Scholars tend to think Jesus’ saying to the rich young man to sell his possessions and give them to the poor goes back to the historical Jesus because it is an impediment to evangelizing for obvious reasons (who would want to follow it?) and it contradicts the evangelists’ message that getting right with God comes through the cross (of course you can interpret the cross as moral influence rather than substitutionary atonement, which resolves the contradiction).  This fits with Jesus’ saying that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven.  On like grounds scholars usually allow the persecutor saying that “You have heard it said love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you love your enemy and bless those who persecute you.”  Why would anyone be willing to die to save their enemies?

 At first glance Ehrman’s argument seems similar to philosopher David Goicoechea’s Postmodern Ethics series, of which we read:

The three traits of personhood–that all persons are equal in dignity, that each is unique, and that all persons are interpersonal–is rooted in that love which is agape.   It is examined philosophically with Kierkegaard as he explains the logic of reconciling love, which can happen when I love the other, even my enemy, as more important than myself. The logic of reconciling love is then examined in Paul’s seven authentic letters. The history of how humans became seen as persons and how this idea developed in the West is then examined through nine moments of history.

Goicoechea was a good friend and I’m posting on his books in tandem with Ehrman’s new book as they appear to cover similar material.  So, we have a bold and controversial thesis, and the goal will be to weigh the pros and cons.  I think that where these authors are going is with Jesus’ interpretation of the apocalyptic framework, we get a new ethics of loving widow, orphan, stranger, and enemy as more important than self (“you have heard it said love your neighbor and hate your enemy …. but I say to you love your enemy – bless those who persecute you…”), and Paul’s idea there is neither male nor female, bond nor free, but all are one – though Paul in his apocalyptic urgency was not concerned with social reform.

• David Goicoechea’s Introduction to Paul

In Paul we have a new kind of interpretation of suffering that is a suffering that transforms one’s enemy:

Saul as a Pharisee believed in life after death but all this started becoming real for him in a new way as he experienced the death and dying of Stephen for Stephen loved and forgave him while being stoned. All of this was very vivid in Saul’s mind… Saul did not forget the glory on the face of Stephen that made present the love of Jesus even in his absence. Saul got on his horse and started riding back to Damascus. The loving, beautiful, glorious face of Stephen haunted him. That look became for him the agapeic event that converted the negative, hateful heart of Saul into the loving heart of Paul…Paul had always believed in the Jewish double command of love: Love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, mind and soul and your neighbor as yourself. (Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:18) What happened when he experienced Jesus’ love in Stephen is that Paul’s understanding of “neighbor” began to change. The Jew thought that his neighbor was his fellow Jew. But Stephen loved each and every person as his neighbor and he especially loved his enemies and his persecutors. What Paul experienced in Stephen was a universal love for all persons and especially for the most unlovable such as Saul who was bent on slaughtering Christians…Of course, there was complexity in the Jewish tradition and there was the long tradition of loving widows, orphans and aliens. Those aliens could be Gentiles and in Second Isaiah there was the Suffering Servant who prays for and forgives his persecutors. Gamaliel in The Acts of the Apostles right before the Stephen story advises the Jews not to persecute the followers of Jesus because if they are not of God they will soon fizzle out and if they are of God who should have or do anything against them? Paul very much belonged to the apocalyptic tradition which was a meaningful way of thinking for those who are persecuted. It started with Ezekiel on the banks of the Euphrates when the deported Jewish people wept when they remembered Jerusalem…So in Paul’s mind there was a great urgency to decide to be either with the forces of evil or with the forces of good. A long history of apocalyptic thinking had prepared him for this exclusivistic logic of the either/or and thus he was always a very passionate man and never lukewarm. From Ezekiel to Daniel to the Maccabees, apocalyptic writing, which was unveiled in symbols to console a persecuted people was concerned with death, judgment and either heaven or hell. Apocalyptic thinking assumed a resurrection of the dead and the persecuted were waiting for “the day of Yahweh” or the end of the world when the judge of the nations would come to reward the good and punish the evil. The Jewish religion of the covenant and the law up until the apocalyptic movement was exclusively for Jews and not for Gentiles who were not people of the covenant. But in apocalyptic thinking there was a universal dualism that was cosmic, psychological, and ethical so that all of humankind was engaged in a battle of chaos against cosmos. When Paul converted to the Lord Jesus Christ he saw him as the Apocalyptic Christ who would provide salvation for all if they would but convert from evil to good as he did. Paul saw himself as called to be the apostle to the Gentiles. Many Greco-Roman Hellenists already knew of the apocalyptic battle because of the Stoic idea about the coming of the end of the world. Paul experienced first hand the love of the resurrected Christ in the loving face of Stephen and he heard the voice of the Spirit of the resurrected Christ calling him on the road to Damascus. He felt that Christ had placed him at the centre of the human drama.  Goicoechea, David. Agape and Personhood: with Kierkegaard, Mother, and Paul (A Logic of Reconciliation from the Shamans to Today) (Postmodern Ethics Book 2) (p. 75-7). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

And further:

Paul’s love for Christ who saved him from his wicked ways put Paul under a compulsion to go out and save others. His life was a living prayer of love, repentance, thanksgiving and petition to Christ his savior and with the most passionate inwardness he preached the Good News to the world.  Paul came from Tarsus and was a Roman citizen and a Stoic as well as a Jew and an apocalyptic Pharisee. He knew the great Stoic answer to the problem of suffering which went back to Alexander the Great and his General, Pyrrho, who brought to Greece the Buddhist idea of universal suffering and the answer to it is apathy or detachment from passion. Paul’s conversion took him to a new solution to the problem of suffering which he saw in Stephen and in Jesus who showed that a passionate and graceful suffering for others was a way of loving that could reveal the worth of all suffering. Just as Stephen had lovingly suffered for Paul so now Paul spent his life suffering for others to teach them its worth… What amazed Paul in his conversion experience was the presence of the loving body of Christ first in Stephen’s suffering love and then in the loving words that spoke to him in his blindness. Goicoechea, David. Agape and Personhood: with Kierkegaard, Mother, and Paul (A Logic of Reconciliation from the Shamans to Today) (Postmodern Ethics Book 2) (p. 78-80). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Now, I think the idea of suffering to transform your enemy is very much in Plato, both in the prayer to Asclepius in the Phaedo and the Impaled Just Man in the Republic, but this is a story for another day … Socrates’ unjust death dis-closed something hidden and malignant in society with the result we no longer execute people for being a gadfly as Socrates was.