Thinking about ancient ethics

(Since the Iran War is going to be part of our daily news for weeks, months, and very possibly years, l’m posting on something different for this edition.)

Bart Ehrman is a Biblical scholar who does regular podcasts on his professional topic. His background is interesting. He began his career as a conservative Christian believer in the fundamentalist, “born-again” tradition. Over time, he evolved into a non-believer.

But that change didn’t remove his fascination and professional commitment to secular scholarly research in his chosen field. It’s worth remembering that the Young Hegelians of the early 19th century like Bruno Bauer, David Friedrich Strauss, and Ludwig Feuerbach focused heavily on critical Biblical scholarship. Their secular scholarship on the Bible was one reason they were known as Left Hegelians. Friedrich Engels at one point considered writing a book on Biblical scholarship in the tradition of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841). But his scholarly interests wound up going in a different direction.

That was part of a modern trend toward an increasingly secular understanding of religion and how it has functioned historically. Not a universal trend, obviously, as we see in the persistent appearance of religious fundamentalist movement in today’s world, and not just among Christians.

How this relates to Bart Ehrman’s podcast and scholarly projects is that he gives a historical picture of how ideas evolved and how they influenced history in ways that makes us still have interest in them today. Here he talks about ethics in the ancient Western world, not so much on Christianity. He talks about Aristotle’ ethics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics.

If you pay attention to such things, this is an interesting and accessible presentation. (1)



In the previous episode in this particular series, “Love Thy Stranger: The Radical Origins of Western Compassion,” it talks about how hospitals began as a Christian undertaking. This piqued my interest because the late Austrian philosopher-theologian Ivan Ilich as argued that hospitals in the form that we know them were something Christian Crusaders learned about from the Muslims. But organized spots devoted to caring for the sick arguably goes back long before the Christian era began.

Ilich presumably thought there was something distinct about the kind of institutions that the Muslims operated:

Religion continued to be the dominant influence in the establishment of hospitals during the Middle Ages. The growth of hospitals accelerated during the Crusades, which began at the end of the 11th century. Pestilence and disease were more potent enemies than the Saracens in defeating the crusaders. Military hospitals came into being along the traveled routes; the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John in 1099 established in the Holy Land a hospital that could care for some 2,000 patients. It is said to have been especially concerned with eye disease, and it may have been the first of the specialized hospitals. This order has survived through the centuries as the St. John Ambulance. (2)

Notes:

(1) Did Jesus Invent Modern Morality? Exploring Ancient Ethics. Bart D. Ehrman YouTube channel 03/03/2026. <https://youtu.be/EWnYqZNyEn4?si=sCNRtTn9z30ifeKr> (Accessed: 2026-04-03).

(2) Piercey, W. Douglas & Fralick, Pamela C. & Scarborough, Harold. "hospital". Encyclopedia Britannica 02/19/2026. <https://www.britannica.com/science/hospital> (Accessed: 2026-04-03).