Paradise, the third and final part of The Divine Comedy, tells the story of Dante's journey through the heavenly realms. Representative of the divine soul's ascent to the Lord, this timeless epic portrays haven as a series of intricate spheres which surround the Earth. Each of these represents an astronomical body, such as the Moon, Mercury, Venus and even the distant stars. Dante's deceased love interest, Beatrice Portinari, is his guide through the journey to the paradise of heaven. Just as Dante depicted Hell as having nine circles, Heaven is depicted as consisting of nine celestial spheres. Gradually the pair ascend through each of these, observing their appearance and meeting with various inhabitants along the way. The poem's grand finale sees Dante and Beatrice enter the Empyrean - the very home of God himself. Beatrice's beauty becomes more marked, while Dante himself is bathed in an intense light, so that he may be fit to behold the divine.

In his recent book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee historian Bart Ehrman explores a claim that resides at the heart of the Christian faith--- that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. According to Ehrman, though, this is not what the earliest disciples believed, nor what Jesus claimed about himself. The first response book to this latest challenge to Christianity from Ehrman, How God Became Jesus features the work of five internationally recognized biblical scholars. While subjecting his claims to critical scrutiny, they offer a better, historically informed account of why the Galilean preacher from Nazareth came to be hailed as the Lord Jesus Christ. Namely, they contend, the exalted place of Jesus in belief and worship is clearly evident in the earliest Christian sources, shortly following his death, and was not simply the invention of the church centuries later."