I rather think he’d like that header.
You’ll like this clip, wherein Colbert takes Bart Ehrman, the [atheist, of course] chair of the Religious Studies department at the University of North Carolina, to school on the subject of Christ, who is both a dead-raising duck and an elephant too large for our comprehension. How very Chestertonian is our Colbert. G.K. would have enjoyed this, I think. Watch Colbert’s withering look at “God is not a fan of puns…” Priceless.
I also like Colbert’s point of Ehrman “burying the lede.” The truth is, in our enlightened age we often see the press – those gatekeepers and “mediating intelligences” – either spiking stories they don’t like, omitting inconvenient facts, displaying deep bias, appearing to make stuff up, not bothering to ask questions, or just plain getting it wrong. Four reporters can go to the same event and get four different perspectives and four different quotes from four different people who each remembered and internalized different parts of the same event. Given the difficulty our media has in getting anything right with all the tools at their disposal, I’d say the Gospel writers did alright. Ehrman also doesn’t seem to understand (or perhaps he just doesn’t care) that in both Mark and Luke’s gospels, Christ is clearly praying psalms while he is on the cross. So whether it’s “my God, why have you forsaken me,” or “into your hands I commend my spirit” – he’s praying psalms.
(H/T)
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Bart Ehrman | ||||
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Isn’t it interesting that an atheist would be head of a religious studies department? Would the university make a believer in an earth-centric universe head of the astronomy department? Or someone who doesn’t believe in history since he wasn’t there the head of the history department?
Great work, Mr. Colbert!
Ehrman’s problem overall is that he is assuming that accounts of historical events should be the same in details. Even in more recent times, accounts of the same event don’t agree.
A perfect case in point is the death of President Garfield. Some reporters focused on the reaction of his personal physician and his vice-president. Others reported the reaction of his widow – and those didn’t “agree” because one praised her stoicism upon receiving the news and another reported that she broke down in sobs at the bedside. Using Ehrman’s criteria, we could say that we didn’t know anything about the events surrounding Garfield’s death because of contradictory accounts.
Another note on differing stories: assuming 2 stories were written one after the other, the second reads something in the first and omits it because “you already know that.”
Think about the dozens of books on any historical figure: JFK, Lincoln, Napoleon. They don’t all agree. Also, the gospel writers all had different aims when they wrote (this from my college New Testamant class). Matthew wanted to show Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, Luke shows him as the Great Physician, John’s focus is spiritual and poetic.
I don’t always watch Colbert, but I think he and John Stewart are lovers of truth and not afraid to “laugh to scorn” hypocrisy, wherever they find it. This bodes well for where they will end up, it seems to me.
Color me unimpressed. Yes, Colbert’s a Catholic, but he’s more the Kennedy/Pelosi/Leahy brand of Catholic.
As someone over at Ace’s said, he’s not really defending Christianity as much as he’s trying to cover his own rear end; he doesn’t really disagree with Ehrman, but he needs to pretend he does in order to make the audience laugh and to come away as the more level-headed end of the conversation.
This surprised me a little, from what I’ve seen of Colbert, I expected a “this is what God wrote in perfectly clear English, can’t you read” parody of fundamentalism. Instead, and to his credit, he decided that the truth was funnier and went for the laugh rather than the polite applause of the politically correct. Good on him.
Especially since I’ve used the “elephant” argument before, myself.