INTRODUCTION

We are told very frequently that we must turn to, or go back to, the ethics of Jesus. Many people are sceptical about some of the more extraordinary Christian claims - the the one-day creation, seven days creation, the snake/apple tale, the whole sequence of seemingly tall stories up to and including the virgin birth and bodily resurrection - but many of these very same people nonetheless say that, somehow, we have to put up with all these weird suppositions because of the supreme value of the ethical teachings attributed to Jesus. Such people are worried that the we might throw away the baby with the bath water.

Quite irrespective of the authenticity of the gospels, in English, on our shelves - ignoring the daunting problem emphasised by the compilers of the New English Bible (the problem of "what to translate and how to translate it") - and also disregarding the problem of 'what Jesus really meant' - this essay is a claim that the ethics attributed to Jesus, in the words that we can actually read for ourselves, is, prima facie NOT of special value - certainly not of such value as to be regarded as inspired rather than merely, in some important ways, inspiring.

Of course, there is no straightforward compact ethical manifesto in the gospels; statements of ethical significance are scattered throughout the synoptic gospels in particular and so the charge of selective quotation can be made very easily - a charge pithily summed up in the quip 'a text out of context is a pretext.'

It happens that the Scottish Council of Churches has run a course for church activists, a course that includes a Christian Ethics module. In the course book is a list of gospel references chosen by the compilers of the module, for students to study. Any charge of 'out of context' selection should be referred to the SCC, not to me, the writer of this essay. What follows is a complete list of those references or groups of related references. The SCC writer is at pains to say that other ethically significant texts could have been cited and so I have added to the list the famous and very important one about the widow's mite.

Thanks are due to the SCC and to that writer for compiling that list.

COMMENTS UPON THESE TEACHINGS

It is easiest to comment upon these in the above order, the order in which the SCC writer set them out. Having done that then a summing-up can be attempted. However, before commenting on the texts listed by the SCC. it seems that the story of the widow's mite ought to be considered (MARK 12 : 41-44).

This story is important because it raises a classic ethical dilemma - the relative importance of intention and consequences.

If we take intention as the main consideration then the widow comes out of it very well; she has meant well and done the best she could do and it is, presumably, not her fault that she could not do more. But, on the other hand, the little that she gave would not be of very much use to anyone precisely because it was so little. She might have felt good (with some reason) but she scarcely did much good.

The rich donor may well have done much more good than the widow but would have, truly, less reason to feel good because he had made no real sacrifice of his self-interest.

But the widow, by giving her all, had made herself totally dependent upon other people while the rich man left himself still in a position to help others.

It has to hoped that both, in their different ways, did good by good example but, of course, this spin-off would be lost if the giving were done in secret.

The fact is that intentions and consequences both make claims upon our capacity for moral approval and it is merely shallow to extol the one at the expense of totally denigrating the other. The story makes no attempt to discuss the problem; it simply resorts to slogan ethics of a kind that could well discourage people from giving anything short of their all.

It might also be wondered whether the rich man had perhaps made his money partly for the express purpose of spending some of it charitably; it can be wondered whether the widow was poor because of fecklessness and her giving her little all was simply to draw attention to her virtue and elicit gifts on account of that. Her gift may not have been well-meaning at all; it might have been the last sprat to catch the next mackerel.

The fact is that consequences can be, to some extent, assessed while intentions can only be attributed. The story is a very flimsy one in that it fails to address any of the complex issues involved other than willingness to sacrifice one's immediate interests.

1. MAT 5: 10-11; 38-39; 41-42.

Verses 10-11 seem reasonable enough but, ethically, not particularly noble; Jesus appears to be offering full support to those who agree with him. Crudely speaking, this boils down to 'if you scratch my back ... ' This is certainly sensible and fair but scarcely a very noble ethic. A more elevated sentiment might, equally crudely, be - 'I will scratch your back even if you do not scratch mine'. In fairness it must be said that the well-known 'love your enemies ... ' text improves upon the rather lame ethic of making a great virtue of mutual back-scratching.

Verses 38-39 taken together are very unconvincing. While it is true that the OT teaching (quoted in verse 38) of 'an eye for an eye ...' would, as someone said wittily, simply lead us to a blind and toothless world, it could also be said that, our following the teaching of verse 39, would simply lead us to a world of very sore cheeks for everyone except the bullies.

The hard truth is that this problem (of what peaceable people ought to do in face of belligerent ones) admits of no simple general solution. All that the Bible does, referring both to the OT and to these two verses, is to offer two answers - revenge or appeasement - neither of which, in the light of experience, can be said to be satisfactory.

Verses 41-42 border on to the farcical: if I give, or lend, on demand then having done so I can then, by the same principle, demand to be given back that which I have just given and I can demand to be lent back that which I have just lent. The absurdity of this is expressed by pantomime dialogues of the kind - 'After you Claud.', 'No, after you Cecil.'

More seriously, verse 42 effectively countermands the gist of the eighth commandment "Thou shalt not steal" in that it boils down to saying that it is ethically obligatory to be a willing accessory to someone else's theft (from oneself).

One of the other texts refers to a man taking one's cloak and, following verse 42, one can take it back again. The ludicrous spectacle of two men passing a cloak back and forth from one to the other, in a busy street perhaps, simply blows the mind. Such idiocy would surely attract the attention of those strong gentle chaps in white coats who are always ready to take us to a secure place where our bizarre behaviour will not be a danger to ourselves or to others.

2. LUKE 11: 37-54; 2: 1-3. MAT 18: 15.

LUKE 11: 37-54 tells of a most extraordinary outburst from Jesus - an outburst which people who tend to admire him must surely hope has been misreported.

On coming unwashed to a meal and this ill-mannered omission having been noticed, Jesus, rather than feeling awkward as most of us would, proceeds to lambast his host with a lecture about things quite other than the simple cleanliness of the person.

Jesus here, if the report is correct, reminds us of those pitiful and insecure young people who flout convention merely to prove - with the minimum of grace and the maximum of ostentation - that they are not its slaves. We have all met young men whose message appears to be 'good manners can be a sham; we are deliberately rude in order to show that we are not shamming'. Such young men usually grow up to be super-conformists. One can only guess what Jesus would have come to be like had he achieved mellow middle-age. If these verses are supposed to set us an example then one shudders to think what a cautionary tale would be like!

Perhaps there is something of value in the tale; the politeness and patience reported of the hosts is perhaps meant to exemplify 'turning the other cheek'? Or perhaps, considering the last few verses, we are to be put in mind of 'just because I am paranoid does not mean that they are not out to get me'.

The whole passage is most unedifying and offers little or no ethical guidance.

LUKE 2: 1-3 seems to have no ethical point whatever; it is a statement purporting to be of historical fact.

MAT 18:15 seems to be good sense and good ethics - those of us who live in small close-knit communities ought to understand that it is wrong to gossip about people's failings behind their backs rather than to confront them in private with a view to some resolution.

3. LUKE 12: 15-21. MAT 5:42; 6 19-24

LUKE 12: 15-21 and MAT:6 19-24 are very similar and can be considered together; comment on MAT 5: 42 has already been made.

The advice in the verses from Luke is perfectly proper and wise but, what is said in the following verses 22-23 does not follow logically from what is reasonably put in the preceding ones. It simply does not follow that the wrong of accumulating wealth for one's own selfish satisfaction makes the accumulation of wealth for other reasons necessarily wrong as well. Oxfam, for example, properly accumulates wealth from sales, and fund-raising generally, for the purpose of relieving undeserved hunger in countries less fortunate than our own.

"Take no thought for your life" is simply silly; if you are to do good to others then your first need is to be alive to do it; if one's life is to be in the service of others then it has, in general, to be "heeded". You're no good dead; you are less than no good if you so neglect yourself that that so far from helping others, you desperately need help yourself. What do you achieve by going to a famine-stricken country to help the starving if you starve yourself? You will then be useless to others and a drain upon the limited aid resources that were meant for people who couldn't help being starved.

The passage gives no proper account of the classic difficulty of balancing egoism with altruism - one of the great ethical challenges we actually have to face.

The only rational basis for not preparing sensibly for the future would be if the all-transforming Second Coming were imminent. Jesus is reported as asserting this to be imminent; his being mistaken about it - even after nearly two thousand years - makes ethical teaching in anticipation of such a huge event merely ridiculous and its perpetuation irresponsible.

The verses from Matthew 6 are even less sensible in that they include the extraordinary statement that you "cannot serve two masters". Of course you can, provided that the two masters do not make incompatible demands upon you and that you have a sense of priority as between them. Indeed, Jesus is elsewhere reported precisely as making this very point when he asks us to serve two masters - "render unto Caesar ..." and "render unto God ..." on the implied understanding that the two acts of service are both quite proper so long as priority is given to the more important one - the second one, presumably.

One of the main ethical problems we actually have to face is the problem of divided loyalties, competing duties, and how to prioritise them. Verse 24 does not help us with this difficulty; it tacitly ignores the problem altogether. It is merely 'slogan ethics' casting no very useful light upon an age-old ethical dilemma.

4. MAT 6: 1-4.

Again, this text starts by being perfectly good ethics - do not boast about your good actions.

But superficiality takes over almost at once in that the only offered alternative to boasting about one's goodness is to be secretive about it.
Even supposing secrecy to be possible, it is wrong to be secretive about one's goodness - such as it is. Everybody knows that good example is about the most powerful means there is for making the world a better place and a the notion of a good example that is kept secret is an elementary logical contradiction.

The value of good example is particularly important in the upbringing of children; is it not the case that the best thing, ethically, that we can do for our children, or our pupils, is to set good examples? Goodness, as the old saying goes, is mostly 'caught not taught'. To be secretive about one's good acts is to prevent one's goodness, such as it may be, from being caught by others. As has been said already, the very point of the widow's mite story is that it applauds good example.

5. MAT 22: 34-40. JOHN 4: 19-21.

"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" is one of the noblest thoughts in the reported ethics of Jesus but it is not original; it is the almost universally recognised Golden Rule which was recognised and formulated centuries before Jesus and is in no way necessarily dependent upon the preceding commandment "Thou shalt love thy God ..."

Many early formulations of the Golden Rule were made by godless thinkers such as Confucius and others and is still observed by many contemporary sceptics. Jesus was right about it but we do not owe the precept to him especially.
In any case the precept "love thy neighbour as thyself" needs to be applied positively; there is a trend within Christianity to think so poorly of oneself, as a miserable sinner, that to "love thy neighbour as thyself" often boils down to "despise or even hate thy neighbour as thyself" - although admittedly only a few Christians nowadays think that way.

6. LUKE 10: 25-37.

The story of the Good Samaritan is another of the noblest parts of the Christian scripture and, in so far as it effectively says that everyone is our neighbour it is very much in line with the passage in the OT that bids us not to vex aliens because we may be aliens ourselves if we move among other different people.

There is little doubt that if the Golden Rule and the story of the Good Samaritan were taken to heart by more of us then our world would be a far better one.

7. MAT 25: 31-46.

This is sound ethics except for the huge emphasis upon punishment if we do wrong. If we do right for fear of being punished then we are not only acting ethically but also expediently. The implication of this is the ethically unsound idea that 'if you cannot be good be careful'. The other old saying - that 'virtue is its own reward' - while a little optimistic, is at least sound ethics untainted by expediency.

8. MAT 5: 17-20; 21-26; 27-28

Verses 17-26 represent recognisably good ethical sense but 27-28 (which were not included in the SCC list but which are referred to in other parts of the course book) are of very dubious merit.

These two verses seem, somewhat vaguely, to present lustful thoughts and lustful acts as being somehow ethically equivalent. That is not said in so many words but the impression remains that the gospel is suggesting as much.

Ethically speaking, the passage is pitifully weak for, while the thought and the act can both be considered to be wrong, the act is by far the worse of the two - for a very obvious reason. The lustful thought does not hurt the person who is the subject of that thought; indeed that person need not even know that the thought is being entertained, may not even have heard of the thinker. (How many men have lustful thoughts about, say, a female film star who has not even met any of those men and would not recognise them if she did; their thoughts, wrong though they may be, do not hurt her one little bit. How often do men entertain lustful thoughts about the female characters in a work of fiction - imaginary women who are not even there to be hurt?

The lustful act, on the other hand, may cause immense hurt to the victim - ranging from humiliating embarrassment to permanent physical or psychological injury.

The only way to even begin to regard the thought and the act as being to any degree equivalent is to suppose that what the victim of the act experiences is of no moral interest. Admittedly consequences may not be all there is to ethics but an ethic that simply ignores real consequences to real people is no ethic at all. These two verses seem to be ethically appalling, if only by omission of any mention of consequences.

A (female!) minister of the Kirk, discussing these verses with me, suggested that the thought and the act were equally offensive to God. The obvious reply to that is that if God thinks along those lines then He is not a morally laudable god, is he?

9. LUKE 6: 37-38.

These verses make sense to everyone but few people actually live by them. They are idealistic rather than effective in the real world.

10. MAT 6: 1. ROM 12: 9-21.

It is simply a fact that good is often unrewarded in this world; it is wishful believing to suppose that somehow things are put right in the next life. It is comforting to believe this but that does not constitute evidence that it is actually true.

11. MAT 18: 1-9; 21: 28-32; 23: 12.

Noble sentiments that nobody, not even Christians, take very seriously. In any case to seek to occupy a position of power and authority can be a means of doing good - "power tends to corrupt .... and almost all great men are bad men" is a famous saying of Lord Acton's and, while it is often true, it does not have always to be true. There can be such a thing as eminence with goodness and it is simply foolish to deny the possibility. This is as silly as saying (as referred to earlier) that the accumulation of wealth is necessarily a selfish act; it can be accumulated for good cause and indeed the Christian church defends its acquisition of worldly wealth precisely on that basis - and often, to be fair, uses that wealth virtuously.

Once again, in the gospels, a promising idea is ruined by glib superficiality, a dangerous tendency to over-simplify issues that are easily recognised to be not simple at all.

12. MK 7: 9-13; 10: 1-12. LUKE 8: 19-21; 12: 49-53.

The Scottish Council of Churches course book says it all - "NB Jesus makes far more negative comments about the family than positive ones".

A most disturbing tendency among the disenchanted youth of the bored middle class is to drift into cults which make a virtue of disloyalty to one's family. This self-indulgence is a nasty over reaction to the commandment that tells us to honour our mother and our father without allowing for the possibility that parents can be, and indeed in some case are, despicable by any standards biblical or otherwise.

Yet again a genuine ethical difficulty - how to identify the proper limits of family loyalty - is fouled up by unthinking biblical extremism one way or the other. No wonder Christians are worried about the family - it is their ethical superficiality that has helped to create a problem that is not always evident in societies without a major Christian input.

13. MAT 5: 33-37.

The prohibition of oath-taking is entirely proper; many people, including both those in the Quaker fringe of religion and the outright sceptics, have fought long and hard to be relieved of this demeaning nonsense in courts of law.

14. MAT 22: 15-22. (But see ROM 13: 1-6 NEB E.S.)

The distinction between "... to God" and " ... to Caesar" is very proper. For a believer it is simply a literal ethical truth and to the sceptic it is a valid metaphor. Governments do not like us to make the distinction and Paul, (ROM 13: 1-6) makes clear his rejection of the distinction preferring the creeps' creed that governments are by God ordained and that to defy them is to defy God.

Paul's position is ultimately atheist - if the government's word is authentically god-warranted then we do not need to refer to God at all. If ROMANS 13: 1-6 is anything to go by then Paul would have sat well on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in its most repressive mode. Fortunately many courageous people, believers and sceptics alike, try to keep the principle of the God/Caesar distinction in mind and they find the resulting dilemmas hard to resolve sometimes.

Again, the biblical messages are ethically confused but at least, as in the case of 'the eye for an eye' and the 'other cheek' problem, the issue is raised.

15. MK 2: 27.

Fairly obvious idea; very few people would deny it.

16. MK 9: 42.

Noble sentiments; no other comment!

17. MAT 6: 25-34.

All the 'take no thought for the morrow' idea is senseless and irresponsible except in the hope of an imminent world-transforming Second Coming.

17. MAT 6: 25-34.

This is the ultimate 'thought for the weak' - don't use the brains that God has given you in an attempt to identify practically what to do for the best - just believe and all will be well.

CONCLUSIONS

Summing-up, it seems fair to say that the ethical teachings, attributed to Jesus in the English language versions of the gospels to which we have ready access, is not ethical teaching of a very high quality. Some of it is unreal, some of it is irrelevant, if not actually unethical, in a world not yet in benefit of the predicted Second Coming; some of it is dismissive of the dignity of the person and there are significant omissions - omissions of some matters that, intuitively, we see to be ethically important. Those precepts that are truly laudable are, in some cases, unoriginal and have been expressed better by earlier thinkers independently of any Judeo-Christian input.

One has to say, with regret, that had these precepts, biblically attributed to Jesus, appeared anywhere other than in a book that is seen as privileged literature, they would be regarded as of second-rate quality ... by which is meant second rate not first-rate or tenth-rate.

A tutor in moral philosophy who had received such work from one of his students would probably send it back with a comment such as 'you have provided a list of many of the matters that are of ethical concern but you have omitted others seemingly for no good reason and the topics you have dealt with you have not thought through with sufficient rigour. Try again.'

If this is an even remotely fair criticism of the biblically-reported ethics of Jesus then it might be argued that perhaps important other material of his has been lost and that the surviving fragments are not a fair account of what he really taught. Be that as it may, we can do nothing about what may have been irretrievably lost.

Another possible way out of any unease we may feel about the gospel-reported ethic is to refer to other sources of Christian ethics in the hope of getting a more satisfactory result. Two such spring to mind - the Decalogue and the list of the Seven Deadly Sins.

The Decalogue, while including so much that is ethically valuable, is almost incredible in its omissions and its lack of sense of proportion. For example, given that we are forbidden to make graven images but that there is no commandment against gross violence, short of killing, against the person then we have the following ethically absurd possibility:

I may be a sculptor or a painter and I may pay my neighbour's wife to pose as a nude model; she agrees to do so and her husband has no objection - she has been a professional model for many years. Considering the Decalogue, I am in direct defiance of the second commandment. (Some adherents to the OT are very strictly against representational art precisely because of this commandment).

But, taking another scenario, I and two others invade my neighbours' home, beat her and her husband severely.. Neither of them is killed but they both suffer appalling trauma and loss of dignity. There is no prohibition of violence in the decalogue - only a prohibition of killing (which may even be justifiable in self-defence).

It is absurd to regard the Decalogue as a balanced ethical code of dependable relevance to real life even though some of its requirements are ethically valuable.

The lack of balance is horrifying: to forbid killing but to ignore torture, to demand honour to parents but to say nothing against ill-treatment of children, to condemn outright the sometimes technical offence of adultery but to make no mention of the very real offence of rape . . . these are absurd and horrible distortions of ethics as civilised people understand the term. Are the Seven Dealy Sins any better as balanced list of ethical requirements?

The Seven Deadly Sins - in no particular order - are wrath, avarice, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony (I remember the list by way of WASP LEG). Superficially these seem to be a pretty comprehensive catalogue of real wrongs - until we notice that there is no mention of other equally real wrongs. The seven include no reference to the obvious sins of dishonesty and its relatives such as treachery, deception, broken promises and no reference whatever to personal violence of any sort such as torture, physical abuse of the vulnerable, unlawful forcible incarceration and so on.

It is clear that, like the Ten, the Seven, represent no balanced ethical precept in general any more than does the reported ethics of Jesus. If we are serious about right and wrong then we have to look further than traditional religious sources.