Colbert: Defender of Gospels!

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)