Where do human rights come from?

Not from biology — from a particular conviction with deep Jewish and Christian roots. As a measurement, equal worth is plainly false: humans differ in strength, health and intellect in every way you can test — which is why even the atheist historian Yuval Noah Harari grants that “there are no such things as rights in biology.” Equal worth is a value laid over that inequality, not a fact read off from it.

The ancient Mediterranean largely assumed the opposite: Aristotle taught that some people are “marked out” for rule and others for subjection from birth. The conviction that every human being has an equal, inviolable worth simply for being human entered Western law and conscience chiefly through the claim that God made humanity, male and female alike, in his own image — so worth is conferred, not earned.

Didn't the Greeks and Romans already believe in a common humanity? A few voices reached toward it — Seneca, the jurist Ulpian — and that is worth granting plainly. But they graded worth by rational capacity, and, decisively, the idea never became a movement, a law, or a settled conviction; Seneca kept his slaves.

This is a genealogy of a conviction, not a proof of a creed — a belief can have honourable roots and still be false. The case for the faith's truth rests elsewhere, on the resurrection.