Jesus sometimes taught that much of the law of God could be summarized in the command to "love your neighbor as yourself." He taught that you should "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
But people must realize that Jesus's ethical teachings were delivered in a decidedly apocalyptic form. The reasoning behind his moral teaching is not the reasoning most of us use today. People today think that we should live ethically for a wide variety of reasons--most of them irrelevant to Jesus--for example, so we can find the greatest self-fulfillment in life and so we can all thrive together as a society for the long haul. Jesus did not teach his ethics so that society could thrive for the long haul. For Jesus, there was not going to be a long haul. The end was coming soon, and people needed to prepare for it. Anyone who chose not to do so would be destroyed when the Son of Man arrived in judgment from heaven.
But people must realize that Jesus's ethical teachings were delivered in a decidedly apocalyptic form. The reasoning behind his moral teaching is not the reasoning most of us use today. People today think that we should live ethically for a wide variety of reasons--most of them irrelevant to Jesus--for example, so we can find the greatest self-fulfillment in life and so we can all thrive together as a society for the long haul. Jesus did not teach his ethics so that society could thrive for the long haul. For Jesus, there was not going to be a long haul. The end was coming soon, and people needed to prepare for it. Anyone who chose not to do so would be destroyed when the Son of Man arrived in judgment from heaven.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
