What started as a pretty low-key tussle has turned into one of this year’s biggest controversies in the American Christian community. For those just catching up, Mars Hill Pastor Mark Driscoll was accused of plagiarism by syndicated radio host Janet Mefferd, who backed up her claim with photocopied documents of some of Driscoll’s work side-by-side with some suspiciously similar source material.
This set off a round of further accusations that seemed to have Pastor Driscoll backed into a corner. And then, surprisingly, Mefferd pulled the accusations off her site and apologized, even as her part-time assistant producer resigned, citing “an evangelical celebrity machine that is more powerful than anyone realizes.” Christian publisher Tyndale defended Driscoll. Their colleagues at Intervarsity wanted some answers. And all the while, Driscoll himself said very little, and Mars Hill didn’t say anything at all.
Well, that’s not quite true. Patheos has discovered that there is a response, but it’s buried deep in the Mars Hill website. A statement there admits to some “citation errors” which it blames on a research team, saying “during the editing process, content from other published sources were mistaken for research notes.” The statement originally said that the work in question was a “study guide” which was “never sold.” However, as Religion News Service points out, the book was sold on Amazon, and Mars Hill subsequently removed the statement from their site …
