This isn't amusing because it's wrong.
The evidence for it is all over the place in the New Testament and early Christianity, and we talk a lot about the primacy of that evidence in this blog.
Some notable texts include Luke 14:33, Luke 12:33, and the narratives about the rich man inquiring how to have eternal life in Luke 18:18ff, Matthew 19:16ff., and Mark 10:17ff., over which so many interpreters in rich, Western civilization stumble generation after generation.
It is amusing because Ehrman imagines that a good follower of Jesus today would sell everything and give it to the poor. He thinks of this as an ethical ideal when it was the primary example of Jesus' negation of ethics. Jesus' eschatological imperative to repent to escape imminent judgment meant abandoning all social conventions, at the heart of which is economic life.
The implications of Jesus' message for the economy of Judea were devastating, and his opponents grasped them better than any of his followers since. He was crucified because if everyone followed him tribute to Caesar would dry up (Luke 23:2) and the Jewish elites would lose their place of preferment (John 11:48). His death was beneficial for the maintenance of the status quo. Whether it was really necessary is another question, given the difficulty of following Jesus quite apart from what might have happened when his predictions failed to materialize. Hope in what he predicted ironically was kept alive by his speedy demise.
Schweitzer long ago taught us that Jesus' eschatology theologically meant the negation of ethics. In keeping with this Jesus' imperatives take a negative form involving renunciation of the world and all its ways. The world is passing away, and threatens to take you with it.
Therefore Jesus' imperatives are not a description of the way to lead a Christian life, because there is no such thing as a Christian life. The end of the world is coming so quickly that there won't be time to lead such a life, not even time enough, for example, properly to bury one's dead, or properly bid farewell to one's family. Jesus' "ethics" are if anything negative ethics. They are instruction in how to lose one's life, the life of this world, not save it.
The imminent eschaton makes the very idea of the Christian life beside the point, same as it does the resurrection. We must remember, as Ehrman helpfully does in the podcast, that Acts 1 tells us that the resurrected Jesus hangs around with the now-styled apostles for forty days but all they can seem to think about is not the astounding wonder of this resurrected man in their midst, but whether he will "at this time restore the kingdom to Israel". The coming of the kingdom is what the historical Jesus had drilled into their heads, not the Pharisees' (and Paul's) doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.
The eschatological theology of Jesus was proven wrong by history twice, once by Jesus' death and the failure of the kingdom to come, and a second time by the Jerusalem community when it mistakenly adopted the eschatological imperatives as a way of life, in particular when they had all things in common (Acts 2:44; 4:32).
Not long after the death of Jesus the Jerusalem community was plunged into such abject hunger and poverty by the famine of 44-48 AD that it had to compromise with Paul and accept his law free gospel to the Gentiles and ask him to remember their poor on his travels among them (Galatians 2:10), which inspired Paul's collection for the saints in Jerusalem (Romans 15:25f., 31). Much of earliest Christianity revolves around this collection as a remedy to the failure of so-called eschatological ethics.
You could say that the eschatology certainly failed also a third time in early Christianity, when its reinterpretation as the apocalyptic theology of the Parousia, the second coming, in Matthew 24 and in Paul, went unrealized before the death of the last of The Twelve (Mark 9:1). The kingdom did not come before they all died either, with power or otherwise, nor after the death of Paul.
All that eschatological energy then petered-out, so to speak, as the decades rolled on and Christianity reinvented itself on The Rock in compromise with the world, in compromise not so much because the Church wanted that but because reality is intractable.
Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? A Debate. A ‘Christian Atheist’ joins Ross Douthat.
The podcast runs 1:24:23.
