneficence, culminating in the injunction to love
even enemies. His originality lay less in inventing the component principles
than in their combination, prioritization, universalization, and uncompromising
application.
That is subtly but importantly different from the strongest
reading of Ehrman's book.
Indeed, Ehrman himself comes close to that formulation when
he emphasizes that Jesus's teachings were deeply rooted in Scripture and other
Jewish teachers while simultaneously arguing that Jesus universalized those
traditions. [ehrmanblog.org],
[bartehrman.com]
And I think that formulation actually strengthens the
most interesting part of Love Thy Stranger. Jesus does not have to have
invented altruistic concern ex nihilo for Christianity to have
transformed Western moral expectations.
In short: Ehrman is more convincing as a historian of
the consequences of Jesus's ethical teaching than as a historian
claiming absolute originality for that teaching. Jesus's ethic looks
best understood as a radical development within Judaism, not a moral
revolution against Judaism. Its historical novelty may reside primarily
in the extraordinary degree to which existing Jewish principles were
generalized across traditional boundaries, especially in the move from neighbor
→ stranger → enemy, and in the subsequent Christian movement's success in
making that expanded obligation culturally normative.
One further point is especially interesting in light of your
question: I found your own Jack Townsend Blog post making essentially this
objection to Ehrman, citing Leviticus 19:33–34 and arguing that Jesus was
teaching from within Jewish tradition rather than introducing an altogether
novel morality. I think your instinct there is basically right, though I would
qualify it in one respect: derivation from Judaism does not necessarily
eliminate genuine innovation. The stronger criticism of Ehrman is not
“Jesus said nothing new,” but “Ehrman sometimes locates the newness at the
wrong level.” The newness is less the creation of love for outsiders than the
scope, synthesis, intensity, and eventual historical career of Jesus's version
of it. [jacktownse...ogspot.com]
Added 4/2/26 910:00am: Ross Douthat, the NYT sort of Christian conservative editorialist, interviews Bart Ehrman on facets of this story. I offer here a "gift article" permitting peope to read the article and, hopefully, the comments many of which are great. Can We Trust the New Testament?: A Christian and a self-described Christian Atheist debate (NYT 4/2/26), here. The article, a transcription of a podcast discussion, is quite long, but rewarding for those with the interest to work through it. And some of the comments are quite good. Here is an example of a comment that ties into my blog entry and my disagreement with Ehrman that Jesus introduced something radically new:
First comment:
Jesus was only preaching what he learned as an observant Jew Leviticus 19:33-34: "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."
Second comment:
I am a Jew who worked for a number of years in an Episcopal School. Listening to the New Testament being read, and sitting through worship services, I realized that the historic Jesus was very much a Jew, and that what he taught were basic Jewish values. He wanted Jews to be better Jews, to get back to basic principles. What my Episcopal colleagues thought of as unique values in their faith were simply what Jesus learned as a practicing Jew, but they did not know that. I began to think of Jesus as perhaps the first Reform Jew. I struggled to understand how Christianity evolved from who the historic Jesus was, and then I discovered the brilliant scholar of early Christianity, Elaine Pagels. After a lecture of hers, I posed this question: "Would Jesus have called himself a Christian?" She said absolutely not. He was born, lived and died a Jew. He taught Judaism to Jews. Pagels also wrote about how Christians began to scapegoat Jews and portray them negatively (as is clear in the Gospels) as a way of attracting converts. Most enlightening.
