Last week, Mark D. Roberts, a Presbyterian pastor and writer had a lengthy debate with Christopher HItchens on the Hugh Hewitt radio show. Roberts has helpfully summarized the many ways in which Hitchens’ book either distorts or simply gets the facts wrong about Scripture and Christian history.

When I read through the first part of Hitchens’ debate with a Christian pastor at Christianity Today, I was immediately struck by his strange reading of the Good Samaritan parable, indicating to me that he just didn’t get it at all. (Yes, parables, by their nature, tend to paradox and even some ambiguity, but you can get it completely wrong, making your reader wonder if you’d even read the thing. That’s the way I felt.) Dr. Roberts’ exhaustive survey confirms my suspicions. Hitchens seems to be wandering – I hate to say it – a little close to DVC Land.  An example:

Hitchens Wrong on the Eyewitnesses of the Crucifixion

In his denunciation of The Passion of the Christ, Hitchens notes that promoters said the film was based "on the reports of ‘eyewitnesses’." (p. 111). Then he continues:

At the time, I thought it extraordinary that a multimillion-dollar hit could be openly based on such a patently fraudulent claim, but nobody seemed to turn a hair. (p. 111)

Nobody turned a hair because even the most skeptical of scholars believes that the accounts of Jesus’s death have some connection to eyewitnesses. The vast majority of New Testament scholars and classical historians believe that Jesus was in fact crucified under Pontius Pilate around 30 AD. This is found, not only throughout the New Testament, but also in the Roman historian Tacitius (Annals 15.44) and the first-century Jewish historian Josephus (Antiquities 18.3.3). It’s would be incredible to believe that the reports of Jesus’s death were not based at least to some extent on eyewitness accounts. This is made even more likely by the fact that the Gospels actually show the followers of Jesus in a very bad light during the passion of Jesus. Most of them abandoned Him, not exactly the sort of thing that early Christians would have made up unless it were true. (For a recent scholarly treatment of the role of eyewitnesses in the development of the Gospel material, see Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham.) Even if one wishes to argue that eyewitnesses had little to do with the stories about Jesus’s death, an informed scholar would never say that the eyewitness claim is "patently fraudulent."

Commentor Augustine points out  that in the interview, Hitchens’ attacks on Catholic matters were passed over, which doesn’t surprise me, considering Roberts’ own theology and past writings on matters Catholic on his blog. That’s all very true – and perhaps I should have added that caveat, not assuming that everyone would understand that about Roberts. However, if I could find a blow-by-blow refutation of Hitchens’ errors from a Catholic source, I would post it.