Where did the adage, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” come from?
It is from the writings of St. Augustine:
His Letter 211 (c. 424) contains the phrase Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum, which translates roughly to "With love for mankind and hatred of sins." The phrase has become more famous as "love the sinner but hate the sin" or "hate the sin and not the sinner" (the latter form appearing in Mohandas Gandhi’s 1929 autobiography).
Alexander Pope in the poem "Eloise to Abelard" (1717) uses a similar formulation:
Of all affliction taught a lover yet,
'Tis sure the hardest science to forget!
How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense,
And love the' offender, yet detest the' offence?
How the dear object from the crime remove,
Or how distinguish penitence from love?
Another invocation of "love the sin, hate the sinner" occurs in William Mason's notes to John Bunyan's hugely influential (in English culture) book, The Pilgrim's Progress, Part II (1684/1786):
Here is the mystery of God's grace, the mystery of precious faith; that, however hateful sin is in the sight of a holy God, however full of sin the sinner is, yet he can love the sinner, as much as he loaths his sin. Why? because he views his elect sinners, in Christ the Son of his love, by whom a perfect atonement is made for sin, his precious blood cleanses their souls from all sin and presents them without spot of sin before God.
Mason wrote his notes to The Pilgrim's Progress sometime between 1777 and 1786 (when a version of Bunyan's book containing Mason's annotations first appeared). In an earlier version of this answer, I had attributed the quoted language above to Bunyan; but as Mr. Bultitude points out in a comment below, the words are entirely Mason's.
A more coherent discussion of the distinction between sin and sinner appears in Isaac Watts, "The abuse of the passions in religion" in Discourses of the Love of God (1729):
There is another Instance of the Abuse of the Passions, which is very near a-kin to this [namely, zeal turned into wrath and fury], and may stand in the next Rank; and that is, when we behold the Vices of Men with holy Aversion and Hatred, and immediately transfer this Hatred to their Persons, whereas we ought to pity and pray for them : Or when we see a Fellow-Christian fall into Sin, and because we hate the Sin, we hate the Sinner too, and suffer our Hatred to grow into Disdain and irreconcilable Enmity, and that even tho' the Offender has given Signs of sincere Repentance. This is not Christian Zeal, but human Corruption; and such criminal Indulgence of the Passions, which ought to be mortified, if ever we should be Imitators of the holy Jesus : He hated even the least Sin, but loved and saved the greatest of Sinners, and delighted to receive Penitents to his Love.
The basic sentiment has been expressed in various ways since long before anything meaningfully resembling modern English, but here's what I can find leading up to the modern form...
Hymn 270 in John Wesley's A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists (1780) ends with...
To hate the sin with all my heart,
But still the sinner love.
That doesn't seem to have been repeated or refined in print until the mid 1820s, when within the space of a decade or so the pithy modern form suddenly began appearing everywhere. The earliest I can find juxtaposing the actual words love the sinner and hate the sin is Sacred Melodies: Preceded by an Admonitory Appeal to Lord Byron, with Other Small Poems (1824) by Mrs Isaac Henry Robert Mott...
I love the sinner, hate the sin
King David, Psalms 104:35, wrote יתמו חטאים מן הארץ. This is usually translated into something on the lines of "Let sinners cease out of the earth". However:
Grammatically this is correct, but it is an irregular way of writing the word
חטאים- sinners. Though through use of grammar (vowel signs, emphasis) the meaning is sinners, the simple writing of the word is identical to sins.In addition, the second part of the verse -
ורשעים עוד אינם- "and let the wicked be no more" is redundant. No sinners = no wicked, so why the repetition?
The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Brachot 10) tells of Rabbi Meir, who was harassed by wicked people and at first wanted to pray for them to die. His wife quoted the two notions above and helped him understand their central idea - we wish for the sins, not the sinners themselves, to cease. When the sins cease, then as a matter of course the wicked will be no more (i.e., they won't be wicked, since they will have no sin). Rabbi Meir ended up praying for them to rectify their ways - and they did.
In a sense, you may say it is bible (old testament) based.