Bart Ehrman, Matthew 25, and the untethered label
Now to Matthew 25. The text is Matthew 25:31–46, and it is the most explicit statement in the canonical Gospels about what the final judgment actually turns on. The criterion is behavioral, not propositional: feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting the imprisoned. Confessional status is conspicuously absent from the list. The sheep didn’t know they had served Christ, the goats didn’t know they had failed him, and the whole arrangement is indifferent to identity by design.
If this text is taken seriously as a theological statement about what judgment turns on, the implications for how the label “Christian” gets assigned are fairly radical. Ehrman’s record clears the Matthew 25 bar. By public documentation, he has spent the post-faith portion of his career systematically directing resources toward the hungry, the homeless, the sick, and people who cannot read. Whatever you call that, the conduct is not in question.
Sociologist Phil Zuckerman has documented that this is a structural pattern rather than a series of exceptional cases, showing that secular people demonstrate higher consistency with neighbor-love ethics than religiously identified Americans on several specific measures, among them charitable giving, treatment of the poor, and opposition to punitive social policies.3 Ehrman is the named, culturally visible instance of that pattern.
William James made the pragmatist version of this argument in The Varieties of Religious Experience. His claim was that religious states should be judged by what they produce in conduct, not by their metaphysical pedigree. The question for James was not whether a spiritual state could pass some formal theological credential check. The question was what it made a person do.4 Whatever category you assign to Ehrman’s post-faith commitments, those commitments produce behavior that Matthew 25 would recognize without a doctrinal exam.
Tolstoy made essentially the same assertion in the 1880s, which means the institutional response is also on the record. He concluded that the ethical content of the Sermon on the Mount was indeed the core of the faith, that the institutional church had buried it under doctrine and ceremony, and that the ethics didn’t require the metaphysics to remain viable. He wrote two books arguing this at length, and the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him for it in 1901. He was the most famous living novelist in the world, and they threw him out anyway, which tells you something about what the institution was protecting and what it wasn’t.5
The intellectual honesty thread and the Matthew 25 thread are really the same story told from two directions. The rigor that made Ehrman follow the problem of evil out of the faith, rather than finding a theologically safe accommodation or rationale, is the same rigor that makes him take the neighbor-love command seriously when he encounters it in the texts. He didn’t stop believing in God and then decide the hungry could wait. He left one set of commitments because they became intellectually untenable and kept the ones that remained. That continuity is what makes him an impressive test case.
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