Bart Ehrman wants Jesus’ morality without Jesus’ God

Bart Ehrman has built a career challenging Christianity. A now-retired professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a prolific author on the New Testament and early church history, Ehrman studied under renowned conservative scholar Bruce Metzger and earned both an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. Yet despite that background, he ultimately rejected the Christian faith and now openly denies that Jesus is God and Savior.

But that doesn’t mean he regards Christ as just another ho-hum religious teacher.

In fact, his latest book, Love Thy Stranger, argues the exact opposite. Ehrman claims that in a brutal ancient world where Greeks and Romans largely lacked concern for outsiders, Jesus introduced a radically new moral vision: care for “the least of these.” According to Ehrman, Christianity fundamentally reshaped the moral conscience of Western culture by teaching people to love and help strangers.

In his blog post on the book, Ehrman says:

“This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is not written into the ancient human DNA nor did it exist in the roots of our Western cultural heritage … The sense that anyone should help random strangers in far-away places was simply not part of the moral equation … My claim is that as Christianity spread throughout the ancient world after Jesus’ death, it revolutionized the understanding of ethical obligation, leading to a fundamental transformation in the moral conscience of the West.”

Ironically, Ehrman’s argument ends up affirming something Christians have long maintained: Jesus truly changed the world. But consider the obvious implication of Ehrman’s assertions.

If morality evolved merely through social development, then moral values are invented rather than discovered. Jesus’ teachings may be admirable under that framework, but they are not objectively true. They became the preferences humanity eventually settled on: sophisticated cultural tastes rather than eternal moral realities.

God’s objective Law in our hearts

Scripture presents a very different picture.

It teaches that we discover and don’t invent morality, and that it is both objective and innate to our beings. The Bible says that, “The law of the LORD is perfect” (Ps. 19:7) and that we know it instinctively: “For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them” (Rom. 2:14–15). 

Ehrman rejects this because he discards the concept of a good and perfect God from whom comes objective right and wrong.

In a recent interview, Ehrman did with Christian apologist Sean McDowell on this topic, Ehrman said, “I don’t have any access to any kind of universal objectivity” indicating, as many other skeptics do, there is no moral objective right and wrong that serves as a guide for our ethical behavior. McDowell challenged him with a straightforward ethical example: torturing a child for entertainment. Surely, McDowell argued, that is “universally”/ objectively wrong.

Ehrman’s response was, “No, I don’t think it is.”

Ehrman continued by saying,

“In the ancient world, for example, people who were also human beings often practiced child sacrifice. It was often very painful. They thought it was the right thing to do. You could claim they didn’t understand the objective truth of morality, or you could say that actually this moral truth that we thought was objective and available to everybody was not available to them.”

With this, Ehrman makes a mistake many others do by equating is with ought; with what people do morally vs. what they should do. But this isn’t surprising since he rejects objective morality, and once done, all you have is opinion.

His stance brings to mind an encounter one Christian apologist relayed of confronting a skeptic with the question: “If I took a baby and dismembered it alive before you, would you say that was objectively wrong?” The skeptic shuffled their feet and admitted, “I would not like it, but I could not say it was wrong”.

Sounds ghastly, but the person was just following what Frederick Nietzsche said: “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

McDowell pushed Ehrman on this point in the interview, asking whether the teaching Jesus brought was objectively true: “The heart of my question is: when you call this a moral transformation, is this a change on a horizontal level, in which it’s just a change like clothing styles have changed over time? Or is this an objectively good transformation that Jesus brought — that we ought to live the way that Jesus lived and support things like hospitals, orphanages, and poorhouses?”

Ehrman replied: “I would say some things are objectively good, in my opinion. I think it’s good that we have hospitals. It’s good that we have orphanages. It’s good that we have disaster relief programs. I think these are good. This is my personal opinion. Since it’s my personal opinion, I don’t think it’s objective.”

At least Ehrman corrected himself at the end. Saying “some things are objectively good, in my opinion” is contradictory. But again, without God, opinion is all you have to fall back on in the area of morality.

What Ehrman’s comments ultimately demonstrate is that once God is removed from the moral equation, all that remains is preference masquerading as principle. Words like “good,” “evil,” “justice,” and “human rights” become expressions of taste rather than truths binding on all people.

But deep down, virtually no one actually lives that way.

We instinctively know some things are truly wrong, and not merely personally disliked, because God has written His moral law on the human heart. Our consciences testify to it every day, whether we acknowledge the lawgiver or not.

At the same time, conscience alone is not enough because human beings suppress, distort, and rationalize moral truth. That is why God has not only written His law within us but has also revealed it clearly in His Word. Scripture gives us the objective standard humanity desperately needs, rooted not in shifting cultural consensus or individual opinion, but in the unchanging character of God Himself.

I appreciate Ehrman shining a spotlight on Christ and acknowledging His distinction from other religions and their teachers. But Jesus did not invent morality any more than Isaac Newton invented gravity; He revealed moral truths grounded eternally in the nature of God. And because those truths come from a holy and perfect Creator, they remain true whether the world applauds them, ignores them, or denies them altogether.