If Jesus Christ was on Twitter, would he be attacked by malignant trolls?

You must listen to the feisty new episode of the Holy Smoke podcast, in which Cristina Odone and I ask our guest Jeremy Vine whether, if he were alive in the 21st century, Jesus would have been on Twitter. If so, what would happen to him?

Jeremy – whose new book What I Learnt discusses social media – points out that the Sermon on the Mount could easily be sliced up into memorable tweets.

Indeed, but you can also fit Jesus’s description of the Jews as children of Satan into 140 characters. That would lose him his blue tick, if not cause him to be banned altogether.

But all three of us agreed that, if Christ appeared on social media, he’d be a magnet for trolls. As Jeremy puts it: ‘Jesus Christ on Twitter would spent a certain amount of time dealing with low-life people in anoraks living in their mothers’ homes who are just there to upset others’. I wonder if, as a veteran phone-in radio host, he’s speaking from experience…

Anyway, you can hear our no-holds-barred conversation here, on the podcast I like to think of as the antidote to the lethal platitudes of the Today programme:

And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every other Monday.

• What I learnt: What my listeners say and why we should take notice by Jeremy Vine is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson