One of the points I try to emphasize in my book Love They Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West is that Jesus’ teachings were not made out of whole cloth but are deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible and teachings of other Jewish teachers of his day.  Here is one place in my book where I try to stress the point.

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Throughout the prophets of Hebrew Scripture (Isaiah, Amos, etc.) we find a recurring emphasis that God is concerned for the poor, the outcast, the vulnerable – and he expects his people to be actively concerned as well, helping rather than exploiting those in need.

 

Living centuries later and dealing with different situations, Jesus frequently aligned himself with such prophetic teachings.  He shared their assumptions about what it means to live as God wants – above all, to care for others and especially those in need, rather than for one’s own life and desires.  Jesus was not alone in this; similar views could be found in other Jewish teachers as well.  The “Golden Rule” is one of Jesus’s best known sayings, often taken to summarize his entire message: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”  Or as Jesus expresses it in the Sermon on the Mount: “Everything that you want people to do for you, do also for them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). As he suggests, for him this “rule” summarizes all of Scripture.

Jesus was not the first to articulate the rule: it had been around for centuries in a range of cultures from classical Greece to ancient China.  Often it was expressed in the negative: do not do to someone else what you do not want them to do to you (Herodotus, History, 3.142; Confucius Analects 15.23).[i]   Among Jewish teachers in Jesus’s day, it was given most famously by Rabbi Hillel, in a rather amusing anecdote.  A gentile approached the great teacher and asked him to teach him the Torah while standing on one foot.  Hillel did so, lifting one of his feet and then saying:  “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31).[ii]

Many of Jesus’ other teachings can also be found through the Jewish tradition before his day.  An interesting example involves someone else named Jesus living two centuries earlier.  This other Jesus calls himself “the son of Eleazar son of Sirach” and the book containing his teachings is therefore called The Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach (= Ben Sira) or Sirach for short.  This is one of the Deuterocanonical books that Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox accept as part of the Old Testament but Protestants do not (Protestants call these other books the Apocrypha). Jesus son of Sirach wrote the book in Hebrew but it was mainly preserved in a Greek translation made by his grandson, and then in Latin, where it is called Ecclesiasticus (not to be confused with the Hebrew Bible book of Ecclesiastes).

Among the many ethical teachings of Jesus son of Sirach to those of Jesus of Nazareth, consider the following:

 

Sirach:  “Do not reject a suppliant in distress, or turn your face away from the poor; Do not avert your eye from the needy and give no one reason to curse you” (Sirach 4:4-5, NRSV).    Jesus of Nazareth:  “ Give to all that ask of you; and do not turn away the one who wants to borrow from you” (Matthew 5:42).

Sirach: “Stretch out your hand to the poor, so that your blessing may be complete” (Sirach 7:32);   Jesus of Nazareth:  “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven” (Luke 6:20).

Sirach: “The Lord overthrows the thrones of the rules, and enthrones the lowly in their place” (Sirach 10:14); Jesus of Nazareth: “The first will be last and the last first” Matthew 20:16).

Sirach:  “The greater you are, the more you must humble yourself, so you will find favor in the sight of the Lord” (Sirach 3:18); Jesus of Nazareth:  “Everyone who humbles themselves will be exalted and the exalted will be humbled” Luke 14:11).

Sirach:  “Someone becomes rich through diligence and self denial…and he says ‘I have found rest, and now I shall feast on my goods!’ He does not know how long it will be until he leaves them to others and dies” (Sirach 11:18-19);  Jesus of Nazareth:  [speaking about the “rich fool” who builds bigger and better barns for all his produce and says:] “’Soul, you have ample good laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry’” but God says to him “’You fool!  This very night your life is being demanded of you’” Luke 12:16-21).

Sirach:   “Do not delay to return back to the Lord and do not postpone it from day to day; for suddenly the wrath of the Lord will come upon you and at the time of punishment you will perish” (Sirach, 5:6-7); Jesus of Nazareth:  “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15); ^“At that time there will be great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be….   Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” (Matthew 24:21, 34).

Clearly these teachings are not identical. Moreover, not all of Ben Sira’s teachings be found in the Gospels or all Jesus’s teachings in Sirach.  My point is they had very similar emphases, along with distinctive twists of their own.  As had other Jewish teachers at the time.[iii]  Comparable teachings sometimes occur in Greek and Roman moral philosophers as well, but many of the key foci of Jesus and other Jewish teachers, such as a focus on the poor and needy, are almost entirely lacking in pagan circles.

If many of Jesus’s ethical teachings were not revolutionary in his own Jewish context, why have I been saying they of Jesus that transformed the conscience of the western world?  Why not say that Jewish teachings did?   It is for two reasons.

One is that, as I try to explain in the books, some of Jesus’s distinctive emphases were not shared by most of his Jewish compatriots (so far as we have record) (just as the distinctive of other Jewish teachers were not shared by everyone), and these became prominent among the views endorsed by his later followers and important to Christians still today.

The other is it was Christianity, not Judaism, that took over the Roman world.  By the fifth century the majority of the Roman world was Christian, the emperors were Christian, and the thinking was Christian.  In terms of ethics, these later Christian teachings – many of which stood at odds with Greek and Roman moral philosophy — were specifically rooted in the sayings of the Jewish Jesus (not, say, in the teachings of Sirach or Rabbi Hillel).

 

[i] Sometimes, as in Herodotus, this is expressed less as a “rule” than as a personal life-policy.

[ii] Some scholars have claimed that Jesus was the first to phrase the Rule positively: “Do to others as you want them to do to you.”  But that is not true.  One positive expression of it, for example, comes over three centuries before Jesus in the writings of the Greek orator Isocrates, who expresses it in a variety of ways (see To Demonicus 1.41; 2.24, 38; 3.61; 4.81)

[iii] For further similarities of Jesus’s teachings with others of his day, see my discussion of Tobit on pp. xxx. Some of the most significant studies of almsgiving in Judaism before, during, and after the time of Jesus showing striking similarities with his views and those of his followers.  See especially Gary A. Anderson, Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) and Gregg Gardner, Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).  Gardner in particular shows the strikingly similar, parallel developments in understandings of charitable giving among Jews and early Christians in the early centuries CE, for example in the notions of giving without any expectation of repayment, of giving as an atonement for sin, and of rewards in the afterlife for charitable giving in this world.