In an interview, Christian radio host Janet Mefferd accused Mars Hill Church pastor Mark Driscoll of plagiarism last week. The audio is here, and here's Mefferd's own account:

During the course of the interview, I questioned Pastor Driscoll about two sections of his book, “A Call to Resurgence,” which neglected to contain any quotes, detailed footnotes or attribution for his reproduction of another scholar’s thoughts and insights. The passages in question are on pages 38-47 and pages 185-189 of Pastor Driscoll’s book. Those pages of material all borrow from the original material of Dr. Peter Jones, cited here in his books, “Gospel Truth and Pagan Lies” and “One or Two: Seeing a World of Difference.”

The interview is a highly uncomfortable one. Driscoll accuses Mefferd of "being accusatory and unkind," telling her "I thought we'd have a better interview than this," but "it seems like you're having a grumpy day." After Mefferd pushes Driscoll on the issue, he assents, slightly: "maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I did. To be honest, I'm sitting here with a head cold and a flu trying to do you a favor and I don't remember a footnote on page 183." Driscoll said the point of A Call to Resurgence is that "tribes tend to fight over secondary issue and miss primary issues and the result is infighting," which he says Meffert is doing to him on her show. Driscoll defends himself by saying there's a "difference between making a mistake and committing a sin," but he concludes with a weird series of disclaimers in which he talks about himself in the third person: "Mark Driscoll loves Jesus, Mark Driscoll loves you. Mark Driscoll's in one of the least-churched cities in America preaching Jesus for 17 years."

Mefferd ends the interview by saying that Driscoll hung up on her, but an audio file of the conversation linked to by Relevant magazine seems to indicate that Driscoll had not hung up.

In the days since the first interview, Mefferd has uncovered more cases that she calls plagiarism. She says Driscoll appears to have...

...lifted material from another source — word for word — in another of his books, “Trial: 8 Witnesses From 1&2 Peter.” This was a book published in 2009 by Mars Hill Church. On pages 7 and 8, Driscoll lifts and publishes, under his own name, an entire section from “1 Peter,” New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, Ed. D. A. Carson, 4th ed. (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), p. 1370.

Here's audio of that show. She's posted some PDF files of the relevant cases online, and she's discussing new instances of what she calls Driscoll's plagiarism on today's show, which you can listen to on her website. Religion News reporter Jonathan Merritt, who resembles nothing so much as a highly clean-cut Joel McHale, reached out to religious publisher Tyndale House, and they responded with this statement:

Tyndale House Publishers was provided a recording of the show by representatives of Pastor Driscoll. A number of people at Tyndale reviewed the tape and were stunned, not only by the accusations, but by the belligerent tone of Ms. Mefferd’s questioning. When Ms. Mefferd asked Pastor Driscoll her first question to accuse him of plagiarism, she did not invoke Peter Jones’s name. The first person that Pastor Driscoll credited in his response was Mr. Jones. Pastor Driscoll also credits Mr. Jones in the section that Janet refers to in Mark’s book, A Call to Resurgence.

Tyndale has taken immediate steps as in the process of reviewing the section of Pastor Driscoll’s book that has been called into question. Pastor Driscoll has also reached out to Mr. Jones and we expect to be able to release some information on his reaction to the interview very soon.

This story is still unfolding. I'll keep you posted.

(Thanks to Shawna for the Slog tip.)