Origin
The exact English phrase love the sinner, hate the sin does not appear in any Bible translation. Its conceptual ancestors are two non-biblical sources:
- Augustine of Hippo, Letter 211 (c. 424 CE), in a letter addressing internal disputes at a convent led by his sister: cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum — with love for the people and hatred of the sins (vices). This is the earliest documented form of the underlying distinction in Christian writing.
- Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1929): Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.
The English-language aphorism in its modern pithy form became widely circulated in the 20th century, picking up biblical-sounding cadence and acquiring frequent misattribution to scripture in casual usage.
What the Bible actually says about hating evil
The closest biblical text is Romans 12:9: Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. The structure is significant:
- Hē agapē anypokritos — love (must be) unhypocritical
- Apostygountes to ponēron — detesting the evil thing
- Kollōmenoi tō agathō — cleaving to the good
The Greek verb apostygeō is an intensified form of stygeō (to hate) — to abhor, to strongly detest. The object is to ponēron — the evil thing, abstract neuter — not a person. The verse names two parallel acts: detest evil, cling to good. It does not split a person from their actions in the way the popular aphorism does.
Psalm 97:10 and Proverbs 8:13 similarly call for hatred of evil without separating sinner from sin as distinct objects of differential treatment. The biblical pattern is detest-evil-cling-to-good, applied to one’s own life primarily, with no popular-style aphorism about how to relate to other people whose actions one disapproves of.
Why the aphorism is useful and also why it is not biblical
The distinction between loving a person and disapproving of their actions is a real and serious moral concept. It is part of how Christian and other religious traditions have thought about ethics. Augustine’s letter is one early articulation of it. The aphorism in its pithy modern form is a useful summary of that tradition.
It is also not in the Bible. Quoting it as if it were scripture both misattributes its actual sources and obscures the more complex biblical material on how to relate to others’ wrongdoing — which includes Matthew 18’s process for addressing offence, 1 Corinthians 5’s instructions about a specific case, and the wider sweep of judge not / judge righteously material across the Gospels.