Neo-Atheist Gets Owned by Stephen Colbert

If you haven't heard of Bart Ehrman... well, good. He's one of the neo-atheists whose made it his personal mission to dissuade as many people from believing in Jesus as possible.

He once was a Christian. Went to Moody, Wheaton, and studied New Testament under Bruce Metzger, one of the foremost Christian NT scholars, at Princeton. Then he left the faith. He's now the chairman of the religious studies department at UNC.

He's brilliant, but he's an apostate. He left the faith because he didn't like that our God decrees suffering, but argues against the faith using New Testament scholarship.

So it was with great pleasure to see him get ripped apart on this clip from the Colbert Report (thanks to Dr. James White).

Colbert certainly is no scholar, and he shredded Ehrman's arguments.

Now, one of the things that Ehrman said was that the Gospel of John is the only gospel which presents Jesus as Divine - as very God. The earliest gospels, according to him, do not.

Really? According to most scholars, Mark was written first. So, let's ignore the fact that several of the letters in the NT were written before Mark... and let's just look through Mark.

-The presence of Jesus is the same as the presence of God's Rule (God's Kingdom)
-Jesus has authority to forgive sins
-Jesus does miracles without directing credit away from himself
-Jesus says that people should do good things 'in his name' (to represent him for his glory)
-He says that people should leave their families for his sake
-He says that whoever receives him receives God Himself
-He points out that the Messiah, though David's Son, is someone that David calls 'Lord'
-He refers to himself as the cloud-riding Son of Man from Daniel 7 - God is spoken of in the rest of the OT as metaphorically riding on the clouds
-Mark 1:2 replaces a reference to God with a pronoun referring to Jesus in his quoting of Malachi 3:1
-He distinguishes himself from 'sinners' (Mark 14:41)

That's just from a quick reading. Of course Jesus isn't cited as coming right out and saying "I am God." Would we expect the Messiah to do so if he is not coming immediately to judge the world, but rather to start a movement which holds to his teachings? He'd have been executed within a day of ministry if he'd done that.

Furthermore, Ehrman was assuming that ancient Jews all would've assumed that the Messiah was not God.

My response:

First, it's pretty clear that some ancient Rabbis believed the Messiah was going to be God. Not all, but some.

And second, it's really hard to ignore the fact that there is one God presented in the Old Testament - and two persons (at least) of that God.

The thing is - Ehrman knows this stuff. So why is he battling against the faith?

"At that time Jesus declared, 'I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him'"(Matthew 11:25-27).

Answer: because God is glorifying himself.