What was so transformative about Jesus’ moral message? A lot of my students assume that before Jesus came along, there wasn’t morality in the Greek and Roman worlds. That’s absolutely not right. So I am absolutely not arguing like, Jesus introduced the idea of love into the world, the idea of altruism into the world. What I am arguing is that we today, almost all of us, whether we’re Christian, whether we’re agnostic, atheist, whatever we are, whatever we are in the West, when there’s a disaster that happens, we feel like we ought to do something about it. There’s a hurricane, there’s wildfires, there’s an earthquake, and we feel like we ought to do something. So we might send a check, for example, or we retire and we decide to volunteer in the soup kitchen. We’re helping people we don’t know and we probably never will know, and we may not like when we get to know, if we did get to know them. So why do we help them? That sense that we should help people in need, even if we don’t know them, ultimately derives from the teachings of Jesus. In Greek and Roman moral philosophy at the time, this was not an issue at all. You were not, you were not supposed to be helping people who just because they were in need, but that Jesus — based a large part on his Jewish background, but with some transformations of what he himself knew growing up — is the one who made this part of our conscience. And so that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the West, including the invention of public hospitals, orphanages, old people’s homes, private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, governmental assistance to those who are poor. All of those are Christian innovations you can establish historically. I think it’s pretty obvious that you also want to make a point that’s relevant to our moral and political debates right now. Is that fair? It is. So what would that point — what do you want readers, Christian or otherwise, to take away from this argument that connects to, let’s say, America in the age of Donald Trump? Well, so I don’t get overtly political. I’m not arguing for a particular political position or social agenda position or not. What I am saying is that if people claim to be followers of Jesus, they ought to follow his teachings. And his teachings are quite clear that you should care for people who are not like you, the other. You’re not supposed to bomb them back to Stone Age and you’re not supposed to make them suffer because you don’t like them or you don’t want them among you. You’re supposed to take care of them. But what bothers me is that so many Christians in our world claim to be Christians, claim to be followers of Jesus, and don’t follow his most basic teaching about this.
