I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this debate on a book that I have watched in the making, from a distance, over the past ten years or more. Richard Burridge was a faithful participant in the New Testament Ethics Seminar at the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, a seminar that I had the privilege of co-chairing, along with Wolfgang Schrage and Andreas Lindemann. During the years of that working group Richard presented early drafts of material that adumbrated the basic themes of Imitating Jesus. Consequently, he and I have been discussing our common interests in these matters for quite a while. Anyone who reads Richard's substantial new work alongside my earlier book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, will see that we don't always agree, but there are actually a fair number of commonalities – perhaps more commonalities than would be conveyed by a casual survey of Richard's explicit references to my work.