The Jesus Apologists: How Bart Ehrman’s “Love Thy Stranger” Protects His Image

Bart Ehrman's new book reveals how far critical Jesus studies still have to go—and how much even skeptical scholarship continues to polish his story.

I’m Be Scofield, founder of The Guru Magazine and the journalist behind the hit HBO series on the Love Has Won cult. I’ve spent a decade reporting on spiritual power, abuse, and the machinery that protects it. My investigations have been cited by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, People, VICE, Netflix, Dr. Phil, Dateline, and more. I’m the author of the new book The Savior Complex: How Jesus Became the World’s Ultimate Influencer. I have a Master of Divinity from the Graduate Theological Union, and I’m a relative of C.I. Scofield, author of the Scofield Bible. CONTACT: bescofieldreporter @ gmail.com

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Imagine trying to study David Koresh critically, only to discover that most of the leading experts on him were believers, ministers and bishops in his movement, or people still “wrestling” with their faith. Imagine trying to sort fact from fiction when so many of the authority figures remain committed to rescuing the “real Koresh” from the abuses of the Branch Davidians. Or when they have deconstructed nearly everything about his movement yet still speak of his unique spiritual greatness. You would reasonably wonder whether the field had ever achieved enough distance from its subject to evaluate him with the same moral scrutiny applied to other charismatic leaders.

This is what it often feels like trying to study Jesus objectively. The field is dominated by “cheerleaders” for Jesus. Discourse is shaped by people who love him or, in the very least, admire him. “Modern scholarship teaches that Jesus was all good,” notes Professor Hector Avalos. Most New Testament scholarship comes from seminaries, divinity schools, denominational universities, and theological faculties—and some academic institutions still require confessional statements of faith. And the supposedly critical historical scholars? Nearly all of them have been Christian.

Take Elaine Pagels, for example—author of the bestselling alternative classic The Gnostic Gospels. She attends church and serves on the vestry—the governing board—of an Episcopal parish. “This church is increasing in membership…there is a lot of activity,” she states excitedly. Consider just ten of the most influential New Testament or Christian scholars of the modern era. Most are celebrated as liberal or critical voices, yet nearly all were ordained ministers, priests, bishops, or lifelong Christians.

• Dale C. Allison Jr. → Ordained Presbyterian minister.

• John Dominic Crossan → Former Catholic priest.

• Raymond E. Brown → Catholic priest.

• John Shelby Spong → Episcopal bishop.

• Marcus Borg → Canon Theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

• Albert Schweitzer → Ordained Lutheran minister.

• N. T. Wright → Ordained Church of England priest and former Bishop of Durham.

• Rudolf Bultmann → Lutheran theologian.

• Walter Brueggemann → Ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.

• James D. G. Dunn → Ordained Methodist minister

The same pattern extends beyond academia. The majority of the most prominent deconstructionist expert influencers online, such as Dan McClellan, April Ajoy, Kevin Carnahan, and John Fugelsang, identify as Christian. The love for Jesus also extends into the New Age world, where he is routinely defended as an ascended master, awakened sage, or spiritual prophet.

This is all happening inside a country still saturated with Christianity: most Americans identify as Christian, Christians make up 87 percent of the current Congress, and nearly every U.S. president has been affiliated with Christianity.

Enter Bart Ehrman—the famous atheist critical scholar of Jesus and Christianity and a best-selling author. Certainly he can save us from this debacle.

“I sometimes call myself a Christian atheist,” Ehrman recently told Sojourners in an interview titled “Bart Ehrman on Following Jesus as an Atheist.”

Drat.

“I do try to follow the teachings of Jesus,” Ehrman said. He told skeptic Michael Shermer something similar: “I resonate closely with the Christian tradition I was raised in. There are moral values that Christianity preaches that I subscribe to.”

Like most Jesus scholars, that tradition has shaped him deeply. Ehrman’s intellectual path ran through Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He has written openly about his years as a committed Christian, his ministerial training, preaching, and his later loss of faith.

I haven’t personally explored mythicism, the field that questions the evidence for Jesus’s existence, in any great depth, such as Richard Carrier has. But it’s painfully obvious he’s doing the equivalent of questioning the integrity of David Koresh in a field full of his ministers, bishops, believers, and admirers. It’s impossible for him to operate on anything like neutral ground when the very people adjudicating the debate have spent their lives protecting the sacred aura of the figure under investigation.

Ehrman “resonating closely” with Christianity and referring to himself as a “Christian atheist” who follows Jesus can’t be separated from his wildly exaggerated claims: “We have more evidence for Jesus than we have for almost anybody from his time period” or that the evidence is “astounding for an ancient figure of any kind.” Pick three figures—Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Herod the Great—and you’ll quickly see how inflated the claim is. For all three we have coins, inscriptions, monuments, hostile and friendly literary sources, geopolitical consequences, named successors, administrative traces, and material evidence tied to cities, wars, dynasties, and state power. Jesus left none of this.

The field of “Jesus studies” is filled with apologists of all theological stripes who share the same goal: protecting and embellishing Jesus. I can’t think of any major critical scholar—from James Tabor and Elaine Pagels to Marcus Borg and Dale Allison—who has ever criticized Jesus despite him running a controversial and destructive cult-like movement. Even the feminist theologians I studied with during my Master of Divinity could analyze the church, doctrine, and the Bible through a lens of coercive power, but Jesus remained sacrosanct.

A comment left for me by a spiritual new-age Christian accurately describes the state of the field at large: “I can critique David, Abraham, and Moses, but Jesus? What is there to critique about HIM? You’re teetering on some dangerous ground.” This perspective serves as the de facto background for most anyone in the field.

“It has been a relatively recent development that people were motivated to go into the field or welcomed into the field if they weren’t themselves practicing,” notes scholar Robyn Faith Walsh regarding the inclusion of nonbelievers in New Testament studies. For most of its history, the field developed within institutions shaped by the church, where theological commitments often influenced who could teach and publish.

David Friedrich Strauss learned this lesson when his critical nineteenth-century Life of Jesus scandalized Protestant Germany and cost him his university appointment. Just imagine Life of Koresh causing scandal and mayhem. More recently, New Testament scholar Mike Licona was forced out of his teaching position after suggesting that Matthew’s account of the resurrected saints may have been apocalyptic symbolism rather than literal history. Even today, crossing certain theological lines can carry professional consequences.

It seems no one in the field wants to engage the fully human Jesus—which is, after all, half of the orthodox view. Yet that figure—the flawed, unstable, complex, troubled, and perhaps mentally ill man beneath the theology—is far more interesting than the polished icon scholars keep rescuing.

When you get beyond the embellishment, the neat story of an impoverished wandering saint dispensing universal love falls away. What emerges instead is a portrait of a charismatic guru strategically connected to wealth, patrons, and elite figures; a man who exploited people’s labor, imposed draconian ethics, threatened catastrophic judgment, and often showed reckless disregard for those in his orbit.

Inventing Jesus’s Ethics

This brings us to Bart Ehrman’s new book Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West. It is a deeply generous portrait of Jesus—one best understood through Ehrman’s lens that he “resonates closely with the Christian tradition.”

It is clear that Ehrman’s lifelong attachment to Jesus has not disappeared. His redeemer has evolved, but Jesus remains a kind of savior. No longer the divine figure who rescues humanity from sin, Jesus becomes the secular figure who rescues the West from moral darkness. “Jesus, in the end, transformed the moral conscience of the West,” Ehrman concludes. It is difficult to imagine a grander historical compliment. Jesus is credited not merely with influencing society but also with reshaping the ethical conscience of Western civilization. He remains humanity’s great moral benefactor.

Ehrman, like the Christian tradition he inherited, fails to consider whether Jesus’s actions and words or lack of words may have had damaging consequences for the West—something explored below. Nor does he offer an interrogation of Jesus’s ethics, conduct, or character. Instead, the book reads as a kind of secular devotional: a way to celebrate his savior in new language.

This tendency extends well beyond Ehrman. Christians and Christian-trained scholars often inherit interpretive habits they no longer recognize as assumptions. Certain readings of Jesus become so familiar that they cease to feel like interpretations at all. A particularly revealing example is Ehrman’s treatment of the two passages most often presented as the foundation of Jesus’s ethics: the Sermon on the Mount and the Sheep and the Goats. Reading them through the inherited Christian lens, he bypasses the immediate narrative and historical context—a context that fundamentally changes what Jesus is doing in both passages.

Sheep and the Goats

In Love Thy Stranger, Ehrman cites the well-known Sheep and the Goats passage in Matthew 25 to illustrate Jesus’s loving ethics. He describes how Jesus says that people of all nations will be judged by whether they fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, welcomed the foreigner, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, and visited those in prison. In interviews he’s called these ideas central to Jesus’s message. The righteous “sheep” inherit the kingdom because they cared for people in need; the unrighteous “goats” are condemned to hell because they failed to do so.

Ehrman, like the Christian tradition he still reveres, misreads this passage by wrongly assuming Jesus was referring to the hungry and sick within society at large. This interpretation portrays the passage as being widely applicable and illuminates Jesus as morally exemplary. But Jesus was actually saying that those who help his disciples will inherit the kingdom, even using a term he specifically reserved for them.

The list Jesus provides maps seamlessly onto the vulnerabilities of his itinerant missionaries as they traveled. Every item Jesus mentions corresponds to a danger or deprivation that his own emissaries were explicitly told to expect.

• Hungry and thirsty → disciples sent out without provisions, dependent on others for food and drink.

• Stranger → traveling emissaries needing hospitality and lodging.

• Naked → men sent without an extra tunic or adequate clothing.

• Sick → exposed and exhausted followers traveling without stable support.

• Imprisoned → Jesus told his men they’d be jailed because of the mission.

Jesus actually uses a term that he reserved for his followers: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” As Professor Denny Burk notes, the term “my brothers” appears elsewhere in Matthew, and in each case it refers specifically to Jesus’s disciples sent into the world to preach the gospel. In Matthew 12:50, Jesus points to his disciples and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers.” In Matthew 28:10, after the resurrection, he tells the women, “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee.”

The phrase “least of these” also has a precedent of referring to disciples in Matthew. Jesus uses a similar phrase, “these little ones,” and promises reward to anyone who gives them even a cup of cold water “because he is a disciple.”

A plain reading of the text, stripped of any “Jesus glow,” reveals a straightforward explanation. “I was a stranger and you invited me in” is a statement about his own representatives—not humanity at large. How you treat my emissaries is how you treat me. He told the public that if they fed his guys, he’d let them into the kingdom. If the public ignored them, he’d send them to hell. Those who mistreated them “will go away into eternal punishment,” he said, but the “righteous ones will go into eternal life.”

Jesus’s earlier use of the same type of hellish threats to protect his disciples provides further evidence that he was referring to them in the Sheep and the Goats passage. In Matthew 18:6, Jesus states, “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.”

Jesus’s “judgment ethic” overwhelmingly focuses on those who reject him, his message, or his disciples. He was not in the business of issuing sweeping moral judgments on humanity as such; his threats of punishment were aimed at people who refused the apocalyptic movement he represented.

Why would Ehrman—and others who, like him, “resonate closely with the Christian tradition”—ever feel the need to question the foundational passages behind Jesus’s ethical reputation? These are the passages that tradition has proclaimed to be true for centuries.

Sermon on the Mount

Read within the flow of Matthew’s narrative, the Sermon on the Mount exposes another remarkable blind spot in Ehrman’s interpretation. In Love Thy Stranger, he cites the sermon as the clearest expression of Jesus’s ethic of love. But the context points somewhere very different.

Jesus is speaking to his own disciples—men he has called to an exhausting and dangerous mission. They have abandoned their livelihoods and will soon be sent throughout Galilee without provisions, dependent on strangers for food, shelter, and protection. As we have just seen, the Sheep and the Goats passage functions as a promise of reward for those who care for these vulnerable emissaries who were at risk of being hungry, thirsty, sick, naked, strangers, and imprisoned. And it was a warning of judgment for those who refuse them.

The Sermon on the Mount comes earlier in Matthew, yet it maps just as naturally onto the same mission. What the Christian tradition has celebrated for centuries as history’s greatest ethical discourse reads instead like a field manual for an itinerant apocalyptic movement. Ehrman, following the inherited interpretation, never seriously considers that possibility.

The “brilliant” ethical teachings found in the sermon lose their shine when exposed as instructions to address specific hazards and dangers his disciples would encounter as they traversed a hostile and hierarchical, Roman-occupied world. “Turn the other cheek” was not some uniquely profound ethic for humanity; it was advice to survive hostile encounters with people who could hurt you. “If anyone wants to sue you and take your tunic, give your cloak as well” was not universal ethical wisdom; it was advice to avoid extended conflict over property. “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile” reflected the reality that Roman soldiers could conscript civilians to carry military equipment. “Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you” was not societal economic advice; it was a warning not to escalate dangerous demands over money or possessions.

Just read the notorious “Eye for Eye” sequence in Matthew 7:38-42 that contains the famous “turn the other cheek.” It is a series of real-world concerns: being slapped, being sued for your tunic, being demanded money, and being forced to walk a mile. Later in the sermon, Jesus tells them, “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court.” The burden is on Ehrman to show how these were meant beyond the immediate needs of Jesus’s men.

To a neutral outsider reading the sermon, these are evidently benign instructions, but Ehrman describes them as an “amazing collection of Jesus’ teachings.” It’s clear the Christian tradition has trained him to see a moral radiance for what amounts to tactical advice.

Jesus warns his men just a few chapters later of these dangers that the sermon is preparing them for: “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves… Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me.”

“Turn the other cheek and live to see another day” is the practical message behind Jesus’s instructions. He’s telling them to not resist the powerful in ways that could get you beaten, arrested, sued, or killed. He’s giving strategies to a band of itinerant men—not delivering an ethical treatise for all of humanity.

The rest of the sermon fits the same pattern. “Do not store up treasures” makes sense for men embracing the simplicity of an itinerant mission. Commands about lust, adultery, anger, and reconciliation help regulate conduct and preserve order within the movement. “Love your enemies” and blessings on those persecuted “on my account” are explicitly addressed to followers who would face hostility because of Jesus.

Ehrman’s reliance on the Good Samaritan also does less work than he thinks, even though he places the story near the center of the Western urge toward modern humanitarianism. The parable functions largely as a polemic against religious authority: the priest and Levite are made to look morally bankrupt for ignoring a wounded man, while the despised Samaritan does what they refuse to do. Jesus is staging a status reversal and shaming rival religious figures, not developing a systematic ethic of “love thy stranger.” Overall, the evidence that Jesus universalized neighbor love beyond Jews is thinner than Ehrman admits, yet his thesis depends heavily on that claim. As Hector Avalos has pointed out, enemy-love traditions also existed in other ancient cultures, including Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, long before Jesus.

Creating the Ethical Superhero

What I’m claiming is quite extraordinary: Jesus’s most famous ethical teachings became “ethical teachings” through the creative work of the Christian tradition. The Church took practical field instructions for Jesus’s disciples, along with mafia-like threats against those who refused to feed, clothe, shelter, or visit his emissaries, and transformed them into the centerpiece of Western moral philosophy.

There is a precedent for this kind of theological expansion. Christianity has a long history of developing ideas far beyond their original textual setting.

• Doctrine of the Trinity → emerged through centuries of theological reflection and doctrinal conflict.

• Original sin → developed most fully through Augustine after centuries of earlier evolution.

• Messianic prophecy → reread Israel’s scriptures as if they were secretly pointing to Jesus all along.

• Atonement → developed multiple theories to explain how Jesus’s death “saves” humanity.

• Hell → expanded scattered biblical images into a full doctrine of eternal punishment.

• Satan → transformed a sparse biblical figure into the cosmic enemy of God.

• The Church → turned a small apocalyptic Jesus movement into a universal institution claiming divine authority.

• Mary → elevated from Jesus’s mother to Theotokos, perpetual virgin, sinless intercessor, and Queen of Heaven.

We even have the story of Junia, the woman Paul appears to identify as “prominent among the apostles.” Later Christian tradition, uncomfortable with a female apostle, gradually masculinized her into “Junias”—changing her name and gender to male. The Church could not tolerate a woman occupying that level of authority.

The Messianic Secret functions in a similar way. Christians offer a generous interpretation: Jesus knows he is the messiah but hides it until the proper time. A neutral outsider, however, would see this as Mediterranean storytelling. As scholar Robyn Faith Walsh notes, it resembles the heroic hiddenness found in literature like Homer, where identity is concealed, staged, misunderstood, and finally revealed at the right dramatic moment. While the Church called it a divine mystery, it’s best described as a plot function.

The Christian tradition has repeatedly taken localized texts and isolated passages, then elevated them into sweeping theological and philosophical systems. In this context, turning Jesus’s field instructions into timeless ethical philosophy fits the pattern. It is one more example of a familiar Christian instinct to turn the particular into the universal.

Ehrman can see through many of these other Christian constructions, but when the same process applies to Jesus’s ethical reputation, he loses his critical lens. The one thing Jesus apologists cannot do is subject Jesus himself—his character, conduct, motives, and moral legacy—to the same deconstructive scrutiny they apply everywhere else. The inherited script about Jesus’s exemplary moral character remains intact.

So where does the thesis of Love Thy Stranger stand if its source for Jesus’s ethics has been compromised? Ehrman says the Sheep and Goats passage is “central” to Jesus’s message. He expands, “You have a passage where Jesus promotes the idea that salvation comes to those who feed the hungry, who visit the lonely, who take care of those in need; that’s what brings them into the Kingdom.”

Jesus, however, said salvation came to those who fed his own disciples—not to those who fed the hungry in general. This realization shatters any sort of morally luminous ethical teaching Ehrman hopes to draw from this passage. The Church lifted this and the sermon out of their original context and repackaged them as timeless humanitarian wisdom.

Elite Networks

The interpretive habits that the Christian tradition instills in scholars like Ehrman create walls around what they can examine. The “Jesus ate with sinners” trope has become so morally polished that it blocks further inquiry into his associations. Ehrman treats these scenes as self-evident proof of compassion: Jesus crossed boundaries, welcomed the excluded, and loved those rejected by respectable society. “Jesus’s goal is to lead sinners to repent and return to God,” he writes.

But removed from the “Jesus glow,” these associations may have served strategic functions for the movement—not unlike cult leaders such as Jim Jones or Keith Raniere recruiting powerful and wealthy people. Ehrman’s inherited tradition would never seek to uncover such motives.

Consider the network around Jesus. Matthew, a tax collector, immediately hosts a dinner with other tax collectors—a major networking opportunity inside a despised but financially connected class. This group had access to things like money, intel, homes, and other people with resources. The apologist reading is that Jesus was comforting the marginalized. Yet he was also moving through a world of useful contacts.

Joanna, one of Jesus’s female patrons, was married to Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household, placing the movement near political power and elite information. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were both connected to the Jewish ruling council, bringing Jesus near the Sanhedrin’s world of legal and religious authority. Zacchaeus was a wealthy chief tax collector. Even the centurion whose servant Jesus heals represents contact with Roman military power.

Jesus also had a close relationship with Mary of Bethany, Lazarus, and Martha—a household that repeatedly hosted him. Mary possessed a jar of perfume worth about a year’s wages or tens of thousands in today’s dollars, and she poured it on Jesus. When the disciples object that they could have sold it and given the money to the poor, Jesus defends the extravagance. He tells them, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

• Matthew/Levi → tax collector with access to other tax collectors and financially connected networks.

• Zacchaeus → wealthy chief tax collector.

• Joanna → financial patron married to Chuza, manager of Herod’s household.

• Nicodemus → Pharisee and Jewish ruling-council figure.

• Joseph of Arimathea → wealthy council member with access to a private tomb.

• Centurion → Roman military officer whose servant Jesus heals.

• Mary, Martha, and Lazarus → Bethany household that repeatedly hosts Jesus.

• Mary of Bethany → possesses perfume worth about a year’s wages and pours it on Jesus.

• Unnamed disciple “known to the high priest” → connected enough to enter the priestly courtyard.

• Upper-room owner in Jerusalem → property-owning supporter with a furnished room available for Passover.

Don’t these elite associations seem odd for a supposed peasant spiritual revolutionary?

Luke tells us that women such as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and “many others” supported Jesus and his followers financially out of their own resources. These stories reveal a movement with access to substantial wealth, patronage, and material support. Rather than redirecting these resources toward the poor, Jesus accepts them in service of himself and his “ministry.”

Other Gospel details point in the same direction. Jesus somehow secures a furnished upper room in Jerusalem for Passover, suggesting access to a property-owning supporter in the city. He sends disciples to retrieve a colt, as if he had already made arrangements. At the end, Nicodemus appears with costly burial spices, while Joseph supplies not merely sympathy but a private tomb. John even says that one unnamed disciple was “known to the high priest,” giving him access to the priestly courtyard during Jesus’s arrest.

The Gospels also describe Jesus’s movement as maintaining a common money bag. According to John, Judas Iscariot served as its keeper and was known to steal from it. The very existence of a communal fund suggests the movement handled enough money to require someone to manage it.

Jesus relied on a network of homes such as Peter’s house in Capernaum, which appears to function as an early ministry base. Matthew/Levi, a tax collector, hosts Jesus at a dinner with other tax collectors and sinners. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus repeatedly receive him in Bethany, and Simon the leper’s house becomes the site of an anointing meal. As mentioned, in Jerusalem, Jesus even secures a furnished upper room for Passover through an unnamed property-owning supporter.

Ehrman says that, according to Jesus, the disciples were to “sell all they had and give to the poor.” But if that is the case, why do Peter and Matthew still have homes during the ministry? Why do so many people in Jesus’s orbit retain wealth and property? The Gospels actually don’t portray a movement that liquidated everything for the poor. They reveal something more complicated: exposed disciples sent onto a grueling missionary path—to perhaps break them down—while the movement continued to rely on a network of homes, benefactors, money, and elite connections.

We should also note that Jesus never held to an ideal of socialism or egalitarianism. His ideal society was not based on equality. It had a hierarchy; it was just violently reversed—something Ehrman fails to address.

This is the logic beneath so many of his sayings about wealth and status. “Woe to you who are rich.” “Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.” “The first will be last,” and “the last will be first.” The people on top will be at the bottom, and those loyal to Jesus (who have become poor and outcast) will be raised. This is not a prophetic teaching on wealth—it is a delusional fantasy of class reversal.

Jesus envisioned himself on top with his disciples ruling politically alongside him. “At the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel,” he states in Matthew 19:28. Luke’s version is even more explicit: “I confer on you a kingdom.”

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Despite emphasizing Jesus’s habit of eating with tax collectors and sinners, Ehrman never pauses to investigate the social and economic world surrounding the movement. He never asks how wealthy Jesus’s associates were, how much money flowed through the group, or what role these elite networks played in sustaining the mission. Those questions are relevant because, despite access to patrons and financial networks, the Gospels never actually depict Jesus or his disciples carrying out a charitable mission.

Do What I Say, Not What I Do

In Love Thy Stranger, Ehrman writes that those who enter the Kingdom of Heaven according to Jesus are people who have performed a series of charitable acts: “people who have done good things for those in need,” people who have “fed the hungry, given something to drink to the thirsty, who’ve clothed the naked, and who’ve visited the lonely.” Elsewhere, he says Jesus’s followers “were to visit those in prison,” “provide essentials to the impoverished around them,” and “help the oppressed and outcast.” He continues: “Banquets should be held for those who normally could not even get a decent meal, let alone give a return invitation. Excess money—or rather, all the money—was to be given to the poor.”

Ehrman makes a major oversight here: the Gospels never depict Jesus or his disciples doing any of these charitable acts. By Jesus’s own logic, they would not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

There are no scenes in the Gospels in which Jesus or his disciples feed the poor, clothe the naked, visit the lonely in prison, give money to a poor person, or organize banquets for the hungry. Nor do they leave behind any lasting system of health care for the sick in the towns they visited.

The miraculous feeding stories do not count. The two crowds fed with a few loaves and fish are not described as poor; they are simply crowds who stayed late and became hungry. Nor do historians treat these stories as plausible records of actual mass feedings. They are miracle traditions—literary and theological scenes meant to display Jesus’s power—not evidence that Jesus or his movement fed the poor.

The miracle-healing stories do not solve the problem either. Historians do not treat these accounts as straightforward records of actual events; otherwise, we would have to accept every miracle-healing claim made by gurus, cult leaders, revivalists, and televangelists, from Amma to Jim Jones to modern faith healers. Ehrman rejects the miracle claims too. So these scenes are either fictional accounts, theological legends, or staged performances. In none of these cases do they amount to actual care for the sick.

This revelation is astonishing: the one thing Jesus is world-famous for, providing charity to the needy, is absent from the historical record. Yet Ehrman and other scholars formed by the tradition simply grant Jesus an extraordinary ethical status the Gospels themselves do not substantiate.

For anyone experienced in identifying red flags in high-control groups, the gap between Jesus’s rhetoric and actions is glaring. Flowery jargon, fiery rants, and pompous preaching do not easily sway cult experts. We ignore the manifesto and check the bank statements, i.e., we focus on what they did, not what they said.

The crux of the issue is that modern Jesus scholars are not trained to see the dark side of benevolence—love can be a dangerous weapon, compassion can be a recruitment tool, justice can be wielded to provide cover, and one’s “charitable” associations can be strategically chosen to portray an image or for advantageous reasons.

Simply put, we cannot identify a movement’s nature by its rhetoric or its charitable involvement. Taking in social outcasts, preaching against empire, condemning the rich, healing people, attacking religious hypocrisy, promising a new world, feeding the poor, and presenting oneself as a messianic figure—these are all things Jim Jones did.

On the surface Jim Jones’s movement appeared morally admirable—and he strategically used this image to build a network of powerful and influential political and civic leaders. Yet beneath this image was a profoundly high-control, destructive system. This is the relevant metric—and one that appears in Jesus’s movement as well.

“Jesus picks up on it from Judaism and develops it into a major, major ethical focus of his,” Ehrman says, referring to Jesus’s emphasis on the poor. If this was such a “major” part of his movement, why didn’t he actually organize to help the needy?

Of course, Jesus could not have set up a highly visible soup kitchen in Galilee. Large crowds already made the authorities nervous; an organized public relief operation could easily have looked like a political mobilization and drawn Roman suspicion.

Here’s what actual low-profile, decentralized systems of relief could have looked like:

• Common purse relief -> Since the group had a money bag, they could have used part of it as a regular alms fund for the poor rather than only for travel and movement expenses.

• Food deliveries -> Jesus and his followers could have regularly brought bread, grain, oil, or fish to known households of widows, the sick, day laborers, single mothers, and the disabled.

• Prepaid vendor aid -> They could have prepaid bakers, grain sellers, or market vendors and given tokens to needy people so they could collect food discreetly.

• Clothing collection -> They could have gathered spare tunics, cloaks, sandals, and blankets from wealthier supporters and distributed them to the poor.

• Hospitality rotations -> Followers with homes could have hosted the hungry, sick, travelers, or displaced people on a rotating basis.

• Care teams for the sick -> Without relying on miracle claims, followers could have brought water, food, bedding, washing, companionship, and practical support to sick households.

• Debt and rent relief -> Wealthier sympathizers could have funded small pools of money to help peasants pay off their debts, rent, taxes, or emergency obligations.

• Local care cells -> In each town, Jesus could have left behind small circles of followers tasked with continuing relief after he moved on.

When you consider what a movement genuinely concerned with the needy could have done, the contrast with Jesus’s “ministry” is disappointing.

We are seeing the glistening mirage of this movement quickly dissolve: Jesus’s “profound” ethics were sectarian field instructions and protection for his disciples; he was not the impoverished, unnetworked saint of Christian imagination; and he never practiced the charity later projected onto him.

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The Road Show

If Jesus was not organizing charity, then what exactly was he doing while roaming the countryside with an entourage of men? What did this movement actually accomplish? Ehrman and the Christian interpretive framework he inherits never seriously interrogates the structure of Jesus’s “ministry”—its goals, methods, costs, or even its justification for existing. The project is simply granted benevolence and importance in advance because Jesus is the one running it.

The movement looks like an apocalyptic road show—a spectacle designed to entertain and impress with the goal of getting new converts.

• healings

• exorcisms

• staged confrontations

• symbolic stunts and miracles

• crowd scenes

• secrecy and riddles

• loyalty tests

• public demonstrations of power

Scene after scene, one thing is missing: sustained care for the vulnerable. Instead, the stories are structured so that everyone is pushed toward the same revelation of who Jesus is.

The entire ministry revolves around Jesus: his power, authority, specialness, and eventually his divinity—not around the poor or needy. Every character seems perfectly positioned in relation to him—groveling at his feet, misunderstanding him, opposing him, serving him, or becoming a demonstration prop for his greatness. The stories are structured around his revelation.

Ehrman and other Jesus apologists overlook the fact that Jesus condemned both the rich and the poor. If a peasant listened to Jesus and accepted the movement, that person was blessed. But if a peasant shrugged or ignored the message, the consequences became dire. Jesus did not simply allow people to reject him. He condemned entire towns of people that did not accept his mission.

“Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!” he says, because they witnessed his “mighty works” and still did not repent. He then compares them unfavorably to pagan cities, claiming that Tyre, Sidon, and even Sodom would have repented if they had seen the same miracles. The implication is brutal: these Jewish towns will face harsher judgment than despised outsider cities because they failed to properly respond to Jesus’s performances of power.

Despite having initial success in Capernaum, Jesus rebuked the city when it failed to undergo the radical repentance his movement demanded. “And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? No, you will be brought down to Hades,” he declares.

He also threatened towns that rejected his disciples. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.” In other words, failing to receive Jesus’s messengers becomes worse than the sins of the Bible’s most infamous destroyed cities.

This threat strengthens the disciple-centered reading of Sheep and Goats. Jesus had already taught that towns would face catastrophic judgment for refusing his emissaries. Matthew 25 follows the same logic: the hungry, thirsty, strange, exposed, sick, and imprisoned figures are not generic humanity but vulnerable representatives of Jesus’s movement.

Thus, we have an established record of Jesus threatening those who reject his disciples. As mentioned, he did not issue sweeping moral judgments on humanity; his threats focused specifically on his movement.

A healthy spiritual teacher should frame rejection as a personal, neutral choice—something Ehrman fails to understand. People are allowed to listen and disagree. They can walk away or remain unconvinced. Jesus threatens judgment upon those who fail to accept his message. His outbursts resemble the narcissistic rage of an apocalyptic leader who didn’t get his way.

Power

“Following Jesus meant not asserting power over others, not compelling them to do your will,” Ehrman states. This is a remarkable claim from a leading Jesus scholar when his entire ministry was about asserting power over others and compelling them to do his will. We have already seen his condemnation of entire towns that refused to do his will and entire nations that refused to take care of his men.

To make his roadshow happen, Jesus broke down his disciples by stripping away the things that made independent life possible. He removed them from their families—wives, children, parents. They abandoned their jobs and livelihoods. Jesus goes further, stating the split must be psychological as well: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” When a would-be follower asks for permission to bury his father, Jesus refuses the most basic filial obligation and replies, “Let the dead bury their own dead.”

Jesus places his followers inside a new interpretive world where his mission becomes the only reality that matters. The ordinary supports of life such as love, work, family, and community are recoded as spiritual distractions or signs of insufficient faith.

Ehrman does question this familial dispossession briefly in Love Thy Stranger and has stated in interviews that he “doesn’t like it.” But he doesn’t understand how this mechanism functions as a central tool of control in Jesus’s movement. It’s classic cult technique.

After isolating his followers from their lives and family, the guru wears them down physically and psychologically. In modern high-demand groups, such abuse can happen through sleep deprivation, intense manual labor, emotional coercion, food restriction, relationship tampering, confession sessions, public rebuke, and the steady collapse of private space.

We can see these dynamics in Jesus’s movement. He created an exhausting road show that functioned as a way to keep his followers dependent and exhausted. His men walked many miles per day. When he’d send them out, he wouldn’t allow them the most basic supports like money or food.

It’s common for new believers to become lost in the zeal of the mission and do whatever it takes. If it means working 18-hour days at the demand of the divinely led guru and getting a few hours of sleep, it doesn’t look like a manufactured system of control. It’s just the mission unfolding in real time.

The disciples’ days were consumed by the demands of the mission: walking hungry from village to village, searching for hosts, generating crowds, managing conflict, watching healings and exorcisms, hearing apocalyptic threats, and then sitting through private debriefings where Jesus reinforced the “secret” insider worldview. They slept wherever they could, often in fields or donors’ homes without privacy or stability.

The whole thing resembled a traveling circus where the disciples prepped each town for the next show—identifying the right people to preach to and then orchestrating the performance.

Ehrman continues, completely oblivious to the disempowerment at play. “Jesus, however, repeatedly insisted that to be his follower required becoming as powerless and insignificant as a child, serving others instead of being served by them; becoming a slave to others; and taking up the cross and giving one’s entire life for others,” he writes. Ehrman doesn’t connect the dots: Jesus has spiritualized infantilization, servitude, and self-erasure. Becoming “like a child,” becoming a “slave,” taking up the cross, and giving one’s life are presented as holy ideals, but within the movement they function as tools of submission. The disciples are trained to become smaller, poorer, more obedient, and more dependent.

Jesus remains powerful and the center of worship and focus—he is the glaring exception to his own teaching. The situation is more ironic and disappointing considering that the ministry wasn’t actually being used to feed or clothe the poor or for any real charitable efforts. All of this control and dispossession wasn’t used for a good cause.

In cult studies we’ve seen this scenario time and again: a charismatic man convinces idealistic seekers to give up their lives and serve him under the guise of a world-changing mission. He convinces them that “service” is sacred; meanwhile, the core of the group’s effort is to highlight the guru’s own specialness. There may be a charitable front—rhetoric or occasional good works—but when you check the receipts, the central operation often serves the leader’s status and myth.

A charismatic guru leads people away from themselves (and their lives) while convincing them he is leading them toward their true selves, sacred service, God, or divine truth.

Money

You can see the same dispossession rhetoric at play in how Jesus treats money. To illustrate Jesus’s radical views on wealth, Ehrman quotes him saying, “Do not acquire treasures for yourself on earth…but acquire treasures for yourself in heaven.” But this is another way of keeping followers disempowered and dependent while promising them compensation in a future world.

Ehrman also cites Jesus saying, “You cannot serve God and Mammon [wealth].” The issue here is that Jesus already convinced his followers that he is God’s representative on earth. In Luke Jesus tells his followers, “The one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects him who sent me.” His chain of authority goes straight to God.

Jesus didn’t need to directly claim to be God in the later doctrinal sense. Cult leaders will often hide their claims of divinity in clever language to avoid criticisms. They can imply that they are God until loyalty to God and loyalty to the leader become functionally inseparable. From a cult-studies perspective, the endless debates over whether Jesus directly claimed to be God miss the functional issue. A leader does not have to say “I am God” for loyalty to God and loyalty to the leader to become indistinguishable.

We see this when Jesus heals the ten lepers. Only one returns, praises God, and falls at Jesus’s feet. Jesus then asks, “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God?” In other words, Jesus treats submission to himself as the proper form of praise to God.

Thus, when Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and Mammon,” his followers are trained to hear it as “you cannot serve me and Mammon.” Wealth is dangerous to Jesus’s movement because it gives followers options.

This is perhaps the reason Jesus sought to dispossess the rich man in the famous camel-and-needle story.

In Mark 10, a wealthy man approaches Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus gives him the full movement ultimatum: sell everything you own, give the money away to the poor, and follow me.

The man refuses. He likes his life and doesn’t want to liquidate it for Jesus.

Only then does Jesus turn to his disciples and declare, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.” Then comes the famous line: “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.”

The quickest and easiest way to get a new recruit is to convince them to give up their money, which represents status, options, and autonomy.

The important point here is that Jesus was stressing how money makes it so hard to join his movement, which was the unfolding kingdom on earth. Even Ehrman sees the group was referred to this way: “The kingdom started with Jesus’s tiny band of followers, but it began to grow and spread.”

Here we have another narcissistic outburst after a rejection. Jesus’s movement was the Kingdom of God unfolding on earth. The “follow me” is the giveaway—he’s asking the man to follow him into the kingdom of God. When the man says no thanks, Jesus rants about how hard it is to get into the kingdom i.e. his own movement, with money.

The Christian tradition later turns this scene into sweeping moral wisdom about the spiritual dangers of wealth. But in its immediate narrative context, the issue is much more concrete: Jesus tries to recruit a rich man, demands total liquidation, and watches him walk away. The man’s wealth protects him from capture by the movement. That is what makes money so dangerous. It allows a potential recruit to refuse the call and keep his life.

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Jesus’s system is not difficult to see once the glow is removed: I speak for God. Give up your possessions. Follow me. Poverty is holy. Service is sacred. Suffer and depend on me and the movement. And when the kingdom arrives, you will sit on political thrones. “At the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel,” Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 19:28.

Promising followers a role in a utopian paradise is highly common for cult leaders—it’s the fuel that drives their zealous activities. Jesus’s disciples clearly found the idea enticing. In fact, Judas’s betrayal is perhaps best explained by him snapping out of his cult indoctrination when he realizes the promised political thrones were not going to happen and that Jesus was taking the ship down.

The foundation of Jesus’s ministry was undoubtedly exploitative: years of unpaid labor, dangerous traveling, exhausting conditions, family destruction, economic dispossession, and total subordination to the apocalyptic mission. However, Ehrman never examines the morality of exposing innocent, idealistic followers to such risky conditions. Nor does he question why Jesus needed an entourage to follow him around the desert. What were they doing and why was it so necessary?

By the end of this roadshow, the disciples’ old lives were gone, their social ties were dismantled, and their sense of self was married to Jesus’s mission. So when Jesus says he is the way to life, it does not merely sound theologically exclusive. It feels practically true. Where else could they go?

When an authoritarian leader builds a movement around keeping followers poor, lowly, dependent, and future-oriented, we should scrutinize his promises that the poor will be blessed and rewarded with thrones in the coming kingdom. Poverty is being produced. Jesus dispossesses people while persuading them that their dispossession is spiritually valuable.

Ehrman mistakes Jesus’s anti-domination rhetoric for liberation, but inside the movement it functioned as a tool of control—something most scholars are not capable of recognizing.

Hire Me for Research, Writing, & Analysis: Contact me at bescofieldreporter @ gmail.com for a project you are working on related to Jesus, Christianity, cults, or hidden power dynamics.

Reckless Disregard

The “Jesus glow” is especially visible in Ehrman’s inability to critically analyze Jesus’s impact on the communities he entered. He can see the moral contributions, but he does not seriously ask what Jesus’s actions cost the ordinary people around him. The presumption of Jesus’s benevolence conditions scholars like Ehrman to only read his actions through a specific lens.

Take the story of the Gerasene demoniac. In Mark 5, Jesus crosses into a non-Jewish region and encounters a man who is said to be possessed by demons. Jesus casts the demons out, but instead of simply expelling them, he allows them to enter a herd of about two thousand pigs. The animals then rush down a steep bank into the sea and drown.

The story is usually told as a miracle of compassion with Jesus liberating a tormented man from demonic bondage. But if we remove the “Jesus glow,” it also looks like a reckless destruction of local property. A herd of two thousand pigs represented significant value in the form of food and wealth for the people in the surrounding economy. Even conservatively, such a herd could represent hundreds of thousands of meals and many months of food.

The locals’ response reveals how destructive Jesus’s actions are. He’s not celebrated as a liberator as he would have hoped—they beg him to leave. Jesus has arrived as a disruptive religious outsider to a foreign community, destroyed a major source of local wealth, and left the people to absorb the cost of his “miracle.”

The Gerasene pigs story is an excellent example of the broader ethical problem with Jesus’s actions. Again and again, the Gospels present scenes where ordinary people absorb the cost of his divine performances. The human fallout of his miracles and actions is rarely examined by Jesus apologists like Ehrman. The point is almost always his authority: bolstering his status and forcing the surrounding world to recognize his power.

Jesus’s “care” often comes with conditions. Women, ill people, the disabled, the demonized, and the dispossessed are repeatedly shown groveling at his feet, trembling before him, begging for mercy, giving public testimony, or submitting to his authority before relief arrives. At other times, their suffering becomes useful because it enables Jesus to stage a conflict with religious rivals and demonstrate that he outranks them.

Instead of making Jesus the center, we should center the women, the poor, the sick, the outcasts, and the religious outsiders who move through his orbit. What did it feel like in their bodies to encounter him? What did it mean to be turned into evidence for someone else’s power?

Take the story of the bleeding woman in Mark 5. She has been hemorrhaging for twelve years, and no doctor has been able to help her. When she reaches Jesus, she touches his cloak quietly, trying to avoid a spectacle. But Jesus stops the crowd and turns her private suffering into a public scene. The text says she comes forward “in fear and trembling,” falls down before him, and tells him “the whole truth.” This would have been frightening for her: as a bleeding woman, she was considered unclean, and she likely had to press through and touch others just to reach him. What could have remained a private act of desperate healing becomes a public testimonial. Her suffering is converted into evidence of Jesus’s power.

Jesus is on his way to heal the dying daughter of Jairus when he stops to stage the encounter with the bleeding woman. He delays reaching the girl in order to extract another public testimony. Messengers then arrive and tell Jairus that his daughter has died. Her death becomes the setup for an even greater display of power. Jesus tells Jairus, “Do not fear, only believe,” removes the mourners, enters the room, and raises the girl. The child’s body becomes the stage for a revelation scene: proof that Jesus commands life and death.

One of the clearest examples is the Syrophoenician woman. Her daughter is suffering, and she comes to Jesus begging for help. Jesus initially refuses and compares her people to dogs. Only after she accepts the insult and grovels at his feet does he agree to heal her child. Ehrman conveniently dismisses the story in a footnote, noting that some scholars doubt it goes back to the historical Jesus. But even if the scene is literary, it still fits the Gospel pattern perfectly. A desperate woman becomes a prop in a revelation scene, forced to absorb humiliation so Jesus can display power and test faith. It’s another example of him dramatizing the superiority of his mission.

The story of the “sinful woman” in Luke 7 is another example of Jesus encouraging women to grovel at his feet. She weeps over them, kisses them, wipes them with her hair, and anoints them. Jesus allows the abasement to continue, then turns it into a scene to shame Simon for failing to offer the hospitality she provides.

In the Mary and Martha story, Jesus elevates female devotion to himself above the general labor needed to sustain the household. Martha is busy serving the household, while Mary sits at Jesus’s feet, absorbed in his teaching. When Martha asks for help, Jesus refuses and praises Mary’s posture of devotion as the “better portion.” The woman doing the actual work is made to look spiritually less evolved, while the woman positioned at Jesus’s feet is held up as the ideal.

The Samaritan woman at the well is another example of Jesus turning a vulnerable outsider into a recruitment tool. He names the most stigmatizing part of her life, exposing her history of five husbands and the man she is currently with who is not her husband. In the story, this proves his prophetic insight, but it also turns her private life into the hook for a revelation scene. She then runs back to her village and funnels people toward him, becoming a lead generator for the movement.

The story of the ten lepers in Luke 17 offers another glimpse into Jesus’s priorities. Ten men are cleansed, but only one returns, falls at Jesus’s feet, and praises God. Instead of simply celebrating the healing, Jesus focuses on the absence of the other nine: “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God?” The point of the miracle becomes more about his own proper recognition than healing. Jesus expects the healed to come back, bow down, and turn their recovery into testimony.

It is clear that Jesus apologists like Ehrman have little interest in examining these stories neutrally. Everything Jesus does is presumed benevolent before the analysis even begins. In cult studies, we approach charismatic gurus who claim to speak for God, demand worship, and gather followers through the same critical lens—whether the figure is David Koresh, Jim Jones, Keith Raniere, or anyone else. Jesus apologists can spot the problematic behavior in other leaders because there is no sacred glow predetermining the conclusion.

Slavery

Ehrman completely omits any discussion of slavery in Love Thy Stranger, yet Jesus moved through a world structured by slave labor. He spent time in the homes of supporters and social elites, including Pharisees, where household servants or slaves would have prepared meals, served guests, washed people’s feet, and maintained order. The Gospels also depict Jesus directly encountering enslaved people, including the centurion’s slave and the slave of the high priest. Yet he never once condemns the practice or the institution. He never tells a host or any character in his stories to free their slaves.

The institution of slavery is so normal in Jesus’s moral imagination that he uses it casually as a teaching device. He actually repeatedly invokes slavery in his stories in graphic and violent ways. Jesus describes slaves being denied a seat at the table, beaten with “many blows,” sold along with their wives and children to repay debt, and even “cut to pieces” when the master returns unexpectedly. These examples are used normatively to make points about obedience to God.

In Luke 17:7–10, Jesus asks his followers whether any master would say to a slave coming in from the field, “Come here at once and take your place at the table.” Jesus’s answer is no. He says the master would instead tell the slave to prepare his dinner, serve him first, and only afterward eat and drink. Jesus then applies the lesson to his own disciples: “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done.’”

Jesus applying the adjective “worthless” to slaves is highly significant. It reveals how he perceived them—and it certainly wasn’t an enlightened perspective.

In Matthew 18:23–35 Jesus tells his disciples that God is like a slave master who has a slave tortured. “In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Luke 12:47 is another example where Jesus casually uses violence against slaves to illustrate a point. “That slave who knew what his master wanted, but did not prepare himself or do what was wanted, will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know and did what deserved a beating will receive a light beating. From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required,” Jesus said.

Jesus has no problem repeatedly referencing violence against slaves and calling them worthless without ever once condemning the practice. Does this reflect the morality of a divine being? An ethical genius?

This is directly relevant to Ehrman’s thesis. If Jesus’s ethics helped “transform the conscience of the West,” then his silence on slavery—and his repeated use of slavery as a morally acceptable metaphor—also transformed that conscience but in the opposite direction. Imagine if Jesus had given one clear statement opposing the ownership of human beings. Imagine if he had refused to use master-slave violence as a spiritual analogy. Think of how many lives might have been spared if the central moral figure of Christianity had said, plainly, “No person may own another.” Instead, for nearly two millennia, Christian slaveholders could read the Gospels and find no direct condemnation from Jesus. Worse, they could find him using slavery as part of the moral architecture of his teaching.

The same problem applies to Jesus’s silence on patriarchy, infanticide, and other draconian laws inherited from his tradition. Imagine if Jesus had given one clear statement rejecting the laws that punish male same-sex acts with death. Imagine if he had said women were not property, children could not be discarded, slaves must be freed, and no person should be killed for sexual impurity. Instead, we are given these one-sided presentations of Jesus as a moral genius by apologists like Ehrman. The reality is that Jesus either said nothing or left the existing hierarchy intact. Scholar Amy Jill Levine states that if Jesus didn’t speak of it or critique it, he was ok with it.

Furthermore, according to Christian tradition, Jesus is the same God as in the Old Testament—thus, Jesus was responsible for permitting and regulating chattel slavery laws and the other horrifying draconian commands.

If Jesus is going to scold others for neglecting justice, condemn religious rivals for hypocrisy, and present himself as the true voice of God, then his own moral omissions are fair game. You do not get to denounce others for failing to embody justice while ignoring slavery and casually turning enslaved people into sermon illustrations. The problem becomes obvious if we update the setting: imagine a Southern preacher in the 1820s using plantation slavery to describe humanity’s proper relationship to God. Imagine the preacher sharing stories in the pulpit about slaves being beaten and tortured. Despite the stories being relevant to the context of the time, we would immediately recognize the moral horror of the analogy. That is precisely the kind of contradiction Ehrman should have interrogated.

Normally we would explain this ethical lapse by describing Jesus as a “man of his time.” Yet, according to Christian tradition, he was God and should have possessed timeless divine wisdom. Under that standard, his silence on slavery and casual use of it in stories is devastating. Even under a secular standard, Jesus was supposedly one of the greatest ethical teachers of all time—a pure moral genius. But a moral genius who failed to recognize the evil of owning human beings is, by definition, morally limited.

The Gospels celebrate Jesus for eating with tax collectors and sinners, but they never show him eating with “worthless” slaves, the very people his own parables imagine as beaten, tortured, neglected, and ordered to serve.

Conclusion

In Love Thy Stranger, Ehrman highlights the radical ethical ideal of Jesus’s teachings on love. But as we have seen, love was not the center of the movement. Jesus was. The miracles, conflicts, and revelation scenes all work to present Jesus as a powerful, divinely authorized figure. Women, the sick, the poor, and social outsiders often appear not as the center of his concern but as instruments in his road show. His most famous ethical teachings look like field instructions and threats designed to protect his men. He was connected to elite figures and wealth, yet the Gospels do not show him organizing the charitable activities he supposedly made central to Western moral life.

We can also see that Jesus used conflict and fear to sustain the movement. He demonized critics, staged public confrontations with religious authorities, and threatened catastrophe for those who rejected him or his messengers. He invoked outer darkness, Gehenna, weeping and gnashing of teeth, severe beatings, and apocalyptic judgment. Love may have drawn followers in, but fear helped keep them there.

This is classic cultic behavior: love is used to recruit, while terror is used to control. Jesus offered feel-good comforts like belonging and meaning. He offered healing and future reward, but he also surrounded the movement with threats. The result was a high-demand apocalyptic movement built around loyalty to Jesus—one that Jesus apologists like Ehrman are incapable of unpacking.

We see the same dynamics in Jesus’s movement that we see in many cultic groups: women trembling, weeping, and groveling at the guru’s feet; late-night spectacles that stretch into exhaustion; crowds chasing miracles; followers leaving families and livelihoods behind; believers’ labor being exploited; insiders being taught secret meanings; critics being demonized as blind, wicked, or aligned with Satan; and doubt being recoded as betrayal.

Imagine what this high-demand environment would have felt like in the bodies of his disciples: urgency, exhaustion, dependency, fear, and the constant pressure to interpret every hardship as proof of faith. And the fruits of such conditions were not even being used in the service of a charitable enterprise. It was an apocalyptic drama with Jesus at the center. The movement offered love, belonging, healing, and cosmic significance—but always under the shadow of judgment. That is what Ehrman misses: Jesus’s “love” did not operate in isolation. It was embedded inside a system of fear, dependency, spectacle, and submission.

This is what makes Jesus so difficult to read critically: the destructive mechanics of his movement are wrapped in feel-good, world-saving ideology. From the inside—and to many Jesus scholars—it does not look exploitative. Abandoning family becomes choosing God. Losing autonomy becomes gaining eternal life. Giving up possessions becomes storing treasure in heaven. Becoming dependent becomes becoming faithful. Read through the most favorable Jesus-apologist lens, the very mechanisms that dispossess people are recoded as love and spiritual freedom.

Imagine if scholars interpreted Jesus with the same clarity and distance they would bring to a cult leader. There are so many stories and parables that display the coercive or exploitative side of Jesus. Imagine how different Jesus studies would look if the field were not dominated by his biggest admirers.

Ehrman says Jesus transformed the moral conscience of the West. But the Gospels show something more troubling: a leader who spiritualized dispossession, demanded loyalty, threatened those who rejected him, used suffering bodies as revelation scenes, left slavery untouched, and turned love into a mechanism of attachment. These are the dynamics of high-control groups. Jesus resembles a charismatic apocalyptic guru more than a timeless moral genius—which perfectly explains why, during the Waco crisis, authorities recruited Jesus scholar James Tabor to help understand David Koresh.

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