Jump to The gist Going deeper In the modern world The tidbit This week
Nobody in this passage is condemned for anything they did.
Matthew 25:31–46 · Majority Standard Bible
When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, He will sit on His glorious throne.
All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.
He will place the sheep on His right and the goats on His left.
Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in,
I was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you looked after Me, I was in prison and you visited Me.’
Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You something to drink?
When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You?
When did we see You sick or in prison and visit You?’
And the King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.’
Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
For I was hungry and you gave Me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me nothing to drink,
I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, I was naked and you did not clothe Me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after Me.’
And they too will reply, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’
Then the King will answer, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.’
And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
The gist
Read the charge sheet on the left-hand side and notice what is not on it. Every count is an omission. Nothing is stolen, nobody is struck, no lie is told. St Theophylact says it outright: these men ”were not punished as fornicators, or robbers, or perpetrators of any other vice, but for not having done good.” And then he presses it further than most readers will want: “the robber is he who has much and does not give alms, even if he does no obvious injury.” The most frightening scene in Matthew turns on things that never happened.
Going deeper
The range first, and for once there is nothing whatever to apologise for.
The MSB prints the heading The Sheep and the Goats at verse 31; there is no further heading, and verse 46 is the last verse of the chapter. The range is the printed unit exactly — no straddle, no window, no seam. That has not been true of any of the last four weeks.
And the heading is doing something. The two units before it in the same chapter are printed The Parable of the Ten Virgins and The Parable of the Talents. This one is not. The book’s own Bible declines to call this a parable, and it turns out that is a live question.
Alford makes the argument and it is formally exact. “This description is not a parable, though there are in it parabolic passages” — and then the reason: ”and for that very reason, that which is illustrated by those likenesses is not itself parabolic.” As a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats is a comparison, and a comparison compares a picture to something that is not a picture. The shepherd is the figure. The judgement is the thing. Ellicott says the same: “it is obvious from its very beginning that it passes beyond the region of parable into that of divine realities.”
Now the text, which is quiet in a way that matters.
There is exactly one footnote in these sixteen verses, and it is at verse 31:
31 k CT does not include holy.
The Byzantine text, the Greek of the Orthodox Church and both Receptus editions read the holy angels; the four critical editions read simply the angels. The MSB prints “holy” and says so. And Chrysostom’s own text had it — the lemma printed at the head of his Homily 79 reads “and all the holy angels with Him.”
Verse 44 is better still, because it splits the three texts this series keeps insisting are three. There, the Greek of the Orthodox Church and both Receptus editions read a pronoun — they too will answer Him — which Robinson-Pierpont does not have, siding instead with the critical editions. So at verse 44 the Orthodox text agrees with the Received text against the Byzantine text the MSB translates. One word, and the whole distinction demonstrated.
And then verse 46, where everything hangs, and there is nothing at all. They will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. All nine printed editions read it identically — critical, Byzantine, Received and Orthodox alike, differing only in punctuation. There is no manuscript escape from this verse, and the MSB, whose apparatus flags a missing “also” nine verses earlier, flags nothing here.
Which brings us to a word, and a claim that has to be conceded before it is refused.
You will have heard that punishment in verse 46 is kolasis, that kolasis means corrective punishment as against timōria, retributive punishment, and that this softens the sentence.
Three concessions, and they are real. The distinction is not invented — it is Aristotle’s, in the Rhetoric, and Thayer, Bengel and Ellicott all cite him for it independently. It is genuine Greek. And four respectable commentators repeat it: the Cambridge Bible, the Pulpit Commentary, Bengel and the Expositor’s Greek Testament. Thayer’s own three-word gloss for the noun is “correction, punishment, penalty,” with correction first.
And now what Thayer does next. Having set out Aristotle’s definition in full and attributed it correctly, he writes: “But, as in other cases, usage (especially the later) does not always recognize the distinction” — and lists eight counter-witnesses, among them Philo, Justin Martyr, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, Ignatius, and Plutarch, who he notes uses the verb “of those undergoing the penalties of the other world.”
Anyone citing Thayer for the corrective sense is quoting the first half of a paragraph whose second half exists to take it back.
Two further facts, and the first is the one nobody mentions. Kolasis occurs twice in the whole New Testament. Timōria occurs once. The technical opposition on which the argument rests is built out of three occurrences. And Thayer files eternal punishment and eternal life under the same numbered sense of the adjective — “without end, never to cease, everlasting” — introducing them with the words “Opposite ideas are.” The ideas are opposite. The sense of the word is one.
Ellicott turns that into an instruction to translators: “The two adjectives represent one and the same Greek word, αἰώνιος, and we ought therefore to have the same word in both clauses in the English.”
And the most striking thing is that the argument is not modern. St Augustine describes it and refuses it in the fifth century: “Some deceive themselves, saying, that the fire indeed is called everlasting, but not the punishment. This the Lord foreseeing, sums up His sentence in these words.” He is describing the move — conceding eternal fire at verse 41 and softening eternal punishment at verse 46 — sixteen centuries before it was put to us as a discovery.
And notice which commentators press the reading hardest. The Expositor’s is the honest one: it identifies the argument as belonging to those who advocate “the larger hope,” observes that it needs a second prong — a weakened sense of eternal — and concludes that the doctrine “must ultimately rest on deeper considerations than those supplied by verbal interpretation.” Ellicott names the point in a clause beginning “Without dwelling, as some have done…” and declines to lean on it.
Then the other great question, and here the entry will not settle anything.
Who are the least of these brothers of Mine? The answers do not fall where a modern reader expects. Gill: the saints only. Jerome, narrower still: not the poor generally but the poor in spirit. Chrysostom, wider: every believer, though he should be secular. Ellicott, widest: every member of the family of man. The Pulpit Commentary: not the apostles, nor any special class, but all the afflicted.
So the broad reading is not the modern one and the narrow reading is not the ancient one. Ellicott, writing in the eighteen-seventies, is broader than Jerome in the fifth century; Chrysostom in the fourth is broader than Gill in the eighteenth.
Two things do bear on it, and both are in the printed text. The first is that verse 45 drops “brothers of Mine.” Verse 40 says one of the least of these brothers of Mine; verse 45 says one of the least of these, and the Greek does the same in all nine editions. Any reading that confines the brothers to the Church has to account for the omission. Origen noticed it in the third century and drew the conclusion that the sin against the less holy is the lesser one — which is not where most modern advocates of that reading want to arrive.
The second is the word for least. Thayer files verses 40 and 45 under a category of their own — “in the estimation of men.” Not least in rank, not least in importance, which are the drawers he uses elsewhere. Least as people reckon it. The ranking in the sentence is ours.
In the modern world
The thing to sit with all week is that both groups ask the same question.
The righteous do not know they did it. The condemned do not know they failed to. Neither side saw Christ at the time, and the scene turns on the surprise. Ellicott marks it in three words, saying of the second question that “there is, as before, an unconsciousness of the greatness of the things that had been done for good or evil.”
Alford turns the surprise into evidence. A man who had spent his life deliberately serving Christ in the poor could not honestly say “when did we see You?” — and Alford is blunt that such a supposition “would remove all reality” from the whole description. And he notices something in the chapter that nobody else does. Two units earlier, the servants with the talents give their account: Master, you entrusted me with five talents; see, I have gained five more. They know exactly what they did. The sheep do not know at all. Two consecutive scenes in one chapter, and the postures are opposite.
Which is uncomfortable, because the practice everyone recommends is the one the passage does not describe. You will have been told to see Jesus in the poor. It is a good instruction — but notice that not one person in this scene did it. What is commended is a life in which the feeding and the visiting simply happened, so habitually that they left no memory of themselves.
And the demands themselves are strikingly small. Chrysostom presses this and it is worth quoting exactly: “He said not, ‘I was in prison, and you set me free; I was sick, and you raised me up again;’ but, ’you visited me,’ and, ‘you came to me.’” Nobody is asked to cure anything or to release anybody. “For no costly table did He seek, but what is needful only, and His necessary food.”
So the week’s honest question is not whether you can see Christ in a stranger. It is nearer this: when did you last do something for someone who could not return it, and forget about it by Friday? Not the giving you remember. The giving you would have to be reminded of.
Theophylact is the one who will not let a comfortable reader alone, and an Orthodox book should print him rather than soften him: “the robber is he who has much and does not give alms, even if he does no obvious injury. For whatever he has in excess of his needs, he has stolen from those who are in need and who have not received anything from him.” That is an eleventh-century Byzantine archbishop, and he is describing a person who has broken no law.
The tidbit
The most famous thing St John Chrysostom ever said about this passage is not in his homily on this passage.
”Would you do honour to Christ’s body? Neglect Him not when naked; do not while here you honor Him with silken garments, neglect Him perishing without of cold and nakedness.” And then the argument, which is the whole of it: “For He that said, ‘This is my body,’ and by His word confirmed the fact, This same said, ‘You saw me an hungered, and fed me not.’”
That is Homily 50, and Homily 50 is on Matthew 14. He is expounding the walking on the water and reaches across eleven chapters for the sheep and the goats to do it. The link between the chalice and the church door is his own, made by putting the eucharistic words and the judgement words in one sentence — and it is made in the wrong homily, which is exactly why it is worth knowing. Anyone citing it from Homily 79 has the number wrong.
He adds two sentences that are usually left off, and they sharpen it: ”For This indeed needs not coverings, but a pure soul; but that requires much attention.” The sacrament needs no adornment. The man at the door does.
This week
Take the list in verses 35 and 36 and treat it as a list.
On the first day, read the six aloud and pick the one you are worst at. Hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, in prison. Most people are quietly competent at two or three and have never once done the others. Pick the one you have never done, not the one you do well.
Then do it once this week, in the smallest form it has. The smallness is the instruction, not a concession: Chrysostom’s whole point is that the demand is you visited me and not you healed me. A meal taken to somebody. A standing order set up and forgotten. A visit to a person who is ill and dull to sit with. A letter, if your parish has a prison ministry that handles them. The bar is deliberately at the floor. Step over it once.
And then do the hard half: do not file it. Do not mention it. Do not let it become a thing you have done. The sheep’s whole distinction is that they had no account to give, and an act you are keeping a record of has already had its reward.
It might look like this. You read the six and find you are quietly competent at hungry and thirsty — the food bank, the collection at Christmas — and have never once done sick or in prison. So you take sick, and the smallest form of it is driving over on Sunday afternoon and sitting forty minutes with a man from the parish who is dull to sit with.
For the rest of the week, carry the other question — the one the condemned ask. When did we see You? Ask it forwards rather than backwards: once a day, notice one person you did not help and could have. Not to accumulate guilt; to break the habit of not seeing, which is the only fault the passage actually names.
And the limit, which this week needs more than most. Nothing here asks you to give away money that other people depend on — a household, a debt, a child’s needs come first, and generosity that creates a second person in difficulty has helped nobody. Nothing here asks you to visit a prison, a hospital or a home alone, or to open your house to a stranger: do this through your parish or an organisation that has safeguards, and never in a way that puts you or anybody in your care at risk. If you are yourself the person in verse 36 this week — ill, or without money, or shut in — you are not failing this passage. You are in it, and the week’s practice is to let somebody else do the visiting. Where a week and the safety note in How to Use This Book seem to disagree, the safety note governs.
Scripture. Matthew 25:31–46, Majority Standard Bible (Byzantine Majority Text). This is a complete printed unit and nothing has been widened or cut — the heading The Sheep and the Goats stands at verse 31, no further heading intervenes, and verse 46 ends the chapter. The heading carries no parenthetical cross-reference and none has been supplied. One typographic point, recorded so it is not corrected by mistake: there is no opening quotation mark at verse 31. The MSB opens the quotation at verse 1 and closes it at the end of verse 46, so a range beginning at 31 inherits no opening mark and does carry the closing one. An earlier draft of this entry supplied an opening mark the printed Bible does not have; it has been removed. The single quotation marks inside are the MSB’s own. biblehub.com/msb/matthew/25.htm
Text. Nine printed Greek editions were collated across all sixteen verses. Exactly one difference reaches English, and the MSB footnotes it: at verse 31 the Byzantine, Orthodox and both Received texts read the holy angels where the critical editions read the angels, and the apparatus prints 31 k CT does not include holy. — the only footnote in the unit. At verse 44 the three texts this series distinguishes come apart: the Greek of the Orthodox Church and both Receptus editions carry a pronoun that Robinson-Pierpont lacks, so the Orthodox text sides with the Received text against the Byzantine text the MSB translates. At verse 46 there is no variant of any kind in any of the nine; the differences are punctuation only. Verses 40 and 45 differ in the Greek exactly as they differ in English — verse 45 has no equivalent of brothers of Mine in any edition — and verse 43 fuses sickness and prison into one clause where the sheep’s list keeps them apart, so the two lists are very nearly, but not exactly, mirror images. The entry says “nearly” for that reason. biblehub.com/text/matthew/25-31.htm biblehub.com/text/matthew/25-44.htm
Greek. Kolasis (2851): Thayer’s gloss is “correction, punishment, penalty,” he states Aristotle’s distinction in full and attributes it correctly, and then writes “But, as in other cases, usage (especially the later) does not always recognize the distinction,” listing eight counter-witnesses and noting that Plutarch uses the cognate verb of the penalties of the world to come. The word occurs twice in the New Testament, and its supposed opposite once. Thayer’s own first sense for timōria is “a rendering help; assistance,” so the retributive sense is secondary even there. Aiōnios (166): Thayer files eternal punishment and eternal life under one numbered sense, “without end, never to cease, everlasting,” introducing the pair with “Opposite ideas are” — and his synonym note, which reserves “the complete philosophic idea” for a different adjective, is the strongest honest form of the qualification and is not concealed here. The exact phrase of verse 46 is attested in Philo, so it was available idiom rather than a coinage. Elachistos (1646): a suppletive superlative, functioning as the superlative of the word behind Matthew’s “little ones,” and Thayer gives verses 40 and 45 a category of their own — “in the estimation of men.” Nothing above rests on a tense-form. biblehub.com/thayers/2851.htm biblehub.com/greek/166.htm biblehub.com/greek/1646.htm
Commentators. Meyer, Vincent, Ellicott, the Cambridge Bible, the Pulpit Commentary, the Expositor’s Greek Testament, Bengel, Barnes, Gill, Poole, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown and Alford were consulted, and those quoted are quoted as attributed. The dispute over “the least of these My brothers” is printed as a dispute and is not settled, because five distinct positions are held by sources spanning sixteen centuries and they do not line up chronologically. Four commentators state the corrective-punishment distinction and only one of them, the Cambridge Bible, states it without qualification; the Pulpit Commentary states it and then concludes the two destinies are “equally everlasting,” and Ellicott and the Expositor’s both name it in order to set it aside. Two attributions in this project’s research file were wrong and are recorded here: a sentence about the holy angels was assigned to Meyer and belongs elsewhere, and a passage of the Pulpit Commentary bled into Bengel’s section on the same page. Neither reached the entry. Vincent’s most quotable sentence here is not his — it is Victorian literary criticism he is quoting, and it is not used above. biblehub.com/commentaries/matthew/25-46.htm biblehub.com/commentaries/matthew/25-40.htm
Fathers. St John Chrysostom, Homily 79 on the Gospel of St Matthew. Public domain. The number and the printed reference line were read off the page and the boundary verified in both directions — Homily 78 is headed Matt. XXV. 1-30., exactly the two printed units before this one, and Homily 80 opens at Matthew 26. A finding worth recording: the famous Chrysostom rebuke of the rich is not in this homily. Its later sections turn to anger and forgiveness and it closes on malice, and that negative was tested by mapping all five sections independently rather than accepted from a single search. The chalice-and-door passage quoted in the tidbit is from Homily 50, on Matthew 14:23–24, verified on its own page. St Theophylact of Ochrid is an eleventh-century Byzantine archbishop, not a Father of the patristic age, and largely epitomises Chrysostom; he is cited by name and date, and the compilation that carries him prints no work reference. Origen and Augustine reach this page through the Catena Aurea, with that compilation’s own attributions given as printed. Origen’s argument continues past what is quoted here into a graded-merit conclusion — that mercy shown to the holier is more acceptable — and that continuation is not used. Rabanus Maurus and Remigius appear in the Catena alongside the Fathers and are not Fathers; they are not quoted above. www.newadvent.org/fathers/200179.htm www.newadvent.org/fathers/200150.htm www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/catena1.ii.xxv.html
Refusals. The entry does not say that shepherds separated sheep and goats nightly because goats needed shelter from the cold. An earlier draft did. No source consulted says it — not the Expositor’s, the Pulpit Commentary, Vincent, Barnes, Gill, Jerome, Chrysostom or Theophylact — and none of the three commentators who describe the practice cites any authority for it. They also contradict each other: the Expositor’s has the animals separating of their own accord, the Pulpit has the shepherd separating them “at night or when being driven,” which is a disjunction and not a routine. The claim that a shepherd could tell them apart at a glance is not merely unsupported but close to the reverse of the only authority quoted on the point. The entry also declines to appeal to classical antiquity for the right hand and the left — Barnes grounds it in five scriptural passages and Gill alone adduces external evidence, which is Jewish and whose source citation was not retrieved. And it declines to call this a parable, following Alford and Ellicott and the MSB’s own heading, while noting that the usual practice is otherwise. What could not be established: Gill’s rabbinic source; whether the continuation of one Chrysostom sentence quoted in an earlier draft is genuine, since no fetch returned it; and the work reference for the Theophylact material. biblehub.com/commentaries/matthew/25-32.htm biblehub.com/commentaries/matthew/25-33.htm
Fifty-one more like it
If one week changed how you read that passage, Abide in Me has fifty-one others, each given the same treatment.