(13 votes, average: 4.69 out of 5)
Loading...My next book will be dealing with how the teachings of Jesus transformed the understanding of what it meant to live a good life and to be a good person in the Western world. One of the most important areas I’ll be focusing on is Jesus’ emphasis on going out of one’s way to help those in need — not just family and friends, but even complete strangers. What we think of as privately funded charities, governmental support of the needy, and individual assistance for those we hear about virtually didn’t exist in the pagan/polytheistic world of the Roman empire before then. It exists big time now, and it almost certainly would not have happened apart from the influence of Jesus’ followers, as Christianity became the dominant religion of the West and transformed culture, society, and government. And now this commitment to help others in need seems rooted in our DNA (well, obviously not in all of us!), whether we identify as Christian or not.
The original motivation for the Bart Ehrman Blog was to raise money for charity. I absolutely would not have begun it, in 2012, for any other reason. I do, of course, believe strongly in providing scholarly knowledge about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the history and writings of early Christianity, and lots of cognate fields to non-scholars, and this is a terrific avenue in which to do it. But there’s no way I would have started the blog just for that reason. Too much work! And I have (and had) plenty other venues to do that in through writing, lecturing, giving interviews and so on.
I started the blog because someone convinced me that it could generate revenue and that I could give it all away. Whoa. Now THAT was a good idea.
So I did it. And here you are, reading it. Every week (going on twelve years now) I have published 5-6 posts and you, the members, pay a small fee to read them. In addition, some of you generously make independent donations to the blog.
ALL of your membership fees and separate donations are completely tax deductible (in the US). And every penny goes to charity. I don’t keep any for myself and we don’t take any of it for overhead. As a result, we’ve raised well over two million dollars for charity, and we are growing all the time. Nearly half of that amount has come from the past two years.
With all that in mind I’d like to remind you of the charities we support. From the outset of the operation I decided to support two international charities that have no political/ideological commitments apart from helping those in need (hunger, homelessness, disaster relief) and two charities local to me (focusing on hunger and homelessness). A few years ago I added one local (focusing on literacy). Your fees and donations go directly to all of these.
If you would like to donate to any of them, it is easy enough just to do it through the blog. If you don’t designate a specific one, we’ll put the donation in the general fund up to go out proportionally to each; if you have one in particular you’d like your funds to go to, just tell us (write a note to [email protected]) and we’ll make it happen.
Here, now are the charities. They are all impressive. Check them out online if you don’t know about them already.
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- Doctors Without Borders: What do I need to say? This is one of the truly great humanitarian charities in the world, without question, a bright light shining in our universe, active in all the crises we read about in the paper and many, many that (pathetically, frustratingly, aggravatingly) never make an appearance there. By their own summary: “Doctors Without Borders provides medical care to people in nearly 70 countries worldwide, saving lives threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe. As a humanitarian organization, we treat people in crisis regardless of race, religion, or political affiliation.” http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
- CARE: CARE is a hugely successful international relief agency that works in nearly 90 countries. Founded in 1945, CARE is nonsectarian, impartial, and non-governmental. As they say: “implementing long-term programs to fight poverty, responding to humanitarian emergencies, and advocating for policy change to improve the lives of the poorest people.” They deal with heart-rending problems with dignity and integrity, again in all the major crisis situations we know about and many we (most of us) don’t: http://www.care.org/
- The Urban Ministries of Durham: This charity is near and dear to my heart, the agency that deals with hunger and homelessness in my own part of the universe. It is an absolutely amazing “ministry” (it is not religious in any way; the term is used in the sense that they “serve” those in need). They certainly deal with pressing needs of members of the community through their homeless shelter, community kitchen, food pantry, and clothing pantry. But even more impressive and arguably important, in addition Urban Ministries works diligently to get people off homelessness and into permanent jobs and permanent housing. Last year they ended homelessness for 287 people. Anyone interested in seeing what a local organization can do, and do brilliantly, should check out their work at http://umdurham.org/.
- Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina: This, too, is a phenomenal organization which deals with food distribution to the needy throughout my part of the state. The quantity of food they collect from all kinds of sources and the complex distribution process they undertake are logistically mind-boggling. They literally keep people from starving – an increased desideratum during Covid and now an ongoing one because of the post-epidemic economy. You can see what they are about at http://www.foodbankcenc.org
- The Durham Literacy Center: Literacy Centers throughout the nation are doing a world of good, teaching those who need help learning to speak, read, and write English, training them to be productive and happy citizens and valuable contributors to our society. The Durham Literacy Center does amazing work with numerous programs – English instruction, skills classes, high school equivalency, and and and – all of them improving the lives of people who need help, and thereby making significant contributions to my city and state – and through that, to the known universe. To see more about them, check them out at https://www.durhamliteracy.org/.
The Bart Ehrman Foundation in Durham, NC is a tax exempt organization. Donations to The Bart Ehrman Foundation are tax deductible in the US. EIN 45-4810987. For more information about it, go here: http://www.orgcouncil.com/nc/durham/bart-ehrman-foundation-987.php
[chariycta]
I’m a very proud member of this blog and always wishing I were rich to be able to contribute more,
a scholar to be able to join others in contributing something meaningful and a IT professional to help with that. Instead, I enjoy the blog every day and have learned so much not just from you, Professor Ehrman, but also from all the others who have something to add.
Thanks so much! And we’re pround to have you!
I watched a roundtable discussion on religion from several years ago with “The Four Horsemen,” Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. They seemed almost evangelistic in their zeal to convince people that religion has had a very negative influence on humanity over the years and that we’d be better off without it. Indeed, much evil has been done in the name of religion, even Christianity. However, I can’t help but think that the overall effect has been mostly positive, that of Christianity and the teachings of Jesus in particular, charity being perhaps the best example.
I’d say there’s been a mountain of good and a mountain of bad, and most people can see only one of the mountains. My sense is that most of the bad would have happened on other grounds if religion wasn’t around (as is empirically demonstrable, historically); as to the good, probably that too, but I’m not completely sure….
I tend to think religion in general has helped keep us, humanity, maybe a little closer to the “straight and narrow” than we otherwise might have been, through fear of punishment if for no other reason. Then again, maybe not. Hard to say.
Hi Bart, love what you do with the blog. Just read Armageddon and joined.
I was wondering if you knew why Christians shifted from Sabbath as the day of worship to Sunday?
Is this shift one of those “orthodox corruptions of scripture”?
Thanks
It appears to have been because it was the day Jesus was thought to have been raised from the dead; that’s also why it came to be called “the Lord’s day”
Will your book be going into the reasons why the polytheistic/pagan world didn’t have charity as we think of it? Human nature doesn’t change. Was there just too much competition for resources in the ancient world to think about the survival of anyone beyond your immediate family?
Yup. And I’m not sure what you mean that human nature doesn’t change?
I simply meant that people don’t start acting in a completely different way than they’ve done for centuries (i.e. giving to charity or setting up charitable institutions) unless there is a powerful societal reason for the change in behavior. If humans aren’t charitable by nature to those outside their immediate tribe or family, there must be a powerful external reason for the change.
That’s right. THere needs to be some reason for the change. But it happens a lot over the long duree of human civilization.
Well done on the charity work – I run a homeless charity.
But…
“and it almost certainly would not have happened apart from the influence of Jesus’ followers”
Since it happened in the East without Jesus followers I find this statement absolutely ridiculous.
People and groups hide behind the name of Jesus because the name is considered the acme of ethics. Nothing could be further from the truth when the NT is read objectively – which is hard even for most scholars to do. But some can…
From Biblical Truths by Dale Martin (a Christian scholar)
page 173 – What Jesus Is Not
“But even if we stick with the Jesus portrayed in our four Gospels it is hard to see why people so blandly claim that Jesus was what most of them would call a great moral teacher. True, in some contexts Jesus taught a supreme ethic of love. But Jesus teaches much else in the Gospels.”
See:
The Bad Jesus the ethics of NT ethics by Hector Avalos
American Holocaust by David Stannard (see Christian “charity” in the New World)
Bye Blog! I’ve had fun here but am not renewing and this will be my last post, last visit to this blog.
Thanks,
SC
The teachings of Jesus (and Judism), though not new or unique in the world, spread out and became a religion, which was adopted by the largest empires in the world. The “East” kept to the East, and did not spread throughout all nations as Judeo Christianity (and later Islam) did. So I agree whole hartedly with Bart on that statement.
A thought: It would help in navigating the site (especially when one is reading a blog entry with a lot of comments), if the “Click for the Next Post>” button was also at the bottom below all the comments, as well as below the original blog. Thanks.
THanks! We’re coming out wiht a new version of the blog this year, and will be trying to improve things like this.
This post reminds me of a suggestion I had about a year or two ago. With the new version, can you create a mechanism whereby subscribers can click somewhere to see all of one’s own previous comments in the history of the blog?
Don’t know! I’ll pass the suggestion along.
Should be six stars on this post
Jesus would be really proud of you Bart! 🙂
SC sadly seems to have missed your qualifying words earlier limiting the scope to “the Western world” and “the Roman empire”.
It happens!
“What we think of as privately funded charities, governmental support of the needy, and individual assistance for those we hear about virtually … almost certainly would not have happened apart from the influence of Jesus’ followers”
“almost certainly”? For government support of the needy? That seems like a naive view.
Economic historians tend to see the emergence of the 19th century welfare state as a conservative, sometimes anti democratic phenomenon intended to contain working class unrest. And continuing in the postwar period of full democracies driven by politics.
Are you saying that it is naive because governments never would have supported the needy or because they certainly would have? The first real governmental support comes in legislation of Constantine, after he converted to be a Christian, in the fourth century. A couple of decades later, his nephew Julian (the apostate), a pagan, lamented the fact that Christians supported the needy and indicated that the pagan authorities needed to start doig that as well. That suggests that governmental support of the needy in the Roman world (it didn’t exist before that, and nowhere in the Greek word). was because of Christian influence.
I read the quote as suggesting that the modern welfare state wouldn’t have happened “apart from the influence of Jesus’ followers”, but I don’t think economic historians believe that, there were other forces driving that.
My sense is that economic history is not restricted to what’s happened since the Enlighenment and the formation of the modern nation-state, but that it has deeper roots. I don’t think modern *systems* (socialism; capitalism; Marxism) have deeper roots per se, but the sense of what a government should be for (which these systems try to expedite) absolutely do. And in the West, the idea that the governmental authorities should help those in need cannot be documented prior to 315 and 322 with two edicts of the now-converted Constantine, as recorded in the Theodosian Code.
I love supporting these charities through my blog subscription! I have to admit though, I dislike the argument that “without Christianity, we would not have any cultural notion of charity or any charitable institutions”. It’s a favorite argument of Christian apologists who want to defend the superiority (and in their view, therefore, truthfulness) of the Christian belief. What I would say is this: We don’t know – and can’t know – what we would have if Christianity had not become dominant. Without Christianity, we might also not have had millennia of entrenched misogyny, or antijudaism culminating in antisemitism. But we simply can’t know. My question: In your book, will you explore the notion of charity (or lack of?) in non-Christian societies? For example, the Far East or pre-Columbian America?
Yes, it’s possible. But there was no such thing in the Western world before Christianity. As I just said to another commenter: The first real governmental support for those in need comes in legislation of Constantine, after he converted to be a Christian, in the fourth century. A couple of decades later, his nephew Julian (the apostate), a pagan, lamented the fact that Christians supported the needy and indicated that the pagan authorities needed to start doig that as well. That suggests that governmental support of the needy in the Roman world (it didn’t exist before that, and nowhere in the Greek word). was because of Christian influence.
As to charitable instutions: in the West (again, I’m talking about Western culture ,and that’s all I’ll be addressing in my book), orphanages, poor houses, and public hospitals were all Christian inventions. Whether the western pagan world would have adopted charitable practices without Xty, who knows? They didn’t during all the centuries before Christians came along, at any rate. As to the harm Christianity has done — no argument here.
The gospels were written in Greek.
The gospel of Matthew contains stoic philosophy.
The gospel of John contains platonic philosophy.
The gospel of Mark contain Homeric themes.
The Acts of the Apostles contains Hellenists.
“The guardians of the traditional ways, notably the ultra-pious Hasidim, who were the forerunners of the Pharisees, sought to discourage and repel Hellenizing incursions.
But what they dismissed as alien intrusions became attractive to increasing numbers of urban Jews. A split deepened in Judaean society between those who considered Hellenization a welcome, invigorating modernization of Judaism and traditionalists who saw it as destructive of Jewish identity.”
Norman Gelb, author of Herod the Great: Statesman, Visionary, Tyrant
Chapter 5: Cultural Divide, p. 99
Even though the Pharisees approved of resurrection, Jesus went on a tirade against Pharisees, “brood of vipers.”
Bart, as a response to the Jewish Revolt, the Jesus movement was not rebellious and the gospels show contrary to being rebellious, the Jewish movement of Christianity could assimilate into Greco-Roman culture?
Steve Campbell
author of Historical Accuracy
Professor Ehrman, I appreciate what you have done.
But welfare was not rare or unknown in Roman world before Constantine.
In late republican times were approved some Leges Frumentariae. The first was the Lex Sempronia Frumentaria proposed in 123 BCE by the Plebeian Tribune Caius Sempronius Gracchus.
Was followed by Lex Terentia et Cassia (73 BCE) and by Lex Clodia (58 BCE).
It stipulated that the wheat distributed with the frumentationes should be given free of charge to the poor. Provision was made for the appointment of a curator annonae who was responsible for managing the lists of those entitled. Clodius was the first to propose completely free distributions and to avoid setting a limited number of beneficiaries who could take advantage.
The Clodian measure had important repercussions on the economy: to finance it it was necessary to spend an annual one-fifth of the revenue that Rome received from taxes for a sum of 64 million sesterces.
The Alimenta was a Roman welfare program that existed from around 98 AD to 272 AD. It was probably introduced by Nerva and was later expanded by Trajan. It was designed to subsidise orphans and poor children throughout Italy with a cash income, food and subsidized education.
Have you read Garnsey’s Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco Roman world. He clears up a lot of the misunderstandins about the various doles. They weren’t free and of course only went to a fraction of the populace, and were not based on poverty. These distributions were not charity in our sense: they were designed to keep the masses from rioting, since food crises were one of the major causes of civic unrest from far back in the Republic and on up thorugh the Empire.
An interesting article about this topic was written by P. Lampe.
Professor of New Testament Studies, University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Acta Theologica vol.36 suppl.23 Bloemfontein 2016.
Social welfare in the Greco-Roman world as a background for Early Christian practice.
He seems less biased than other authors and keen to admit that Christians did not invent from scratch charitable institutions. He briefly talks about Leges Frumentariae and about the Alimenta promoted by Nerva and Trajan too.
Trajan’s Tabula Alimentaria, from Veleia, inscription on bronze.
“The institution of the Alimenta, wanted by the emperor Trajan, consisted of a mortgage loan granted to landowners -obligatio praedorium- whose interest was donated to the maintenance of poor children, with the twofold aim of increasing agricultural activities and supporting poor families to counteract the depopulation of the countryside.”
In the ancient world, especially Greek, many charity acts were made by wealthy citizens. Sometimes, but not always, donations were done for political reasons (patricians helping their plebeian clientes to get their vote).
But it wasn’t only a private business. The governments of Athens and other city states cared about orphans, especially sons of fallen soldiers.
About this topic:
Richard Cudjoe, The Social and Legal Position of Widows and Orphans in Classical Athens (Panteion University 2000).
Yes, Lampe’s is an absolutely terrific summary (esp. of the classic work in German that most people don’t read because, well, it’s long and in German!). But the doles were not really charity in our sense of helping the poor because of their desperate need (so much as helping the city and its needs, and the rich folk and theirs)
I greatly appreciate your commitment to charity. While it may be “too much work”, I ask you to remember that we all have our crosses to bear. Simon of Cyrene must be just around the corner. Of course there is Diane.
I gave out tens of thousands of dollars buying Andrew Murray books in Chinese characters to folks in Shanghai. particularly “New Life” & “WAITing on God”
Recipients asked my distributers anything else? If they focused their lives on living their lives as taught by Andrew Murray, next Revival!
Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done!
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/24/1226371734/religious-nones-are-now-the-largest-single-group-in-the-u-s Nones could prove to be an important political group
Gregory Smith at Pew was the lead researcher on the study, titled “Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe.”
He says the growth of Nones could affect American public life.
“We know politically for example,” Smith says, “that religious Nones are very distinctive. They are among the most strongly and consistently liberal and Democratic constituencies in the United States.”
And that could change electoral politics in the coming decades.
The political power of white Evangelicals has been well-reported in recent decades, but their numbers are shrinking while the number of the more liberal Nones is on the rise.