In his fifth book, “Vintage Jesus,” the very first page is vintage Driscoll.

“Jesus was born,” he wrote, “in a dumpy, rural, hick town, not unlike those today where guys change their own oil, think pro wrestling is real (and) find women who chew tobacco sexy.

“Most people thought [Mary] concocted a crazy story to cover the ‘fact’ she was knocking boots with some guy in the backseat of a car at the prom.”

It’s the sort of smarmy style that drives a few folks up the proverbial wall. Nationally known contemporary Christian musician Steve Camp is quite possibly Driscoll’s harshest online critic.

Perhaps coincidentally, within a couple weeks of Camp’s claim that Driscoll had blasphemously used Jesus as the punch line to a joke while quoting from the Song of Solomon, Grace Driscoll picked up a ringing phone at home.

“It’s Rick Warren calling,” she said. Mark was so surprised that he asked his wife if she knew what he’d done wrong. Turns out the senior pastor of Saddleback Church just wanted to encourage him.

Rick has a lot of time on his hands, Driscoll joked from the stage last Sunday. All he’s doing is “funding a cure for AIDS” across Africa.

About a thousand laughs went up all at once in Ballard. You almost got the sense somebody, somewhere, was hoping to hack into Warren’s phone records to see if Driscoll was telling the truth.

The young man with more than 201,000 Google hits wasn’t fibbing. The dude one pastor calls a “name-dropping narcissist” had a confident smile on his face.

Blog away.