Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The new book I'm writing about altruism, putting it in a nutshell, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Mike Johnson.
[00:00:10] As I've been writing my new book, tentatively called the invention of how the teachings of Jesus transformed the conscience of the west, I've been thinking about how I might summarize the basic argument. Here's what I've got to this point. I'd be happy to hear your reactions.
[00:00:28] Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy, a terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression. We feel pity for those who pointlessly suffer and sense a desire, even an obligation, to help, for example, by donating to disaster relief. Almost never do we know the people in need. They are complete strangers, often in far off lands, whom we will never meet and possibly wouldnt like if we did. Yet we, at least multitudes of us, want to help.
[00:01:06] This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is unnatural. It is not written into the human DNA. Nor did it exist in the ancient roots of our western cultural heritage in greek civilization, from the literary and philosophical greats of Homer and Plato onward, or in the roman world from its earliest history to its first christian emperor, Constantine many centuries later. The sense that anyone should help random strangers in faraway places was simply not part of the moral equation.
[00:01:38] Why, then, is it part of the equation today? Why does this urge to provide assistance for some of us, quite intense, for others, admittedly faint, seem like moral common sense, not just among religious folk, but among agnostics and atheists as well, a common sense that affects not only our individual psyches and actions, but also widely held social agendas and governmental policies. My argument in this book will seem obvious to some and implausible to others. The impulse to help strangers in need is part of our modern moral conscience because of the teachings of Jesus.
[00:02:20] My claim is that as Christianity spread throughout the ancient world after Jesus death, it revolutionized the understanding of ethical obligation, leading to a fundamental transformation in the moral conscience of the west.
[00:02:34] Hominids did, of course, engage in altruistic behavior before Jesus, even before the appearance of homo sapiens some 300 millennia earlier.
[00:02:44] Moreover, in the centuries leading up to Jesus, nearly everyone in the greek and roman worlds agreed that helping others was not just appropriate but right and obligatory in some circumstances.
[00:02:57] My argument is that prior to the emergence of the christian tradition, altruistic acts and the rhetoric connected with them focused almost exclusively on close genetic and social relationship, principally family and friends, and less frequently, others like us, members of the same community and socioeconomic class. But the importance of caring for strangers and outsiders, the others who were suffering, was not merely absent from the discussion. It was considered nonsense.
[00:03:30] I will, of course, need to document this claim. But even granting it is true, one might unreflectively suppose that a widespread interest in the other could not be expected before the technologies of mass communications. It is a bit hard to sympathize with the millions of people starving in Somalia. If youve never heard of Somalia, dont know that there are millions of people there and are not keeping up with the recent tragedies on the ground.
[00:03:58] There is obviously a good bit of truth to that view, but it is also important to remember that mass communication is a remarkably recent phenomenon. The moral obligation to help the unknown other was firmly entrenched in the western psyche a millennium and a half ago.
[00:04:16] One might also object that altruism was long attested and promoted outside the west. In other parts of the world, at other periods of history. That may indeed be true. But there is almost no convincing argument that western mores derived from cultures in, say, Southeast Asia or China. Important and intriguing parallel developments notwithstanding, altruistic acts toward the unknown other arose and developed internally in the West.
[00:04:48] I will not be arguing Jesus invented this kind of altruism. On the contrary, Jesus inherited it in large measure from the Hebrew Bible and derivative jewish teachings of his day. Unlike other religious traditions of the West, Judaism had long emphasized the obligation to care for the poor, the needy, the outcast, and the oppressed. On the other hand, it was not Judaism that transformed the conscience of the West. Jews comprised only a sliver of the roman world in Jesus day and remained a small and marginal religious, ethnic, and cultural group up to modern times. It was Christianity that took over the greco roman world when the west became christian religious and cultural leaders, and in part and at times its political rulers, promoted aspects of a social agenda rooted in the teachings of Jesus. A new set of ethical concerns and practices emerged that generated the moral conscience widely shared to today.
[00:05:55] It is not that the christian church ever constituted a monolith with a single sense of ethical obligations, any more than it endorsed a single set of doctrinal teachings or ritual practices. On the contrary, the church was startlingly diverse in virtually every way, especially in its earliest centuries. Moreover, as I will be arguing, very few christians actually accepted, adopted, and preached the strict ethical injunctions of Jesus himself. Just a few years after his death, his followers and their converts faced new situations in unexpected contexts completely different from those of their founder, an itinerant jewish preacher in the sparsely populated hinterlands of rural Galilee. Christian leaders adjusted Jesus teachings accordingly, often altering and almost always modulating them. But the basic core of Jesus teachings lived on, especially in christian rhetoric, but often as well in practice. None of his teachings proved more important for the cultural history of the west than his insistence that his followers care for the poor and needy. By the fifth century, this teaching began to make an enormous practical difference in the lives of many on the margins of society.
[00:07:18] Prior to the christian takeover, there were no orphanages, poorhouses, old persons homes, or public hospitals. There was no governmental assistance specifically directed to help those in need and no private charities to minister to the poor, homeless, and hungry. These are christian inventions that revolutionized the social world of the west and changed the common sense about what it means to be a good person.
