Any argument that dares to challenge the moral wisdom of Jesus had better begin with an acknowledgment of the difficulty and audacity of the task. Jesus is regarded by many as the pinnacle of moral authority, so anyone who challenges his teachings can expect to be dismissed as either ignorant, misguided, or in league with the Devil himself.
The truth is, I’m neither an amoralist nor a nihilist, nor do I sacrifice small animals on the altar of Satan. But I do believe that Jesus’ ministry was not only deeply unethical—for reasons that will soon become clear—but that it represented a profound regression from the intellectual and moral achievements of the Greeks. Establishing that claim will require some relatively demanding historical and philosophical legwork, but the stakes could hardly be higher. What is ultimately at issue is the moral tradition we choose to inherit—and whether we are willing to recover the Socratic courage to question even our most deeply held assumptions.
But before we can pass judgment on Jesus’ ethics, we must first establish what he actually taught and what those teachings meant in the world in which he lived. That requires us to set aside, at least temporarily, the theological assumptions that have accumulated around his teachings and return to the historical evidence itself. We must therefore begin with a more fundamental question: how should we approach Scripture if our goal is to recover the historical Jesus?
Scripture, broadly speaking, can be approached in one of three ways: literally, as a record of events that actually occurred; metaphorically, as a collection of stories conveying moral or spiritual truths; or historically, as a human product to be examined like any other ancient text. Each approach serves a different purpose. But if our aim is to recover the historical Jesus, understand what he actually taught, and assess how those teachings shaped the subsequent development of the Western mind, only one approach will suffice: the historical method.
A word of warning, then. If you believe, without question, that virgins can give birth, people can walk on water, or the dead can return to life, you may as well stop reading here. If your only interest is in knowing the miraculous tales of Jesus, the Gospels already have everything you seek. And if your aim is to extract moral, spiritual, or political meaning from Scripture, you can simply read your preferred meaning into Jesus’ teachings without troubling yourself with the historical context in which they arose.
For the rest of us—those more interested in how a man named Jesus came to shape the Western mind, largely displacing the rationalist tradition of the Greeks—we will turn to what critical historians have uncovered about the historical Jesus in their examination of the history of Scripture, the world in which it was written, and the circumstances of Jesus’ life as a Galilean Jew living under Roman rule in the early first century.
Only then can we answer a more consequential question: Do the teachings attributed to Jesus, as they have come down to us, represent an advance over—or a regression from—the Greek rationalist tradition, exemplified most powerfully by Socrates?
We’ll explore that question shortly. But first, we need to establish what can reasonably be known about the historical Jesus.
Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet
Fortunately for the reader, we will not be adopting an idiosyncratic or minority position on the historical Jesus, one that would require an elaborate defense. The important work has already been done for us. After centuries of critical analysis, scholars have converged on an answer—that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet, someone who expected God to intervene decisively in history and establish his kingdom on earth in the relatively near future.
It should be acknowledged that a vocal minority of scholars—including John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg—reject the apocalyptic interpretation, portraying Jesus instead as a teacher, social critic, or even a kind of political revolutionary. We will not attempt to settle this complex scholarly debate in full here. We will, however, briefly examine the evidence for the apocalyptic interpretation and why it remains the most compelling account of the historical Jesus. Readers interested in exploring the argument in greater depth should consult Bart Ehrman’s Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium.
The argument, in a nutshell, is this: the earliest sources for Jesus—Saint Paul’s letters and the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke—portray him in distinctly apocalyptic terms and preserve teachings that reflect an apocalyptic worldview in which the world as we know it would soon come to an abrupt end. The case is strengthened by the fact that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, a figure whom historians likewise understand as an apocalyptic Jewish preacher. The baptism itself is attested in all three Synoptic Gospels and is widely regarded by historians as one of the more secure facts about Jesus’ life.
That’s the high-level view. To dig a little deeper, consider Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, the earliest surviving text in the New Testament, composed less than twenty years after Jesus’ death:
For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord by no means will precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thess. 4:15–17).
Paul seems to believe that he himself will be among those living when Jesus returns, in addition, no doubt, to many others. To this day, there are still those who carry on this apocalyptic tradition, fully convinced that the end of the world, and Christ’s Second Coming, is near.
Adding to our apocalyptic arsenal is the fact that Jesus himself preached an apocalyptic worldview. The Gospel of Mark, considered by historians to be the first Gospel written (c. 65–75 CE), has Jesus say, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” (Mark 9:1); Or, “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Mark 13:30).
The Gospel of Matthew, written independently of Mark, has Jesus reiterate the same point: “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matt. 16:28).
And so it goes. We have only scratched the surface of the apocalyptic references scattered throughout Scripture, but these examples are enough to make the point.
Anyone arguing against the idea that Jesus was an apocalypticist—and that he thought the end of the world was imminent—certainly has their work cut out for them. They would somehow have to maintain that John the Baptist had no influence on Jesus—despite Jesus’ remark that “there is no one greater than John” (Luke 7:28)—and that Paul, Mark, Matthew, and Luke all got Jesus’ message wrong. This is possible, of course, but not very likely. Neither is it likely that Jesus was speaking only metaphorically.
Apocalypse-deniers would also have to grapple with the fact that Jesus’ teachings became progressively less apocalyptic in the hands of later Christian writers, who had to reckon with the inconvenient fact that his prediction had failed—since the world had not, in fact, ended. It is in this process of creative accounting that we can surmise the origin of the idea that Jesus was only talking figuratively about “internal spiritual development,” social reform, or political revolution, or else that Jesus would soon return to fulfill his original failed apocalyptic predictions.
Frankly, these explanations are not very convincing. For our purposes, then, we’ll move on, considering Jesus’ teachings in the context of the imminent end of the world.
The Apocalyptic Teachings of Jesus
We’ve already seen that the Kingdom of God was expected to arrive imminently, with Jesus’ immediate followers anticipating its establishment within their own lifetimes. But what did Jesus say would happen at the final judgement? He gives us an answer in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew:
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left (Matt. 25:31-33).
To those on his right, he says, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” (Matt. 25:34). Why? Because they had fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and cared for the sick and destitute—and, in doing so, had cared for the Son of Man himself. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus declares, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40).
To those on his left, he says, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41). They had failed to feed the hungry, clothe the destitute, welcome the stranger, and care for the sick—and in neglecting the least among them, they had neglected the Son of Man himself. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me” (Matt. 25:45).
It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider a couple of key points. First, note that Jesus never mentions faith, or that one must have believed in him, his mission, the Holy Trinity, or the necessity of eating his body in the form of a cracker. The only requirement for eternal life appears to be the provision of assistance to those in need. The upshot is that the later Christian emphasis on the virtue of faith may have gained importance only when Christians realized that Jesus had not returned as expected.
Second, Jesus demonstrates, through this parable—which isn’t really a parable, but a description of the final judgment—the general reversal of fortune we were repeatedly promised throughout Scripture. “So the last will be first, and the first will be last,” Jesus says in Matthew 20:16. The poor, the sick, the downtrodden—individuals society has neglected and forgotten—will inherit the Kingdom at the expense of the unrighteous, who flourish, with the assistance of evil, in this pre-apocalyptic world. Jesus makes this point with particular force in Luke:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man.
…
“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets (Luke 6:20-26).
This is one of many verses that express Jesus’ radical antipathy toward wealth. When he said, for example, that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:24), we can safely assume that he meant it was impossible. One’s ultimate duty was to love God and one’s neighbor as oneself, which, as the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats made clear, amounts to the same thing. Hoarding wealth while those around you go hungry was therefore not merely a moral failing. By Jesus’ own reckoning, it was a one-way ticket to the eternal flames of hell.
Now, I’m all for the fight for greater equality, but I’m not sure I want the rich to burn for all eternity. That punishment seems a bit harsh. Yet it lends the rest of Jesus’ teachings a kind of grim coherence. As Bart Ehrman so skillfully summarizes it:
What does [the] “right way of living” entail? It entails loving God, the one who brings the Kingdom, and one’s neighbor as oneself. All else should be completely secondary in importance. If thieves want to take your clothes—let them! If bullies want to force you to do their work for them—let them! If the government wants to take your money—let them! If thugs want to beat you—let them! If enemies want to kill you—let them! None of these things matters. You should give away your shirt as well as your coat, you should go an extra mile, you should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, you should turn the other cheek, you should not fear the one who can destroy your paltry body. The Kingdom is coming, and the concerns of this life are trivial by comparison (see Matt. 5:39–42; 10:28; Mark 12:17; Luke 6:29–30; 12:4–5).
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” Jesus declares in Matthew 16:24-25. “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” These teachings are beginning to make more sense within the apocalyptic framework. What possible value could material wealth hold against the promise of eternal life in the coming Kingdom of God? And what possible threat could your enemies pose to you? You might as well love them now, since they’ll shortly receive their comeuppance in the form of eternal flames.
Which segues nicely into the case for the immorality of Jesus’ entire ministry.
The Case Against the Morality of Jesus
To be clear, there are plenty of morally commendable teachings in the Gospels—once you take them out of context. It is a good thing to care for your neighbor, to help out those in need, to welcome strangers, and to generally practice non-judgmental, unconditional peace and love. These ideas, however, are not revolutionary; they are grounded in the Golden Rule—and in our innate capacity for empathy—and found within virtually every worthwhile religious and philosophical system ever devised, many of them established centuries before Jesus was born. But to act with benevolence towards your neighbor only because you expect the imminent reward of eternal life makes the gesture seem a bit less sincere.
But that’s not the only problem. Jesus’ teachings can also lead to categorically immoral outcomes, not the least of which is the idea of eternal punishment.
We’ve already seen that Jesus, in the final judgment, will condemn the unrighteous to eternal damnation, despite the moral asymmetry of such a severe penalty for the sin of, in some cases, merely being a bit selfish. This ought, in fact, to make believers considerably more anxious than it seems to. When Jesus tells you to “sell your possessions and give to the poor” if you want to be perfect and “have treasure in heaven” (Matt. 19:21), you had better believe that he meant it. It’s possible, of course, that Jesus was speaking metaphorically, or else exaggerating for effect, but are you really willing to risk eternal torment testing the limits of what Jesus demands? The language he uses doesn’t appear to suggest he’s in the business of giving out second chances.
But let’s say that you do test these limits, and, at the final judgment, Jesus finds you a bit too wealthy for his liking. What can you expect after entering the gates of hell? Jesus doesn’t spare the details; he tells us that you will be “throw[n] into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 13:42), “where the worms that eat [you] do not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). There will be fire and darkness and no possibility of escape, because your punishment is, once again, to last forever. Perhaps testing his limits wasn’t such a great idea.
In truth, this whole idea of divine punishment makes a mockery out of the “Prince of Peace,” who, while turning the other cheek in preparation for the coming Kingdom, becomes quite violent—in the most extreme of terms—once that Kingdom arrives. As the scholar Hector Avalos pointed out, Jesus didn’t actually preach unconditional love and peace; he preached the Gospel of “deferred violence” for those who disobeyed him. This is what makes it so difficult for nonbelievers to praise the morality of a man who demands obedience to his every word on threat of perpetual torture.
But perhaps Jesus’s most egregious moral error is his willingness to deprive people of this life’s greatest pleasures in sacrifice for another life that, in all likelihood, will never come. In more mundane terms, it would be like spending your entire life over-saving for retirement, foregoing every pleasure along the way, only to discover upon reaching it that your accountant has absconded with all your money.
Under the watchful eye of Jesus, natural human urges—especially sexual ones—are discouraged and suppressed and ultimately replaced with feelings of guilt and anxiety. Jesus instructs us to devalue our relationships with our family (Matt. 10:34-36), endure loveless or harmful marriages at all costs (Mark 10:11-12), avoid sexual relations (Matt. 19:11-12), sell all of our possessions (Matt. 19:21), and become like children who never question or learn anything (Matt. 18:3-4). This is a perfect recipe for an empty and miserable life, and a terrific way to become utterly unlikable.
The truth is, if the teachings of Jesus make sense only in the context of the coming Kingdom of God, they are senseless and immoral if that Kingdom never comes. Turning your cheek and loving those who wish to harm you and your family is horrendously idiotic advice. The command to not worry about tomorrow (Matt. 6:34), to hate or abandon your family in his name (Luke 14:26), to forgo all pleasures, to sell all your possessions, and, in general, to become an unthinking, dogmatic, moral absolutist, is just about the worst possible advice you could ever impart on anyone. And finally, consider what Jesus says about the promotion of family values:
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household (Matthew 10:34-36).
Isolation from family members. Totalitarian thought control. Love bombing. Emotional manipulation. These tactics are barely distinguishable from modern-day cults. And so, it turns out, our natural reflex to think of Jesus as morally perfect is a total farce.
The Great Inversion of Socratic Ethics
What makes this story far more tragic than it otherwise would be is that Jesus’ apocalyptic moral system ultimately came to replace something far more resplendent: the ethical rationalism of Socrates.
Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher and mentor of Plato, famously proclaimed, contra Jesus, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” His wisdom, he believed, lay precisely in recognizing the limits of his own knowledge. Rather than offering certainty about the ultimate questions of existence, Socrates pursued truth through dialogue, questioning himself and others in the conviction that the examined life was itself a source of meaning. This helps explain why Socrates never longed for death and, at his trial, imagined that an afterlife—if one existed—might resemble the life he already cherished: an endless opportunity for conversation and inquiry with the great figures of the past.
Socrates believed that virtue was inseparable from knowledge, and that learning to live well required the continual pursuit of truth and goodness through intensive self-reflection, questioning, and civil debate. Yet Jesus had inverted this entire project, replacing epistemic humility with dogmatism; curiosity and questioning with faith; the possibility of progress with resignation; and the pleasures of philosophical contemplation and debate with fear, dread, and the wish for the outright destruction of the world.
Where Socratic dialogue leaves conclusions open to revision and directs our attention toward improving the world we actually inhabit, Jesus’ apocalyptic framework offers revealed certainty, backed by eternal consequences that make dissent existentially dangerous. By treating worldly concerns as secondary to the imminent arrival of a supernatural kingdom, Jesus effectively subordinates this life to the next. It is difficult to see how this could be regarded as an improvement, either for the Western mind or for Western civilization.
If we want to recover the intellectual freedom that made the West possible, perhaps it is time to put aside the certainties of faith and resurrect the spirit of Socrates—and with it, the courage to question everything, even, and especially, ourselves.
References and Further Reading
Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Miller, Robert J., ed. The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2001.
Navia, Luis E. Socrates: A Life Examined. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007.
Walczak, Marcin. “Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet: The Meaning of the Theory for Systematic Theology.” Biblical Theology Bulletin 53, no. 3 (2023): 172–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461079231191560.