Challenge 5: "Jesus was an Imposter Who Failed to Fulfill the Messianic Prophecies" An Interview with Michael L. Brown, Ph.D.

Not surprisingly, Jacobsen remains unaware of the principles of interpretation explained by Miller here, so it is no surpise that he wastes considerable time complaining about OT prophecies not being "clear" (that is, to his uneducated, decontextualized eye) or "specific" enough (to suit him, that is) or being able to be "verified" (that is, by him personally being able to verify the details) or the usual skeptical begged question of history invented to suit prophecy (see here). His response is filled with the usual canards we have addressed before, such as:

Matthew had obviously read the passage in Zechariah to mean that the messiah will be riding on two donkeys. He had actually made Jesus sit on the two animals at the same time! (Try to imagine this!) Note that the last sentence, Jesus sat on them, is not just an oversight on Matthew's part, for he had deliberately altered the whole episode to include two animals (the donkey and its colt). I have italicized the portion where Matthew had changed the singular in Mark to the plural when referring to the animals.

It apparently does not occur to Jacobsen that the plural refers to the cloaks (plural) placed on the animals and not the animals themselves. See more here. Jacobsen is, as is typical, ignorant of the nature of Jewish monotheism which permitted recognition of Jesus as part of the divine identity (see here); he sticks his head as far into the sand as he can as he defines exegesis as "an exercise in forcing Biblical passages to say what you want them to mean, using scholarly-sounding practices like linguistics to make it look like something real is being done." These are the words of someone not competent to perform his own exegesis in an authoritative way. It speaks for itself that he closes:

As such, I don't see the point in commenting further on the rest of this interview, for it is mainly Brown engaging in exegesis. It is just drivel not worth commenting on. This chapter is supposed to be about fulfilled Biblical prophecies, but he doesn't demonstrate any.

I think rather that Jacobsen knew he was in over his head, and so quit while he thought he was ahead.

Challenge 6: "People Should be Free to Pick and Choose What to Believe About Jesus" An interview with Paul Copan, Ph.D.

Jacobsen complains that Copan ignores his counter-arguments, which he does know about. He can afford to, since I defeated Jacobsen's arguments against Copan already. That said, the chapter subject is outside my scope of expertise, other than to note: