Another post on the forthcoming “response book,” titled How God Became Jesus, written in reaction to my book How Jesus Became God. As I indicated in my previous post, I gave my publisher permission to share my manuscript with the five scholars who produced the response, so they were not simply guessing about what I had to say. They had it in their hands. They responded in kind and allowed their publisher to share with me their book. I haven’t read it yet.

The reason that they shared their book with me in advance of its appearance is that we are being asked to do some media events that will require knowledge of each others’ books. The event that has been set up already is a kind of on-radio debate with one of the five authors, Simon Gathercole, who teaches at Cambridge University. Next week I’m heading over to London for Spring break, mainly to see family and so on. But I’ve agreed to do a taped radio show.

Unlike the States, in England (as I understand it – maybe someone can correct me if I’m wrong) there’s one major Christian radio station, which is called Premier Radio. And on it there is a kind of talk show run by a very smart and interesting fellow, an evangelical Christian named Jason Brierley. The show is called “Unbelievable.” I’ve been on it a bunch of times, sometimes being interviewed for one of my books, but most often having an on-air debate (taped ahead of time) on this or that topic – usually something I’ve written about.

In that capacity I’ve debated Peter Williams about the reliability of the manuscript traditions of the New Testament; Darryl Bock on the reliability of the New Testament itself; Mike Licona on the question of whether historians can prove that Jesus’ resurrection happened; and Richard Swinburne, a philosopher who teaches at Oxford, on whether there can be an explanation for the suffering in the world if there is an all-powerful God in charge of it. In *that* debate I got really, truly, and deeply angry and it probably showed. But I can talk about that some other time.

The debate with Gathercole will be taped and will not be released/aired until after the book appears. So I’ll be interested in seeing how it goes, and will, of course, read his contributions to their book very carefully ahead of time.

 

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