Luke Timothy Johnson Reviews Bart Ehrman on Jesus as God

Over at Commonweal Magazine, Luke Timothy Johnson (Emory Uni) reviews Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God. Johnson is particular critical of Ehrman’s failure to engage the religious experiences of the earliest churches. According to Johnson:

The greatest deficiency in Ehrman’s work is that he does not even seem aware of the language of religious experience that pervades Paul’s letters and that paradoxically provides us with the earliest historical evidence for the basis of Christian convictions. The deficiency is not his alone, to be sure. It characterizes all those who seek to secure or discredit the truth of the Gospel by means of merely verifiable facts. But the good news is not and never has been based in verifiable fact; from the beginning and still today, it is based in the experience of God’s power.