Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard spend a surprising amount of space, perhaps too much, filling in the historical setting of the gospel story. The stories of Julius Caesar, Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, and others are made into novelistic narratives just like the Jesus chapters.1 One is tempted to say the authors are verging on the docudrama genre. While I have no quibbles about their depictions of these historical figures, I suspect that the material actually turns out to be counterproductive to their purpose, since we are soon going to find out that the gospel appearances of these characters do not match what history tells us about them, suggesting that the historical connection between them and the gospel story of Jesus is less secure than O’Reilly and Dugard would have us believe.

DOES JESUS BELONG IN HISTORY?

First a word about the larger function of these background chapters. It is common, and altogether natural on certain assumptions, to regard the gospel episodes as iceberg tips emerging into view from larger bodies beneath the surface. That is, the gospel stories seem to presuppose much about the culture, the politics, the religions, and so on, of the period in which the episodes are set. The evangelists (gospel writers) may be expected to have taken a good deal for granted, since they could count on their contemporaries to be familiar with the relevant facts. Living so long afterward, modern readers require some help filling in the picture. Bible commentaries are properly filled with such information. But there is a forgotten or unsuspected question being begged here. To some scholars, the Jesus stories bear an unmistakable resemblance to oft-recurring archetypal myths and legends, and we have to ask whether the gospel writers have sought to bring an originally mythical Jesus figure down to earth by clothing him in a plausible historical-cultural setting, much as Herodotus tried to place Hercules as a historical figure in the reign of this or that king. Plutarch similarly figured that Osiris and Isis must have originally been an ancient king and queen of Egypt. Hercules and Osiris were, like Jesus, dying and rising savior deities. And, like them also, Jesus was placed conjecturally and variously in the first century BCE, imagined crucified by Alexander Jannaeus or his widow Helena,2 or as late as the reign of Claudius.³ It is perhaps significant that in earlier New Testament epistles we read of Jesus’⁴ death being brought about not by any Roman or Jewish government officials but rather by “the Archons [angels] who rule this age” (1 Cor. 2:6–8), “the Principalities and Powers,” fallen angels (Col. 2:13–15); while of the Romans we read that they never punish the innocent, only the guilty (Rom. 13:3–4; 1 Pet. 2:13–14). Does it look as if these writers knew the crucifixion story we read in the gospels? The very notion of the Son of God put to death on a cross makes plenty of sense in terms of ancient astronomy and Gnostic mythology, where the celestial cross is the junction of the ecliptic with the zodiac.

The effect as well, perhaps, as the intent of providing a wealth of historical detail as O’Reilly and Dugard do, is to make Jesus seem as real as Julius and Augustus Caesar, Herod the Great, and Herod Antipas. The goal is analogous to having a US president appear in a movie or a comic book. Clinton is made to look like he is announcing a communication from outer space in the Jodie Foster movie Contact. Superman has been depicted shaking hands with Clinton and with JFK. Forrest Gump met Kennedy, too, even though Gump never existed. The Incredible Hulk once received a pardon from Lyndon Johnson. Bill O’Reilly himself appears on TV commenting on Stark Industries in Iron Man 2.

O’Reilly and Dugard repeatedly simply assume that Jesus must have done what Jews regularly did. On pilgrimage to Jerusalem, pilgrims typically waded into the mikvah, a ritual bathing area, for the sake of ceremonial purification, so we read simply that Jesus did it, too. (This is the kind of baseless inference from “what most people did” that led William E. Phipps to suggest, in a once-controversial book, that Jesus was probably married—since most rabbis were.5) I think they are a bit too sure about these things, insignificant as most of them are. But it is vivid to tell the tale this way, so they do. It gets worse when our authors make up events from Jesus’ life out of whole cloth.

Passover is a time when Jerusalem is packed with hundreds of thousands of worshippers from all over the world, so it was horrific when Archelaus boldly asserted his authority by ordering his cavalry to charge their horses into the thick crowds filling the Temple courts. Wielding javelins and long, straight steel and bronze swords, Archelaus's Babylonian, Thracian, and Syrian mercenaries massacred three thousand innocent pilgrims. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus saw the bloodbath firsthand and were lucky to escape the Temple with their lives. They were also eyewitnesses to the crucifixion of more than two thousand Jewish rebels outside Jerusalem's city walls when Roman soldiers moved in to quell further revolts. (p. 66)

He labors six days a week as a carpenter alongside his father, building the roofs and doorposts of Nazareth and laying the foundation stones of sprawling nearby Sepphoris. (p. 81)

Not one word of any of these episodes is mentioned anywhere in the New Testament. These deeds of violence occurred, as we know from Josephus, but the Holy Family is nowhere associated with them. Sepphoris was constructed about this time, but we have no mention of Jesus and his dad donning their hard hats and carrying their lunch pails down the road to join in.⁶ Sure, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus might have witnessed these Roman atrocities. We can imagine them doing so, and that appears to be quite good enough for the authors of Killing Jesus.

Reading Killing Jesus, one may wonder where the authors got all the vivid detail displayed in their recountings of the very brief and sketchy gospel cameos. Again, strictly from their imaginations. They did just what Anna Katharina Emmerich did in the eighteenth century when she wrote The Dolorous Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, a rather hefty and super-detailed gospel novel (the basis of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ). She claimed to have simply received the whole thing in a series of feverish visions as she lay upon her chronic sickbed, but what seems to have happened is that she attempted to visualize the gospel events in this-worldly detail, and they seemed very real to her as a result. The same technique is brought to bear still today as devout Christians, Catholic and Protestant, meditate their way through the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola.7 This is basically what O’Reilly and Dugard have done in Killing Jesus. The rule of thumb is to ask oneself, “If this really happened, what would it have been like on the scene?” Think of the old TV show that promised, “All is as it was then, only you are there.” But you weren't. And neither were O’Reilly and Dugard. And, we might wonder, was Jesus?

HEROD THE GREAT (BEAST)

King Herod was fully the villain O’Reilly and Dugard make him, though they do miss one interesting little detail. They quote Caesar Augustus’ quip “I would rather be Herod's pig than his son.” It is worth knowing that the remark is a clever pun. The Greek word for “pig” () is but a single letter different from the word for “son” (), and the joke was that, Herod being nominally Jewish, he would never have a pig slaughtered, but, as a murderous paranoid, he would and did have various of his sons put to death.

Herod's role in the gospels is confined to Matthew's Nativity story (Matt. chap. 2), including the episodes of the Wise Men and of the Slaughter of the Innocents. O’Reilly and Dugard blithely accept this story as accurate history (at least most of it). They trim the apocryphal details that are so familiar from Christmas carols and cards; Matthew never says there were three Wise Men, nor that they were kings, nor that they were named Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior, nor that they represented different nations. And, contra Killing Jesus, Matthew does not say they visited the newborn Jesus. No, Matthew has Herod ascertain that these stargazers detected Jesus’ natal star two years before. Thus the order to kill every male up to that age.

As Raymond E. Brown (remember, a believing Catholic like Messrs. O’Reilly and Dugard) argued, it appears quite likely that Matthew has drawn upon first-century Moses lore, much of it preserved in the Jewish historian Josephus, for the basis of his Nativity.8 Josephus’ nativity of Moses, somewhat embellished from the simpler version of Exodus, reads:

One of those sacred scribes, who are very sagacious in foretelling future events truly, told the king that about this time there would a child be borne to the Israelites, who, if he were reared, would bring the Egyptian dominion low, and would raise the Israelites; that he would excel all men in virtue, and obtain a glory that would be remembered through all ages. Which was so feared by the king, that, according to this man's opinion, he commanded that they should cast every male child into the river, and destroy it…. A man, whose name was Amram…was very uneasy at it, his wife being then with child, and he knew not what to do…. Accordingly God had mercy on him, and was moved by his supplication. He stood by him in his sleep, and exhorted him not to despair of his future favours…. “For that child, out of dread for whose nativity the Egyptians have doomed the Israelites’ children to destruction, shall be this child of thine…he shall deliver the Hebrew nation from the distress they are under from the Egyptians. His memory shall be famous while the world lasts.” (Antiquities of the Jews 2.9.2–3)

Matthew looks to have made Josephus’ “sacred scribes, who are very sagacious in foretelling future events truly” into his own Wise Men (more about them in a moment). Matthew has split the role of Pharaoh's scribes into that of the Magi from the East and Herod's staff of biblical scribes, who know how to interpret Old Testament predictions. What they tell him about the birth of a child who will topple the wicked king (Herod playing the role of Pharaoh) so alarms him that he orders the elimination of all the possible sons who might fulfill that prophecy. But, thanks to a timely warning from God (or his angels), the child is saved and goes on to fulfill his divinely appointed mission.

Where did Matthew get the idea of making his Wise Men into Persian Magi from the Parthian Empire (the Magi were well known as the ancient Persian caste of astrologers)? I suggest that he derived these characters from a widely reported (Dio Cassius, Suetonius, Pliny) case of political butt kissing. In 66 CE, Tiridates, king of Armenia (part of the Parthian Empire), made a grand journey to Rome, bringing with him the sons of three of his fellow Parthian kings. In Natural History, Pliny the Elder refers to them in his account as “magi,” the same word Matthew uses. In a great public ceremony, Tiridates strode forward and bowed before Nero (as Matthew's Magi do before Jesus, the newborn King of the Jews), swearing fealty: “I have come to you, my god, to pay homage, as I do to Mithras” (XXX vi 16–17). Nero then confirmed him in his kingship, whereupon Tiridates and his delegation returned to their own country, but by a different route than the way they had taken to Rome, just as Matthew's Magi “departed to their country by another way” (Matt. 2:12).9

I think this is a bona fide case of literary dependence or at least of fictionalizing history. But there is another factor to consider. Martin Dibelius called it the Law of Biographical Analogy.¹⁰ Spontaneously, a certain type of story will be told in similar cases. In the case of a faith community celebrating the epoch-making (as they view it) entrance of their hero into world history, believers will almost inevitably spin a miraculous Nativity story. Usually these stories feature some kind of divine annunciation of the historic birth. Another frequent feature is an attempt by some tyrant to nip the mission of the savior in the bud by destroying him as soon as possible. The mythical character of such a tale is evident from its early occurrence in the nativity of Zeus. The Titan king Kronos fears that one of his offspring will grow up to kill him and to usurp his throne, as he usurped that of his father Uranus. To avoid this fate he seizes every newborn son and devours him. But when baby Zeus arrives, his mother Rhea contrives to get him to safety while covering a rock in the swaddling. Kronos swallows it and does not know the difference. Sure enough, Zeus grows up and unseats his father, becoming king of the immortals.

But there are a number of such rescues related of religious and other founders. News of the birth of Octavian (Caesar Augustus) upsets the corrupt senators of the Roman Republic, who know he is the one destined to overthrow their regime, so they conspire to have the infant murdered. They are unsuccessful. When the Iranian prophet Zoroaster is born, he who shall one day convert Prince Vishtaspa to the new faith and cause the Magi caste to lose their position, the chief Magus, Durasan, tries to have the baby hero placed in the path of a stampeding herd, but the cattle swerve around him. The infant is next dropped into a wolves’ den, but, like Daniel in the lions’ den, he is unharmed. Nimrod learns from his wise men that Abraham, the future scourge of idolatry, has been born, so he tries, unsuccessfully, to have him killed. When Krishna is incarnated, the demons arrange for his wet nurse to smear poison on her breast, but he is rescued. You get the idea. So even if Matthew did not derive the Slaughter of the Innocents specifically from Josephus’ story of Moses, we would still have to classify it with these parallels. If all the rest are manifestly mythical, why should Matthew's Nativity of the Son of God be regarded any differently?

Of course, one might point to Herod the Great's bloody record of eradicating anyone he thought might one day plot against him. Josephus catalogs Herod's numerous atrocities. So it sounds reasonable to picture Herod learning of some newborn hailed by a group of potential rebels wanting to use him as a standard to rally the people against Herod, the false king. One can imagine Herod figuring it is not worth the risk to let this seed grow into a real threat—and having all the local children killed, just to be sure. But can we be sure we are dealing with history? Or is it just literary verisimilitude? Herod is the obvious choice if the myth-making imagination is looking to cast the role of the stereotypical nativity villain.

Not only that, but if you're going to appeal to Herod's rap sheet to make the Slaughter of the Innocents look suitably historical, just realize that the argument cuts both ways: the ample, detailed record of Herod's atrocities does not record this one. Given all the crimes against humanity Josephus lists, shouldn't this one be on the list? It's not like it was kept quiet, as if such a thing were possible. Matthew 2:3 says that all Jerusalem knew of the reason for the Wise Men's visit and dreaded to hear what Herod might do. If he did what Matthew says he did, they'd have heard about it, and so would Josephus.

STAR TREK

I said that O’Reilly and Dugard include most of the Matthean Herod story, but not all of it. It is not too difficult to see why they tactfully neglected one particular piece of it: the moving star that, like a supernatural GPS system, led the Magi to Mary and Joseph's Bethlehem home (not Luke's stable, which presupposes an entirely different scenario, though O’Reilly and Dugard switch over to Luke when they assure us that Jesus was born in a manger in a stable). Not only does this “star” move through the air close enough to the ground as to hover visibly above a single small dwelling, it is obviously pictured as a tiny object, just like all the ancients imagined the stars to be.

I once had a New Testament professor who, in discussing this story, recalled seeing some low-budget church education film depicting the Nativity. He said he had winced when it reached the point of the star of Bethlehem. He shook his head and summed up by opining, “There are just some things that you shouldn't try to depict.” He didn't actually say so, but I was sure he meant that Matthew's moving star, if represented accurately, would look like Tinkerbell. And you wouldn't want biblical inerrancy to take a hit like that. D. F. Strauss similarly pointed out how the gospel story of the multiplication of the loaves and fish fell prey to the same cartoonishness.11 What are we supposed to picture Jesus doing? Stretching each barley roll like a sponge until it divided like a cell in mitosis? You're not really supposed to look too close.

It seems to me as if Matthew is inconsistent about the role of the star. Here's the rub: The Magi explain to King Herod that they know the infant king has been born because they saw his natal star in the East (or “when it rose,” same phrase in the Greek). As astrologers, they knew the significance of a stellar event occurring in the constellation Pisces, assigned by them to the Jews. The star had not moved anywhere. They simply inferred that, if there was a newborn heir to the Jewish throne, Jerusalem was the place to inquire. Once there, they don't anticipate any flying star; they know to head for Bethlehem because Herod's scribes tell them that's where they ought to look. But then Matthew says the star reappeared and this time moved through the sky to hover over a single house. This is the part O’Reilly and Dugard tactfully omit—because it exposes the story as a piece of pious legend. They refer to a convenient theory that a comet observed by Chinese astronomers in 5 BCE might have been the Wise Men's “star” and conclude that “due to the earth's orbital motion, the comet's light would have been directly in front of the Magi during their journey—hence, they would have truly followed the star” (p. 15). But they are said to have followed the moving star only once they reached Jerusalem, and it led them to a particular house in Bethlehem. Tinkerbell.

O’Reilly and Dugard assure us that Jesus was born in a Bethlehem stable and that immediately afterward Mary and Joseph took baby Jesus to the Jerusalem temple to have him circumcised, whereupon they met up with the prophetic pair Simeon and Anna who proclaimed the child's great destiny. The Jerusalem visit comes from Luke. The trouble is that one cannot draw piecemeal from Matthew and Luke, whose Nativity stories diverge at virtually every point, though you will not learn this from the authors of Killing Jesus. They interweave as much as they can of the contradictory Nativity stories, for example, noting the irony that, even while Herod's goons were frog-gigging babies in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph brought their new son to the Jerusalem temple to be circumcised, right under Herod's nose. But would the parents have risked showing up on Herod's doorstep if, as Matthew says, they were anxious to flee the country and take refuge in Egypt? Anyone who does this must not expect miraculous protection from a God who has told them to get packing and go into hiding someplace else. Besides, can you imagine the scene with Simeon and Anna proclaiming to all who would listen that the baby Messiah was in town—when “all Jerusalem” (Matt. 2:3) knew of Herod's murderous designs? Were Simeon and Anna trying to get rid of him, too?

O’Reilly and Dugard simply ignore the larger narrative contexts from which they have cherry-picked the Nativity scenes they use, heedless (or hoping the reader won't notice) that these snippets make no sense thus isolated, then forced into their new context in the Gospel according to O’Reilly. For instance, how did Jesus come to be born in Bethlehem in the first place (one of the very few things Matthew's and Luke's birth stories have in common)? Matthew pictures Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem. Jesus, presumably, is born in their home, where the Magi find him as much as two years later. After the attempt by Herod to snuff the boy, they hasten to put their hovel on the market and hightail it to Egypt. Once they think the coast is clear, some years later, they return, only to find that Herod's no-good son Archelaus has replaced him, so the danger is not past after all. (Why? Mustn't Herod have assumed his plan had worked? Why would his son still be gunning for Jesus?) So they relocate to Nazareth, a new town for them.12

Luke has it exactly the other way round. For him, Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth. They only make a temporary trip to Bethlehem in order to register for taxation, and that in the strangest tax census anyone has ever heard of: that a man should have to register to file his taxes not where he actually lives, but where his remote ancestors had lived a thousand years before. Anyway, the town is overcrowded with people there for the same reason, so that Mary must give birth in the open air, in a stable. (One must ask why Joseph would have dragged his very pregnant wife on such a journey.) Once the baby Jesus arrives, the Holy Family goes back home to Nazareth. Thus you cannot have Luke's manger and Matthew's Wise Men and Herodian pogrom in the same story. Mary and Joseph did not stay living in a Bethlehem stable for another two years, waiting for Matthew's Magi to show up.

SCISSORS AND PASTE

Our authors are not writing as critical, that is, modern, historians. R. G. Collingwood explained the difference.13 Ancient and medieval historians, precritical historians, were what Collingwood dubbed “scissors-and-paste historians.” They referred to their documents, inscriptions, and so on, as their “authorities.”¹⁴ They felt obliged to take the old documents at face value, to take them at their word, at least until two “authorities” conflicted and one had to choose between them. But once the coin had been flipped, you went back to implicit confidence in the rest of what your “authorities” said. That, obviously, is the approach taken in Killing Jesus. Entirely different is the methodology of critical historians. These scholars make their ancient documents sing for their supper. They think of them not as “authorities” to be heeded but rather as “sources” to be scrutinized and evaluated. The maxim of precritical historians is “Innocent until proven guilty,”¹⁵ while that of critical historians is “Guilty until proven innocent.” The critical historian recognizes that writers of the past, whether letter writers, chroniclers, essayists, whatever, indulged in deception, spin, propaganda, legend mongering, pseudonymity,¹⁶ and other non-veridical conventions. This doesn't mean such materials are to be rejected as useless. No, the trick is to learn to recognize just what sort of material one is dealing with. If a particular document is propagandistic in nature, well, there is a history of propaganda to be told.¹⁷

O’Reilly knows this perfectly well when it comes to sniffing out spin when his TV guests start to bloviate. He won't stand for it if what he wants are the facts. But it is not as if the BS his guests hand him tells him nothing about them. It may actually reveal the truth about them more accurately than a straightforward statement of fact would. What we call “spin,” New Testament scholar F. C. Baur called Tendenz (tendency).¹⁸ An essential tool in the critical historian's kit is tendency criticism, or ideological criticism. But it seems not to occur to O’Reilly to employ it in the case of the New Testament. He is almost completely credulous. I doubt that he and Dugard approached their books on the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations this way. Those books evaluate secular sources about secular events. Killing Jesus is quite different. This is part of what I mean when I say Killing Jesus is not, despite its pretentions, a historical treatment but rather a religious one.

The paradigm case of the arbitrary critical procedure in Killing Jesus is its authors’ treatment of the saying from the cross “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” which occurs only in Luke's Gospel (23:34) and not in all manuscripts of that gospel. O’Reilly says he omitted it from his crucifixion scene because, in the circumstances, no one could have heard Jesus say it even if he did. Well, that would appear to rule out any of the sayings from the cross, but what about this one? O’Reilly can't bring himself to declare it inauthentic. No, he figures, Jesus must have said these words just a bit earlier, at Golgotha, in the scant minutes before the Romans nailed him up. Somebody might have heard that. Like Collingwood said: scissors and paste.

LURKING FUNDAMENTALISM

The authors say they felt compelled to omit any gospel feature that they could not defend as the product of eyewitness reporting. But where do they come by the notion that the gospels are the work of those who saw and heard Jesus for themselves? From one source, which I must regard as something of a polluted well: the fourth-century church historian Eusebius, quoting from Papias, a second-century bishop from Hierapolis in Asia Minor. He said that Papias had stated that “Matthew was the first to write the words of the Lord, in the Hebrew language, and everyone translated them as well as he could” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3:39).19

Mark, who had been Peter's interpreter, wrote down carefully, but not in order, all that he remembered of the Lord's sayings and doings. For he had not heard the Lord or been one of his followers, but later, as I said, one of Peter's. Peter used to adapt his teaching to the occasion, without making a systematic arrangement of the Lord's sayings, so that Mark was quite justified in writing down some things just as he remembered them. For he had one purpose only—to leave out nothing that he had heard, and to make no misstatement about it.20

Most have supposed that Papias was referring to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. D. F. Strauss, however, suggested that this was a gratuitous inference.²¹ In fact Papias may as easily have been talking about other documents altogether. Why? Because what Papias says does not appear to describe our familiar Matthew and Mark. For one thing, our Greek Matthew appears to be an original Greek composition, not a translation. For another, most scholars think Matthew is an expansion of Mark, rather than, as Saint Augustine thought, an abridgment of Matthew. Again, Matthew certainly includes many sayings attributed to Jesus, but one would not naturally refer to any of the traditional gospels as simply “the words of the Lord.” It looks as if, whatever Papias was referring to, it would more likely have been something on the order of the all-sayings Gospel of Thomas or the Q Source (“Q” standing for Quelle, German for “source”) that scholars hypothesize existed as one of the two principal sources, along with Mark, employed independently by the second-stage gospel writers Matthew and Luke. Finally, it is worth noting that Origen, Jerome, and others referred to gospels written in Aramaic (sister language to Hebrew), which they took to be the supposed “Hebrew” original of Matthew. But their quotations from them seem rather to represent other documents altogether, such as the Gospel according to the Hebrews (though their quotations even of this survive only in Greek translation). Papias may as easily have been referring to one of these. Plus, there were other documents ascribed to Matthew, such as the Infancy Gospel of Matthew (to which we shall return). In other words, we can't be as sure as Eusebius was that Papias was talking about our canonical Gospel of Matthew.

Nor does the work Papias ascribes to Mark sound like our Gospel of Mark, for Papias implies it featured teachings of Jesus in no chronological order, whereas our Mark has a clear basic outline (even if it is an artificial order imposed by the author). It sounds to me more like he meant to describe something like the noncanonical Preachings of Peter or the Gospel of Peter, both of which actually do present themselves as the memoirs of Peter, written down by himself or others, though they are clearly fiction.

O’Reilly and Dugard are willing to take for granted the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that ancient editors used as headings for the gospels. But these designations were applied to the gospels only after each had circulated for a while anonymously. Compare them with, say, the epistles of Paul. Whether or not he really wrote them (and there is a storm of debate over this, too), his name does actually appear as part of the text, both at the opening and occasionally farther on into the body of the letter. There is no such authorship claim in any of the four gospels. Nor did any of them at first require one. It is no surprise that all were originally anonymous, since, as with the compilers of the Mishnah, to use the name of the evangelists might have drawn attention away from Jesus, whom they sought to display for the reader. They likely would not have wanted to leave the impression that they were the real authors of the material (even though, to some extent, they were). Think of how the Book of Mormon was initially published with Joseph Smith listed as author, with subsequent editions omitting his name, lest readers get the impression that he created the whole thing (which of course he did). The names were added only once congregations eventually began to receive copies of additional gospels to supplement the single one they had used at first. Hitherto, their practice had been simply to announce “a reading from the Gospel.” But once they had a set of two, or three, or four (or more), it became necessary to distinguish which one they meant, and so editors added the qualifier “according to Matthew,” “according to Mark,” and so on. We don't know where they got these names. It is way too late to tell. Besides, all four names were quite common, “Mark” and “Luke” being nearly as common in the Mediterranean world as “Muhammad” is in the Islamic world today. So even if the four authors did have these names on their chariot licenses, they needn't have automatically been the same as the various New Testament characters with those names. Indeed, one can easily imagine that, once the gospels had been tagged with these names, scribes started looking for New Testament personages bearing the same names so they could peg them as the evangelists. (Nonetheless, I am going to keep referring to the gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, without any assumptions as to who may actually have written them.)

Papias didn't say anything, as far as we know, about the Gospels of Luke and John, but Irenaeus (Against Heresies 3:1) says (on what basis, we don't know) that Luke, Paul's personal physician (Col. 4:14; 2 Tim. 4:11), had written down the story of Jesus as Paul used to preach it. This is pretty hard to credit, since Paul's letters have almost nothing to say about any historical Jesus. When a saying of Jesus we read in our gospels would have come in quite handy to settle some disputed point, Paul does not mention it, implying he knew of none. On the one occasion (1 Cor. 7:10, cf. 25) where he does appeal to “a command of the Lord,” it more probably refers to the kind of “command of the Lord” he believes he had received from the heavenly Lord Jesus (see 1 Cor. 14:37; 1 Thess. 4:15–17, where “the word of the Lord” includes a third-person reference to the Lord Jesus and thus cannot be taken as his own speech). We can't help thinking of how Bill O’Reilly himself felt commanded by the Holy Spirit to write the very book we are talking about. Whether the Holy Ghost also told him to enlist Martin Dugard, Bill has not yet said. Maybe it was like Exodus 4:10–16, where God told Moses not to worry about stage fright; he's sent Aaron along with him as his spokesman.

So Paul does not know of Jesus as an itinerant teacher. Nor does he speak of Jesus as a miracle worker. In 1 Corinthians 1:1:22–23 he virtually denies that Jesus performed any miracles.22 He never mentions Nazareth. Can this man have been the source of Luke's Jesus material? Even if he had seen Jesus during the latter's earthly sojourn, Luke hadn't, even if he was dependent upon Paul. Nor did anybody think Mark was an eyewitness, reliant as he supposedly was on Peter's decades-old recollections.

JOHNNY ON THE SPOT

O’Reilly and Dugard highly value the eyewitness reliability of the Gospel of John, and indeed it serves as the central source of their version of Jesus’ teachings about his identity as the divine Son of God. It is merely church tradition that identifies John, son of Zebedee, as the fourth evangelist. John 21:24 refers to the (unnamed) author of the preceding twenty chapters as a witness and reporter of the things there narrated, but chapter 21 appears to constitute an appendix to the gospel, written by someone else, because 20:30–31 seems intended as the conclusion to the gospel, but chapter 21 starts it up again and paraphrases the original conclusion in 21:25. Thus 21:24 (“This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true.”) is not a claim by the evangelist on his own behalf but rather by someone else, essentially no different from Irenaeus’. Are we to accept that claim? Remember, a critical historian's duty is to not take that for granted. He requires some corroboration. But O’Reilly doesn't.

John 19:34–37 (“But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth—that you also may believe,” etc.) is an overt eyewitness claim, and on this is built the belief in this gospel's eyewitness character. But there is a problem. These verses seem to contradict what comes immediately before them:

Since it was the day of Preparation, in order to prevent the bodies from remaining on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their [the crucified criminals’] legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other that had been crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.

Wait a minute here. They already knew he was dead? Then why the spear in the side? The same thing has also been interpolated into some manuscripts of Matthew 27:49: “And another took a spear and pierced his side, and out came water and blood.” Without this dubious verse in John 19:34–37, no one would suspect that John was supposed to be an eyewitness record, and it isn't. Just compare John with the other three gospels (together called the Synoptics).23 As different as they are, they are much more alike than any of them is like John. As scholars have long noted, John not only has the events of Jesus’ ministry in a different order but also extends it over three years, unlike the others, which imply a single year. At least as important, the parables, the favorite teaching mode of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are virtually absent from John (though he does include two allegories, the True Vine in 15:1–11 and the Good Shepherd in 10:1–18). Instead, John features numerous artificial-sounding monologues and dialogues constructed on a pattern according to which Jesus’ hostile hearers obtusely misunderstand his revelation discourses, giving him the opportunity to clarify them for the readers’ sake.

The subject matter in John is very different from that portrayed in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In them, Jesus is all the time preaching about the kingdom of God, while in John the recurrent theme is “eternal life.” The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as Adolf Harnack pointed out, talks about the Father, but in John he talks about the Son.²⁴ It is not that John never mentions the kingdom or the Father, or that the others never mention eternal life or Jesus as God's Son, but the difference in emphasis is pronounced. No reader not invested in spinning the gospel data will deny that.

Most striking of all, everyone in the Gospel of John speaks the same way, whether that be John the Baptist, Jesus, or the narrator. Sometimes we cannot even tell when a character's speech leaves off and the narrator's comments begin. This idiom and style do not sound like Jesus in the other gospels, but they sound just like the style and idiom of the epistles ascribed (by editors) to John. As Albert Schweitzer urged, if you are going to try to delineate the historical Jesus, you have to make a choice: either John or the Synoptics.²⁵ But this is precisely what O’Reilly and Dugard refuse to do. Like all precritical gospel scholars and like fundamentalists today, they patch together bits and pieces from John and the others indiscriminately. They are scissors-and-paste “historians.”

O’Reilly and Dugard hasten to reassure us that, though once there was serious doubt about the authorship and accuracy of the gospels, recent years have seen a return to traditional views: “Thanks to scholarship and archaeology, there is growing acceptance of their overall historicity and authenticity” (p. 22). This is sheer wishful thinking. O’Reilly and Dugard eventually provide a list of scholars to whom their work is indebted, and most of them are ax-grinding fundamentalist platform debaters and overt spin doctors for biblical inerrancy: William Lane Craig,26 Craig Evans, Craig Keener, Paul Copan, J. P. Moreland.²⁷ O’Reilly and Dugard are quite comfortable in this company. But, like these men, they are engaged in nothing but pseudo-scholarly spin.

They admit that some of the details may have become garbled in the process of oral transmission (pp. 103, 126), even though this does not really square with their belief that Matthew and John were penned by those two members of the twelve apostles. In that case, what room would be left for the telephone game of oral tradition? Indeed, the dogmatic insistence on eyewitness authorship is nothing but an ad hoc device to eliminate the whole notion of a fluid, developing oral transmission. Anyhow, it is important to understand how O’Reilly and Dugard use the critical scalpel they have sharpened. They are eager to take just about everything they read in any of the gospels as grist for their mill. They busily stitch every piece of gospel cloth they can into their quilt. It is only when they run across some stubborn tag end that they feel entitled to trim it off. What they do not realize is that, if one can notice difficulties at such minor points, there is no reason not to start cutting elsewhere, anywhere one finds difficulties: contradictions, anachronisms, too-close parallels with extra-biblical sources. But this they will not do.

JESUS THE NERD

Once again I marvel at our authors’ blithe willingness to take as a piece of historical repor-tazh (as Bill likes to pronounce it) Luke's story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in theological dialogue with the scribes at the Temple. It reminds me of an old Lenny Bruce joke: One day Jesus strolls right into St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, to the considerable shock of the priest on duty. This poor fellow rushes to the cardinal's office and asks what he should do. The cardinal tells him: “Look busy.”

O’Reilly and Dugard are oblivious of the Law of Biographical Analogy. This sort of child prodigy tale is another piece of typical hagiography.28 Josephus padded his autobiography with an incident just like this. (It is not at all unlikely that this is where Luke got it. It wouldn't be the only place he used Josephus as a source.)

When I was a child, about 14 years old, I was universally commended for my love of learning, on account of which the high priests and the chief men of the city frequently visited me in a group, to ask my opinion about the accurate understanding of points of the law. (Life of Flavius Josephus, 2)

That, my friends, is a tall tale. And so is Luke's. And it is a tall tale of a particular kind. It is the same sort of stuff we find in spades in the pages of the apocryphal Infancy Gospels, like those attributed to Matthew and Thomas, in which Jesus is depicted as a visiting deity in human form. He is alternatively disdainful and pitying of his parents and adults generally. Joseph takes him to a local scribe for schooling, but when the man tries to teach Jesus the letters of the alphabet, the boy already knows them and demands to know if his tutor knows the esoteric significance of the letters. For this effrontery, the teacher smacks Jesus with a ruler, whereupon Jesus strikes him dead with a miracle. Naturally, Joseph scolds him.

Joseph, a carpenter, has been contracted to make a throne for a king, but the bumbling fool cannot seem to get the chair legs the same length. Jesus steps in and, like a fraudulent faith healer today, grabs hold of the legs and stretches them to an equal length.

Jesus is playing outside and some kid tumbles into him. Jesus points at him and says, “You will go no further in your course!” The rambunctious lad keels over dead. This sort of thing happens often enough that Joseph tells Jesus to cool it, lest they get run out of town.

After a rain, Jesus stoops down beside a puddle and fashions some mud into the shape of small birds. A young Pharisee rebukes him for doing this “work” on the Sabbath. Jesus laughs, claps his hands, and the birds come to life and fly away. (This story even made it into the Koran, surah 5:110).

In Luke 2:41–52 we see many of the same elements. Jesus’ parents’ incredible neglect (“No, I haven't seen him for three days. I thought he was with you.”) is on a par with Joseph's comical ineptitude in the throne story from the Infancy Gospel. His preternatural wisdom, making monkeys of the adults around him, is not mere precocity as O’Reilly and Dugard would have it. That is what Old Testament scholar Niels Peter Lemche29 calls a “rationalistic paraphrase” of a legendary narrative, smoothing it out in order to make it seem plausible as a piece of history. The adolescent Jesus is clearly pictured in Luke 2:49 as a god masquerading as a mortal. Note that he is not only wiser than the scribes but contemptuous of his oblivious parents who should have known to make a beeline for the Temple if they wanted him. His staying behind when they left for home is no Tom Sawyer mischief; he is acting with superior sovereignty. But he condescends to go with them back home for some milk and cookies.

Even though O’Reilly and Dugard minimize the blatantly legendary character of the story, which is why they make Jesus only a very inquisitive child, they nonetheless double back to cash in on the mythical material by taking the story seriously as Jesus’ first public claim to be the Son of God. They are reading Luke 2:49 (“Did you not know I must be in my Father's house?”) as if it were John 5:18 (“This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God.”). O’Reilly and Dugard seem to take the “my Father” reference in the Lukan story the same way Jesus’ adversaries do in the Johannine story, against Jesus’ intention. He rebuts their inferences in John 10:33–36, but O’Reilly and Dugard apparently agree with the Pharisees. They want Jesus, already as a youth, to claim membership in the Trinity. And any old piece of Jesus folklore is grade-A building material for their project. This is what I mean: Killing Jesus is by no stretch of the imagination the purely secular historical account O’Reilly stridently says it is.