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.

2. Where Ehrman Is Right

There are genuine innovations in Jesus’ teaching:

A. Jesus foregrounds enemy‑love

• “Love your enemies… pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44) is unusually explicit and emphatic.
• While Proverbs 25:21 (“If your enemy is hungry, give him bread”) anticipates this, Jesus centers it as a defining mark of discipleship.

B. Jesus universalizes the command rhetorically

• The Good Samaritan parable collapses the “Who is my neighbor?” question by making the enemy outsider the moral exemplar.
• This is a hermeneutical expansion, not a new law, but it is powerful.

C. Jesus links love to imitation of God’s indiscriminate benevolence

• “He makes his sun rise on the evil and the good” (Mt 5:45).
• This theological grounding is more explicit than in most Torah passages.

Conclusion: Ehrman is right that Jesus amplifies and re‑prioritizes universal love in a distinctive way.

3. Where Ehrman Overstates the Case

A. The Hebrew Bible already commands love of the stranger

The Torah repeatedly commands love for the gēr (resident alien):

• “You shall love the stranger (gēr), for you were strangers in Egypt.” (Deut 10:19)
• “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger.” (Ex 22:21)

As the critic on Ehrman’s own blog notes, these commands do not distinguish by religion.

Scholarly consensus:

The gēr is not merely an Israelite outsider; he is a non‑Israelite living among Israel, and the law protects him with remarkable generosity.

This is not narrow tribalism.

B. Second Temple Judaism already had universalist ethics

Jewish literature before Jesus (e.g., Tobit, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, Philo) contains:

• almsgiving to the poor as a universal duty
• concern for the righteous of all nations
• critiques of ethnic pride
• the idea that God cares for all humanity

Jesus stands within this tradition, not outside it.

C. Jesus’ ethic is not a legal innovation but a prophetic intensification

Jesus’ teaching style—hyperbole, parable, intensification—resembles:

• Amos’s universal moral critique
• Isaiah’s vision of all nations streaming to Zion
• Micah’s demand for justice, mercy, and humility

Jesus is not legislating a new Torah; he is re‑reading Israel’s scriptures through a prophetic lens.

D. The Good Samaritan does not overturn Torah; it redefines “neighbor”

The parable does not say the Torah was too narrow. It says: “Go and do likewise.” The Torah’s command stands; Jesus reinterprets its scope.

This is hermeneutical expansion, not ethical invention.

E. Christianity did not consistently practice universal love

As the blog critic notes, Christian history includes:

• persecution of Jews
• coercive missions
• sectarian violence
• exclusion of heretics

This complicates Ehrman’s claim that Jesus’ ethic “transformed the moral conscience of the West.”

The Enlightenment, humanism, and modern liberalism also played major roles.

4. A More Accurate Framing

A more historically precise claim would be:

Jesus did not invent universal love; he radicalized, dramatized, and prioritized strands already present in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism, and early Christianity eventually amplified these themes—though unevenly—into Western moral thought.

This preserves Ehrman’s insight while avoiding overstatement.

5. Conclusion

Ehrman’s thesis is compelling as a narrative of moral development, but it risks flattening the richness of the Hebrew Bible and overstating discontinuity between Judaism and Jesus. The Torah’s ethic toward the stranger is already generous and theologically grounded; Jesus’ contribution is one of emphasis, rhetorical power, and prophetic universalization, not invention.