Bart Ehrman and Mike Bird in Publishers Weekly

Over in Publishers Weekly, there is a piece on Man or God? Scholars Again Debate the Divinity of Jesus, featuring Bart Ehrman’s book How Jesus Became God and Michael Bird et al on How God Became Jesus.

To clarify one thing, despite all of our criticisms of Ehrman’s book, we never say that Ehrman’s work is filled with “populist conspiracy theories and sloppy history.” Ehrman’s book makes some strange and objectional arguments,yet many valid one’s too! The article does give one of my quirky quotes from the introduction to our book:

“While Ehrman offers a creative and accessible account of the origins of Jesus’ divinity in Christian belief, at the end of the day, we think that his overall case is about as convincing as reports of the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, sitting in a Chik-Fil-A restaurant, wearing a Texan-style cowboy hat, while reading Donald Trump’s memoir—which is to say, not convincing at all,” writes Bird.

The author, Henry Carrigan concludes: “These books continue the never-ending conversation about the way (or whether) a human became God, illustrating once again how perplexing the idea of Jesus’ divinity is to Christians and non-Christians alike.”