The phrase circulates in two word orders — “hate the sin, love the sinner” and “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Both refer to the same aphorism, and neither appears in any Bible translation.
Origin
The phrase has two distinct historical layers.
Augustine of Hippo (c. 424 AD). In Letter 211, addressed to a community of nuns under the authority of his sister, Augustine writes in Latin:
Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum.
Translated: “With love for mankind and hatred of vices.” This is the earliest known formulation of the idea in roughly its modern form. Augustine’s phrasing distinguishes between the person (loved) and the vice or sin (hated).
Mahatma Gandhi (1929). The modern English wording — “Hate the sin and not the sinner” — is most directly traced to Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Part IV, Chapter IX, 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 phrase has been widely adopted in English-language Christian usage since the early 20th century, often without attribution.
Why the misattribution persists
The construction expresses an ethical idea — distinguishing the wrong-doing from the wrong-doer — that does have biblical analogues (see “What the Bible says on this theme”). The phrase has the cadence of a proverb and is often used in sermons, which has reinforced the assumption that it is biblical.
What the Bible says on this theme
Several biblical passages address the relationship between hating evil and loving people. None of them uses the wording of the proverb:
- Psalm 97:10 — “Hate evil, O you who love the LORD”
- Romans 12:9 — “Love must be sincere. Detest what is evil; cling to what is good.”
- Proverbs 8:13 — “To fear the LORD is to hate evil”
- Jude 1:22–23 — pairs mercy toward sinners with hatred of the corruption itself
The structure of Romans 12:9
Romans 12:9 is the verse most often cited as the phrase’s biblical source, and its structure is worth noting. The Greek reads hē agapē anypokritos; apostygountes to ponēron, kollōmenoi tō agathō — “Love unhypocritical. Detesting the evil, cleaving to the good.” The verb apostygeō (ἀποστυγέω) is an intensified form of stygeō (to hate) — to abhor, to strongly detest. Its object is to ponēron — the evil thing, an 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, and it does not use the word “sinner.” The same pattern holds in Psalm 97:10 and Proverbs 8:13: hatred of evil is commanded without separating “sinner” and “sin” as distinct objects of differential treatment.