HarperCollins Publishers has released simultaneously the work of popular religion author Bart D. Ehrman and its counterpart, an evangelical rebuttal, in an unusual publishing experiment involving two of its imprints.

Written by a team of five evangelical scholars, How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature (Zondervan Academic) is a response to Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God (HarperOne), but unlike many books aiming to debunk the claims of another, this pair of titles released on the same day (March 25) and resulted from a unique collaboration.

The authors of the two books signed nondisclosure agreements and exchanged manuscripts, allowing the simultaneous release of the evangelical response. Written by Michael F. Bird, Craig A. Evans, Simon J. Gathercole, Charles E. Hill and Chris Tilling, How God Became Jesus features the tagline “A Response to Bart D. Ehrman” on the front cover, and the art style of the two books is similar.

“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 Chick-Fil-A restaurant, wearing a Texan-style cowboy hat, while reading Donald Trump’s memoir—which is to say, not convincing at all,” Bird said.

A New Testament professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ehrman left the Christian faith and became an agnostic. He has dedicated his academic and publishing career to debunking traditional Christian beliefs. His last five HarperOne books have sold approximately 750,000 copies in total, and his popularity was a factor in HarperCollins facilitating this collaborative dual release.

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