Bart Ehrman seems to have done it again: tapped a topic from the history of Christianity that is both controversial and timely. He’s really good at this, as shown in previous bestsellers like Misquoting Jesus, from 2005, which focused on changes made to the New Testament by scribes that have subsequently sown division.
This time, he touches on a spiritual practice that has universal importance, especially now. We are bringing this book to your attention because it is all about hospitality.
Ehrman explores the Jewish roots of Jesus of Nazareth and of Jesus’ teaching on hospitality. What is often called “the greatest commandment,” because those are the words that Jesus gave to it — “Love the stranger as yourself” — began as a rabbi teaching Torah. This transformed “love, charity, and forgiveness in the Greek and Roman worlds,” according to Ehrman’s powerful analysis.
Altruism of all kinds, from the personal to the governmental, owes its origins to Jesus' teaching, Ehrman says. I only wish that Ehrman would have provided a broader context for how Rabbinic Judaism, also, simultaneous with early Christianity, built these teaching and practices of care for the other. (Muhammad and Islam, later, too.) Instead, Ehrman claims for the Jesus movement, perhaps too strongly: “This ethic [altruism] is part of our psyche today because the Western world became Christian and, in some measure, adopted the views preached by the religion’s founder and his earliest followers.”
But this is an important book. Ehrman, who writes as a former Christian, rightfully points out that we live in a time when “There are more than enough people all around us … in scarily increasing numbers, even among those who most loudly proclaim their commitment to Christ and his teachings, who do not share an altruistic impulse toward strangers (or even family members), who live in complete isolation from others or, worse, who seek society in order to dominate it, striving for their own good at all costs and showing zero concern for the welfare of others.” To them, especially, Ehrman urges that the history of “the moral conscience of the West” is essential to understand.
