Since Stephen Colbert was named as David Letterman's successor on The Late Show, a video of an interview he conducted with well-known Bible critic Bart Ehrman has been getting a lot of attention.
In the following clip from an April 2009 Colbert Report episode that aired on Maundy Thursday, Colbert, an outspoken Catholic, argues that the Bible is real and presents the divinity of Christ in a way that leaves Ehrman speechless.
Watch the video below.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Be sure to read Bible scholar Andreas Köstenberger's recent article (click to see website or read below), where he provided Christian Life News with a few more reasons Ehrman's latest book, How Jesus Became God, is wrong.
Don't Cancel Your Easter Service: Why Bart Ehrman's 'How Jesus Became God' Is Wrong
“Jesus was a lower-class Jewish preacher from the backwaters of rural Galilee who was condemned for illegal activities and crucified for crimes against the state. Yet not long after his death, his followers were claiming that he was a divine being. Eventually, they went even further, declaring that he was none other than God, Lord of heaven and earth. And so the question: How did a crucified peasant come to be thought of as the Lord who created all things? How did Jesus become God?” (1).
This is how Bart Ehrman, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, frames the question in his latest attempt at deconstructing the Christian faith in his popularly written, often lopsided,1 and at places eccentric book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. While Jesus was a Jewish preacher from Galilee who was crucified for political reasons (though surely also for religious ones) and whose followers claimed was divine shortly after his death, Ehrman’s portrait neglects Jesus’ miracles, his messianic claims,2 and his followers’ confessions of him as Messiah and even God during his public ministry and immediately following his resurrection (e.g., Matt. 28:17; Luke 24:52; John 20:28). Right from the start, one gets the impression Ehrman’s Jesus is a truncated version construed by a historical-critical scholar—and an unduly skeptical one at that. This isn’t only Ehrman the historian; it’s also Ehrman the ex-believer and notorious skeptic.3
From beginning to end Ehrman dichotomizes between faith and reason, history and theology, the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.4 With such premises in place, the outcome of his historical research is predictable: Jesus never claimed to be God; he viewed himself as an apocalyptic prophet (echoes of Albert Schweitzer); and his followers never considered him to be God either. In customary fashion, Ehrman assigns the emergence of the notion of Jesus’ divinity to the latest possible date. He asserts ancient people frequently thought of a particular human as a god or of a god having become human, so there’s nothing unique about Christians’ claim that Jesus was divine.5
As is also customary for Ehrman, he paints a rather monolithic portrait of scholarship on the issue. There are sober-minded, realistic historians—that is, “the majority of critical scholars”—who for “more than a century” have maintained Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet and didn’t even claim to be divine (6). Then there are others who are naïve and uncritical, if not unreasonable, refusing to follow the lead of the self-proclaimed critical scholarly elite and thus condemning themselves to unenlightened historical-critical darkness and ignorance. Tertium quid non datur. (Editor's note: that means a statement must either be true or false.)
Bombshell Explodes
A bombshell explodes when Ehrman admits he no longer believes Jesus was actually buried or that the tomb was empty. He claims, notwithstanding the unanimous testimony of all four Gospels and Paul, [6] that “Christian storytellers” had a compelling reason to fabricate Jesus’ burial: “If Jesus had not been buried, his tomb could not be declared empty” (160). Pilate, he says, was not a “beneficent prefect who kindly listened to the protests of the people he governed” (163) and was therefore unlikely to grant the request to release Jesus’ body. Ehrman also claims the resurrection narratives are replete with contradictions.7
What we do know, Ehrman says, is that many of Jesus’ followers (Peter, Paul, and Mary, among others) had visions of him still alive, perhaps out of bereavement. Belief in those visions (not the historically resurrected Jesus) then led them to posit Jesus’ exaltation—the first exaltation Christologies. However, there was no precedent for belief in a resurrected Messiah, as first-century Jews did not anticipate a suffering Messiah (and a God who doesn’t die needs no resurrection). Later on, Ehrman alleges, an alternative view was posited that Jesus pre-existed as divine and became human (incarnation Christologies). In so doing, Ehrman posits a radical discontinuity between the Synoptics and John (270). He also claims Jesus didn’t exist prior to the incarnation; only the Logos did (274).
Later still, Christians espoused views eventually declared heretical (e.g., Jesus was fully human but not divine; he was fully divine but not human; he was two beings, divine and human, united temporarily during his earthly ministry). Finally, the fourth-century AD Arian heresy claimed Jesus was God but not on the same level as the Father (subordinationist Christology).
Essentially, Ehrman sketches a trajectory during the course of which the prevailing Christology evolved from “no God” (Jesus, his first followers) to “exaltation” (based on belief in visions; Mark) to “incarnation” (John) to the more sophisticated Christological formulations of the early councils and creeds. In other words, as Ehrman puts it, from “not . . . God in any sense at all” to “divine . . . in some sense” to “equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense” (44). The model is simple, but is it the most plausible way to characterize what happened?
Source: Christian Life News
