An introduction to Jesus of Nazareth considered as an ancient moral philosopher

In this essay, I summarize the views of Jesus, considered as an ancient philosopher which an educated person should know something about.

I’ll start by laying my cards on the table. I grew up Christian, but I left the faith relatively early.

I’m coming to this from a state of despair. The point that “haha, many people who claim to follow Jesus really do no such thing”, has been made many times, but today I saw something that made me snap. There was a debate about the following situation. A man was helping raise a child, and the child viewed him as his father. Then, a paternity test showed that the man was not his father. Did the man have an obligation to continue to help raise the child? A guy who had an Eastern Orthodox icon of Christ as his profile picture was calling everyone who said yes a “cuck”.

Here’s the problem with that. A lot of what Jesus said is written down. It’s pretty coherent. Jesus was a specific person, with particular philosophical views on morality, philosophy and theology. You can read what he said (or what the biblical Jesus said at any rate) very easily. He’s not just an icon that means “whatever I agree with”. Whatever you think about this sort of thing morally, it is, at the very least, poor scholarship to not check the primary sources.

In short, I’m sick of people using Jesus as a symbol for whatever they want to think anyway. Jesus was a sophisticated religious and philosophical thinker. His beliefs envisage a relatively simple, compelling, but horrifically demanding moral philosophy that should fascinate, inspire and frighten us.

In this essay, I want to consider the Jesus described in the bible as a moral philosopher. In an increasingly secular world, many of us know less and less of what Jesus said, and even those who have read what he said have tried studiously to misunderstand it. It’s my hope to contribute to public education by summarizing his views in much the same way that I would summarize the views of, say, Socrates. He’s an important ancient philosopher and so you should know a bit about him, in order to better understand the society he shaped.

Here’s a bunch of things I will absolutely not be doing.

1. Considering Jesus as a Christian would, as the incarnation of the one God and savior of the world.

2. Considering Jesus as an atheist, seeking to disprove Jesus’s claims. This essay aims to be entirely neutral on the divinity of Christ (something I suspect Jesus himself would have thought was impossible, e.g. Matthew 12:30- “he who is not with me is against me”)

3. “Secularize” Jesus, discounting the theological aspects of what he said.

4. “Historicize” Jesus, seeking the real Jesus behind the stories.

Rather I want to take the biblical gospels, and consider them as works of philosophy in their own right. Essentially, I want to read the gospels as if Christianity were an obscure sect that had died out not long after the death of Christ, the gospels survived as our only record, and I were a historian of philosophy reading them as a philosophical (and religious) text.

It is my vain hope that this will stop some people from believing, or pretending to believe, very silly things about the biblical Jesus when several primary sources all about him are very easily available to read.

The moral philosophy of Jesus

I take the core moral teachings of Jesus to be as follows:

A) Moral obligations to God flow from love and as such should reflect a practice of love before specific rules.

B ) Morality between people flows from very simple premises. 1. Value everyone’s welfare as much as you value your own. 2. Everyone means everyone. This is framed in terms of loving each other. Love is, fundamentally, not defined as a feeling but defined as a willingness to sacrifice your own interests and even body on behalf of the other: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13-14. (We should recognize that R Hillel, the esteemed ancient Rabbi said something similar, replying to one who asked him to summarize the law, he said that one must love the Lord God with all your heart, and love others as yourself and that all the rest of the law is commentary)

C) God has various ceremonial and religious requirements of us, but before all else, what God wants for us is to care for one another. Thus point A reinforces point B. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You pay tithes of mint, dill, and cumin. But you have disregarded the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”- Matthew 23:23-24

For the same reason Jesus is portrayed as healing others on the Sabbath, allowing his disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath etc.

D) Both these forms of moral obligation- to God and man- should reflect a logic of love, not duty. To truly love someone, one must do everything one can for the beloved. The chief signifier of love is, again, the willingness to make sacrifices on behalf of the beloved. If you are thinking in terms like “how much do I owe”- e.g., how much do I need to do to be a good person you have already failed because someone who truly loves others doesn’t make accounts like this, they are as quick to act for other’s interests as their own.

E) Thus, morality is infinitely demanding, you can’t “do enough” and just leave it, the value of your actions is equal to your degree of self-sacrifice on behalf of others and on behalf of God. You are obligated to sacrifice, at least potentially, everything. Give everything you have to the poor (“Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide yourselves with purses that will not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.…” -Luke 12:33-34) and potentially sacrifice your own life (as above). This is simply what you would do, if you actually cared about other people as much as yourself, and the Lord your God with all your heart.

A collorary of the above is that since God loves everyone, he identifies himself with their interests. Thus any action you take against other people is really action against God, and any action you take for others is really action for God. “Whatever you do unto the least of my brothers, you do unto me”. If you deny your brother water, you are denying God water, and so on.

F) Because we all fall so far short of the standard of morality- of loving each other and God totally-, all moral failures are arbitrarily bad, and we all make moral failures all the time. This is not to say that some sins aren’t worse than others- Jesus complains about those who “strain out a gnat while swallowing a camel” after all, but trying to see oneself as a qualitatively less bad sinner than others is futile. See for example:

“To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable:  “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”” Luke 18:9-14

G) This part you will probably know because Christians emphasize it a lot. Because our actions fall infinitely short, an infinite act of mercy is required to reconcile us with God. The interesting flipside of this, however, is that the very same standards that God holds which mean that we will fail, also mean that God chooses to extend us a chance. The necessity of our failure, and God’s mercy on our failures flow simultaneously from the reality that God’s moral code is infinitely demanding- that infinite demand falls both on us (requiring us to do the impossible) and God (requiring him to give us a way out).

H) You can’t really accept infinite grace while refusing to extend forgiveness to others. For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you -Matthew 6:14

I suspect the reasoning here might be as follows. If you won’t forgive someone else, it’s because you regard their sins as fundamentally worse than your own. But that means you can’t have truly grasped the infinite magnitude of your own sins.

I) Our infinite failure means that seeking to make moral distinctions which elevate some as worthy and others as unworthy is a farce, and really serves as a club for some of the most immoral people in society to assert themselves as moral rulers. (E.g. in numerous passages Jesus attacks the Pharisees and scribes for using religious and moral ideas in self-serving ways and try to escape the demands of real morality, and give themselves status over others.)

J) Because we are all obligated to do as much as we can, those who can do the most for others, but are not doing so, are the most culpable and the most morally reprehensible. Chiefly this includes the rich. (See the story of the Widow’s Mite). By the same token, the poor are to be exalted. It is perhaps a little unclear on Jesus’s philosophy why the poor should be exalted, as opposed to merely punished somewhat less than the rich, but that’s what the text says. “Blessed are you who are poor”.

K) True moral leadership has the inverse of the normal trappings of leadership, it means accepting indignities. “And whoever would be first must be your slave”- Matthew 20:2

Jesus as proto-utilitarian

Do unto others as you would have done unto you seems to me, fundamentally, to be an approximation of utilitarianism. Obviously, the slogan, as formulated, is vulnerable to counterexamples. What if you’re a masochist? Just because you want to be beaten up does not mean that you should beat others up. However, it seems to me that “do unto others as you would have done unto you” is meant to approximate “do unto others as they want to be done unto themselves” in situations where you have no specific information about what they want. Like the Act Utilitarian- a utilitarian who holds that we should evaluate each action by its likely consequences on the welfare of others- Jesus thinks that our moral decision-making should be rooted in a fundamental concern for the wellbeing of others. Jesus attributes to God the same concern for the wellbeing of others, taking precedence over ceremonial concerns (e.g. healing on the Sabbath)

I actually feel a great deal of kinship in that, for Jesus, the heart of morality is concern for others, but he’s a fair bit vaguer on formulating exactly what care for others means. Jesus proposes a heuristic (do to other people the same thing you’d want done to yourself) that works for a lot of cases, but falls apart in others. Similarly, I think all of morality is about caring for the welfare of other people, but I’m not really sure what that welfare consists in.

Jesus had no time for honor culture or attempts to impress with aggressive masculinity

Jesus, unlike the odd character that made me write this post, had no time for interpersonal aggression, or assertion of one’s real manliness:

That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

Note that his warning against anger is “without cause", but there is no mention of cause or not in the case of one who calls his brother a fool. One could read this as suggesting that calling someone a fool endangers one with hellfire even if one has cause. Certainly I don’t think Jesus was holding the mental reservation “unless they called you a fool first” as he said this.

The duty to forgive is infinite:

Then Peter came up and said to him, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?   As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven." (we can take “70x7 here as meaning “an indefinitely large number)

Even if one is attacked in an insulting way- a slap- one has the obligation not to retaliate, and indeed turn the other cheek to be slapped. It is not even clear that self-defense is permitted- Peter was rebuked for raising the sword for trying to protect Jesus.

Nothing could possibly matter more than our moral choices

Linked inextricably to the idea that morality is infinitely demanding is the idea that our moral choices are also infinitely valuable. No prize, talent, capacity, object etc. could matter more than whether or not you use that thing for good, i.e. to meet the needs of your neighbors and for the glory of God.

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?" -Mark 8:36

“Provide yourselves with purses that will not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.…”-Luke 12:33-34

By the same token, one who leads others away from good moral choices has placed himself in infinite spiritual danger: “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” - Matthew 18:6

Is Jesus a critic of exchange economies?

We know that Jesus had serious concerns about exchange economies, reflected in his constant condemnation of the rich and exhortations to give away property (numerous passages, absolutely unequivocal in their plain reading), rejection of commercial activity in the Temple (Matthew 21:12–13), and perhaps also (although I have mostly tried to stick to the gospels and not the later books), his early followers’ private property free lifestyle:

“The multitude of believers was one in heart and soul. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they owned.” Acts 4:32

Where did this critical approach to exchange economies come from?

My sense is that Jesus thought the urgent obligation of every human being was to attend to the needs of every other human- a limitless obligation to serve the interests of others just as much as you serve your own interests. I think Jesus saw the organization of economic activity through money and property- favouring those with the means to pay- as inconsistent with the moral demands the needs of others make on us “Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what is yours, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you”. Luke 6:30

To the extent that Jesus envisaged an alternative, I suspect it was making and giving things to meet the needs of others, rather than for exchange.

Jesus as political quietist

-”Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, My servants would fight to prevent My arrest by the Jews. But now My kingdom is not of this realm.””

-"Later, they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to catch Jesus in His words. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that You are honest and seek favor from no one. Indeed, You are impartial and teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them or not?” But Jesus saw through their hypocrisy and said, “Why are you testing Me? Bring Me a denarius to inspect.” so they brought it, and He asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription? “Caesar’s,” they answered. Then Jesus told them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.””

So you may have read the preceding essay, saw that I attributed ideas to Jesus like a rejection of economic exchange and a belief that moral ideas are used to buttress the power of self interested cliques, wealthy cliques and thought “You’re trying to tell us Jesus is a socialist- what a typical modern reader, trying to project such ideas backwards in time”. But no, I don’t think Jesus was a socialist.

Socialism is a method of organizing a political body, but Jesus is an apolitical thinker. Jesus thinks we should all, individually and right now, start acting like the needs of others matter just as much as our own, rather than implementing a political strategy to make that happen.

I don’t know why Jesus rejected politics like this. Maybe it was just to survive given the political situation of the time. However, I do not think so. I suspect he rejected politics because he saw morality as demanding we all behave perfectly (not that he saw this as practically attainable), and would see any idea of a political solution as an inappropriate attempt to substitute for that.

A final comment: On the homeless

Special comment because I have seen a lot of this lately. If you claim to be a follower of Jesus, but hate homeless people (I saw a trad “Christian” directly say that they hate homeless people and consider them worthless), the biblical Jesus implies that you will burn in hell.

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

"The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.'

"But Abraham replied, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.'

"He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.'

"Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.'

"'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.'

"He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"“

Luke 16:19–31

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