Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard paint a vivid picture in their book of John the Baptist. In doing so, they simultaneously embellish the figure of John and oversimplify it. All four canonical gospels feature John, but they contradict one another in serious respects, as we shall see. The treatment of the Baptizer in Killing Jesus is a prime example of the authors’ tendency to homogenize the gospel accounts, a method that gives short shrift to any and all of them, cheating the reader, who will come away with no idea of the remarkable distinctiveness of each one. The fundamentalist, the harmonist, the apologist wants to be able to point to a single “truth” about John and his role in the Jesus drama. The fact that there are four different canonical versions is disturbing to him, though not to the genuine historian who is always willing, if necessary, to admit that we cannot arrive at a definitive conclusion. But the apologist for the faith, even if he masquerades as a New Testament historian, is motivated by theology and cannot tolerate such ambiguity. O’Reilly and Dugard, however, are impatient with such “dithering,” as they no doubt view it. They have a story to tell, and they want to sound like they know what they're talking about. So they figure the facts must be knowable. The ironic result is that they throw the various accounts of the Baptizer into the textual blender and produce a synthetic product that matches none of the originals. But it looks most like that of John's Gospel. And, as I have argued, this is doubtless the poorest choice of the bunch.1 What say we take their section on John and the Jordan baptism of Jesus bit by bit?

THE BEAUTIFUL, THE BEAUTIFUL RIVER

What kind of person came out and waited in line to confess his or her sins to John and to receive his absolution? “The believers are mostly poor working people” (p. 95), those whom O’Reilly, on The Factor, likes to call “the folks.” To today's reader, this sentence would seem to imply that John's ministry attracted only a certain slice of a larger population. This may be misleading, since there weren't many other options. The Roman Empire balanced a tiny elite at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid, the broad base being slaves and desperately poor laborers, shepherds, fishermen, and farmers, even as our authors explain elsewhere in the book. Luke 7:29 adds the hated, quisling tax collectors (or toll collectors) but says “all the people” had been baptized by John, just as Mark says (1:5). O’Reilly and Dugard place “the haughty Pharisees” on the scene, “spying on him from the shore” (p. 95). Here is the old Christian caricature of this pious sect. Pharisees were not aristocrats, much less clergy. There was little overlap between them and the priesthood. They were more analogous to today's Hasidic Jews.

Luke 7:30 says that the Pharisees had boycotted John's baptism, presumably feeling they did not need it. Consistent with this, Luke's account of the baptism (3:1–9), rewritten somewhat from Mark 1:4–8, makes no mention of them being present. It is Matthew, also rewriting Mark, who has introduced the Pharisees, plus the Sadducees, into the baptism story. Luke 3:7 added a passage from the Q Source, giving a detail of the Baptizer's preaching: “He said therefore to the multitude that came out to be baptized by him. ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’” Matthew 3:7 added the saying, too, but he made a significant alteration, “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers,’” and so on. As you can see from elsewhere in Matthew's Gospel, he really has it in for these groups (see especially chap. 23), so he takes the opportunity to have John give them both barrels. But in doing so, paradoxically, he creates the impression that the Pharisees (and the Sadducees) actually did report for John's baptism, contrary to Luke. Does Matthew mean to imply they were hypocrites, just going through the motions? Why would they? And how would John be in any position to know this? Was he a mind reader? I think the question arises simply from Matthew failing to think his editorial change through. We would have to judge Luke's version more likely, meaning that there were no Pharisees on the scene. But O’Reilly and Dugard happily harmonize Matthew's version with Luke's: “One from column A, one from column B,” and thus they conjure “the haughty Pharisees,” lounging on the riverbank on their Shroud of Turin beach towels, binoculars at the ready.

But why not add the Gospel of John? In John 1:19–28, we read that certain Temple personnel had been sent by the Pharisees, not to do surreptitious reconnaissance, as O’Reilly and Dugard seem to think, but to interview the Baptizer. The story, as usual in this gospel, is unhistorical, and we can see this for two reasons. First, the Pharisees are said to have sent the priests and Levites (low-level priestly functionaries) on this fact-finding tour, but the evangelist is confused: the Pharisees, a group of pietistic laymen, would not have been in any position to send the Temple priests on some errand. This is the work of someone with no direct knowledge of the Holy Land back before the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The evangelist merely imagines “the Jews” (as he usually calls them) as one big gang of villains, with no reason to make distinctions among them.

Second, the interrogation of John, questioning whether he thinks himself to be Elijah, or the predicted Prophet like Moses, or the Messiah, seems to be a Johannine rewrite of Mark's Caesarea Philippi scene (Mark 8:27–30), in which Jesus asks the disciples who the crowds believe him to be, and they answer, “Some say John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others one of the prophets.” When Jesus asks the disciples’ own opinion, Peter answers, “You are the Christ.” John's Gospel has taken this scene and transferred it to John the Baptist. The four options are the same (Elijah, one of the prophets/the Prophet, John the Baptist, the Christ). Both Jesus and John deny being Elijah and a/the p/Prophet, but Jesus, being the Christ, denies being John, while John, being the Baptizer, denies being the Christ. When John's Gospel gets to his version of the Caesarea Philippi scene (though he switches it to Galilee), it is simpler: the contrast between the crowds and the disciples is preserved, but now, instead of Jesus asking, “What do they say? What do you say?” he sees the crowds, mystified at his Bread of Life discourse, abandoning him (John 6:66), and he asks the Twelve, “Will you also go away?” (6:67). Again, it is Peter who replies, and his rewritten response is both simpler and more elaborate: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God” (6:68–69).

O’Reilly and Dugard sum up John's preaching this way:

The end of the known world2 is coming, John preaches. A new king will come to stand in judgment. Wade into the water and be cleansed of your sins, or this new anointed ruler—this “Christ”—will punish you in the most horrible manner possible. (p. 96)

But this is not in fact what any gospel has John say. He speaks more vaguely of “the Coming One,” who will incinerate the unrepentant. This is an ultimatum of apocalyptic doom, that's for sure, but O’Reilly and Dugard are jumping the theological gun here. John says nothing of the Coming One being the Davidic Messiah or any other variety of a king. Albert Schweitzer thought that if these were actually the words of the Baptizer, he was more likely referring to the much-anticipated return of Elijah:

Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple…. Behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts (Mal. 3:1); Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible Day of the Lord comes. (Mal. 4:5)³

Mark's Gospel opens with a quote at Mark 1:2–3 cobbled together from Malachi 3:1 (which I just cited above), with the pronouns changed (“I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way”), and Isaiah 40:3 (“the voice crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’”), though he names only Isaiah as the source, no big deal. Mark uses the passage to introduce John the Baptizer as the fulfillment of prophecy. John's Gospel puts the Isaiah part of the passage onto John's own lips, making it the Baptizer's reply to the Pharisees’ emissaries who want to know what he claims for himself. O’Reilly and Dugard take John's secondary version as fact, unable to discern the subtle redactional alterations of one gospel by another. Nor have they done their homework on Isaiah very well, ascribing Isaiah 40:3 to Isaiah of Jerusalem, who lived eight hundred years before Jesus, when in fact it is the work of the so-called Second Isaiah, a member of the Isaianic sect who wrote just as the Babylonian Exile was about to end, when the Persian emperor Cyrus allowed Jewish subjects to return to Judea. In fact, this is the point of the passage, that God was commanding the preparation of a smooth journey through the desert for his returning people. For their part, O’Reilly and Dugard are quick to read Christian theology into the verses: “Isaiah foretold that a man would come to tell the people about the day the world would end and God would appear on earth.” In Isaiah 40:3? Come on.

As if we needed a reminder that O’Reilly and Dugard are writing more of a novel than a historical work, consider this: “Like the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth has long hair and a beard. He wears sandals and a simple robe. His eyes are clear and his shoulders broad, as if he is a workingman” (p. 103). Oh really, O’Reilly? Where do the gospels say anything like this? I can't help thinking of one morning, decades ago, when I was teaching an Intro to New Testament class and mentioned the belief of some ancient Syrian Christians that Thomas “the Twin” was Jesus’ own twin brother. One woman raised her hand and suggested it was because, and here she pointed to an illustration in her Bible, Jesus and Thomas looked so much alike. Hoo boy.

PIGEON ON A STATUE

Again: “Suddenly a dove lands on Jesus's shoulder. When Jesus makes no move to shoo it away, the bird is quite content to remain there” (p. 103). This is another “rationalistic paraphrase.” Mark has both more and less than this. “And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased’” (Mark 1:10–11). Actually the preposition is , “into,” though most translators, disliking the heretical implications,4 prefer to pretend the preposition is , “upon,” which is what Matthew and Luke replace Mark's with. Obviously, O’Reilly and Dugard prefer it, too, since they want the dove to be a flesh-and-blood bird, and it would be pretty grotesque to have the bird penetrate Jesus’ body. Did he swallow it? But it is ridiculous for it to come to this. Mark and Matthew say the Spirit descended as a dove, not that it was a dove. Luke objectifies it, changing Mark's “as a dove” to “in bodily form like a dove” (Luke 3:22), but if he intended an incarnation of the Holy Ghost in a bird's body, it gets even weirder, like the Hindu belief that Vishnu once came to earth as a fish.

O’Reilly and Dugard admit that the gospels diverge over whether the Spirit descended before or after Jesus was immersed. This is one of the rare instances where our authors switch over from fundamentalist literalism to gospel criticism as an expedient when they can think of no other way to get out of a difficulty.

The Gospels are a combination of oral tradition, written fragments from the life of Christ [=?], and the testimony of eyewitnesses. This would explain the discrepancy. The appearance of the dove may have been coincidental with Jesus’ baptism. However, the Gospels were written as many as seventy years after Jesus’ death (Mark in the early 50s, Luke between 59 and 63, Matthew in the 70s, and John between 50 and 85). For the dove to remain a part of Jesus's oral tradition for that long indicates that the bird's appearance must have been remembered quite vividly by all who were there. (p. 103)

Good God, but this is nonsense. Earlier our authors assured us that the gospels were eyewitness accounts, but now that would be inconvenient. Can O’Reilly and Dugard even add? If Jesus died in 30 CE, and the gospels were written as late as seventy years after, wouldn't the highest date have to be 100 CE? But the latest date they allow is 85 CE for John. Besides, these dates are preposterously early, dictated by the desire of apologists to minimize the gap between the ostensible time of Jesus and the composition of the gospels. Of course that only matters if you are trying to convince potential converts that all the stuff in the gospels can be trusted as accurate, so they can trust this Jesus, the character in the story they are reading, to be their personal savior and imagine him listening to them during their daily devotional quiet time. It wouldn't work so well if you had only a vague notion of who the historical Jesus might or might not have been. Once in the fold, the convert will be told that none of it matters; the gospels are inspired and without error. Christians can believe them implicitly because they are the infallible Word of God. And that could be equally true if the gospels were written in the 1950s. It is all cynical bait-and-switch, and it is this propaganda tactic that necessitates these early dates for the gospels. It is all mere spin.

Like a whirling dervish, one spins in a circle, and thus it is no surprise that the business about the dove landing on Jesus and the preservation of the scene in oral tradition is viciously circular. Note that O’Reilly and Dugard start out by assuming that the incident originated in a remembered fact and was passed down. If it survived, getting repeated for that long after it happened, that proves it must have happened!

THE ALL-SPIN ZONE

Don't let it escape your notice that O’Reilly and Dugard are not truly critical at all. The factors they say would explain slight discrepancies between the gospels are all assumed to be virtual guarantees of gospel accuracy. Let's see: there are oral traditions that are to be judged the more accurate the later we find them, like the late survival of the dove scene. There are written records of Jesus from his own lifetime. Besides being sheer supposition, this guess implies the gospels are giving us at least portions of contemporary testimony in written form. That's even better than accurate oral tradition. Third, we have eyewitness testimony. How does that differ from the other two types? All are accurate. Where is the zone of possible confusion? These “factors,” even if they were real and factual, would only make the contradictions more puzzling, not less.

What O’Reilly and Dugard are conspicuously omitting to mention is the very good possibility that, first, the gospels are compilations of fiction and legend and, second, that one evangelist seems to have edited and rewritten his predecessor with considerable freedom, as any glance at one of those three-column parallel comparisons of Matthew, Mark, and Luke will make inescapably clear. And if we must reckon with these “factors,” then we cannot pretend to be nearly so sure what really happened in the life of Jesus. The gospels are not unlike the Warren Commission report. Can you really trust them?

In fact, the only way to understand the gaping gospel differences, for example, over the baptism scene, is to “factor” in the possibilities that we are reading fiction, spin, and rewrites. Consider the differences and how much sense they make as polemical rewrites. Mark is the earliest version we have, written probably around 100 CE.5 Mark has Jesus appear at the Jordan as a face in the crowd. There is not the slightest hint that John the Baptizer knows who he is. Jesus is baptized, then has a vision that only he sees. He sees the heavens open and the Spirit descend. The Baptizer never knows the difference. “Next!”

Early Christians faced competition from the sect of John the Baptist, who believed their own master had been slain by a tyrant, then raised from the dead, and that he was the Messiah. That is why Luke, Acts, and John (Luke 3:15–16; Acts 19:1–7; John 1:8, 20; 3:25–30) bend over backward to have John deny that he is the Messiah. It is aimed at latter-day followers of John whom Christians sought to convert. The John sectarians apparently made much of the fact that Jesus had sought out John's ministry and received his baptism of forgiveness of sins. Does that not indicate that Jesus recognized John's spiritual superiority? This seems to be why Luke, Matthew, John, and even the later Gospel according to the Ebionites handle the baptism with kid gloves, each modifying it, sometimes radically, in their own way.

Luke makes something of a convoluted mess of the baptism, describing John's ministry with material drawn from Mark and Q, as Matthew does, but adds touches of his own, and it is essentially over, with John arrested and hauled off to the slammer, before Luke gets around to telling his readers, in a flashback and in a subordinate clause, that “when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him,” and so on (Luke 3:21–22). Why would Luke, perhaps the most elegant stylist of the evangelists, retell the story in so tortuous a manner? It looks like he is trying to minimize, even to obscure, the connection between the Baptizer and Jesus. It's still there if you read it carefully, but it almost opens the door to the idea that somebody else baptized Jesus after John was gone. And notice that, as in Mark, Luke gives not the slightest hint that John knew Jesus before or after his baptism.

Accordingly, when Luke gets to the passage taken from the Q Source, Luke 7:18–20, he has John, languishing in Herod Antipas’ dungeon, hearing about a man named Jesus reportedly healing the sick. It dawns on him that this mysterious person might just be the Coming One whose advent he had been proclaiming. “The disciples of John told him of all these things. And John, calling to him two of his disciples, sent them to the Lord, saying, ‘Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?’” He would not even be asking the question if he had already recognized Jesus as the Messiah. And in Luke, as in Mark, he didn't. Jesus had been merely one more face in the crowd. It is true that Luke's Infancy narrative makes John and Jesus into cousins. And, in an episode too obviously legendary for O’Reilly and Dugard to include, already the fetus John recognizes the embryo Jesus with both still in the womb (Luke 1:44). But this is incompatible with Luke's own episodes of the baptism and the messengers of John being sent to Jesus. It is, in fact, part of Luke's polemical effort to reconcile Christianity with the rival John the Baptist sect and to co-opt their members. It doesn't matter to Luke that one of his stories is inconsistent with another as long as each is consistent with his larger purpose.

Matthew has the same anxieties about the gibe of John's believers that John, having baptized Jesus, must be Jesus’ superior. So what does he do with the baptism scene? This: “Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he consented” (Matt. 3:13–15). In this version, John the Baptizer recognizes Jesus as the Coming One the minute he sees him, just the opposite of the way the story goes in Mark and Luke. Why this rather drastic change? Matthew wants to reassure readers that Jesus is the greater figure, despite the claims of the John sectarians: John discouraged Jesus from receiving his baptism (“What's a nice savior like you doing in a place like this?”) and tried to reverse their roles, but Jesus declined his offer, insisting on going through with John's baptism. Can you imagine that, if it had actually happened this way, Mark and Luke would not have included this little exchange between Jesus and John? No way. What Matthew adds to the story he did not get from oral tradition, eyewitness testimony, or written records from Jesus’ own lifetime. He made it up. Obviously. But it is not obvious to O’Reilly and Dugard, who tell us it really happened. They are not, despite O’Reilly's oft-repeated claims, writing history. They are engaged in apologetics, spin, on behalf of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

O’Reilly and Dugard cherry-pick several of these items and stitch them together. Then they place this Frankenstein's monster into a context derived from John's Gospel, even though it doesn't fit. John has the Baptizer recognize Jesus, all right, contradicting both Mark and Luke, but he also contradicts Matthew, who had the Baptizer know Jesus as the Coming One even before he beheld the descent of the Spirit after Jesus’ immersion. In John's Gospel, the Baptizer knows Jesus for the Coming One only once he witnesses the descent of the Spirit, not before. As we have seen, O’Reilly and Dugard do realize there is an inconsistency here, but they try to hide behind the ambiguity of the sources. The point of such an appeal is not to show that the gospel sources cannot be relied upon for history but merely to wave away a difference in detail. But the contradiction between John and the rest is that John never even says Jesus got baptized! John the Baptist merely points Jesus out in the crowd and announces that whoever commissioned him to start baptizing informed him that he was only doing it to gain a bully pulpit from which to draw public attention to a man upon whom he should eventually behold the Spirit descending. The circumstances of this vision of Jesus being marked out as receiving God's Spirit are not named. Certainly not a baptism, and that is an amazing omission. But in omitting it, John the evangelist hoped to cut the rug from under the feet of the Baptist sect and their gloating over the fact that Jesus was baptized by the superior John.

O’Reilly and Dugard have squeezed every bit of ill-fitting gospel material into one patchwork quilt. But that is not good enough for these modern gospel writers (for that is what they are, not historians). So they start making stuff up again. “So now, speaking softly with John the Baptist, Jesus does declare who he is” (p. 104). But, uh, he doesn't, even in the new and improved O’Reilly and Dugard version. All he does is mouth the words taken from Matthew 3:15: “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” But maybe the Holy Spirit just forgot to tell his faithful scribes O’Reilly and Dugard the rest of Jesus’ supposed self-declaration, because the Baptizer now knows enough to announce to the crowds, “I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God” (John 1:34), a little detail conspicuously absent from all three of the other gospels. Or is it? Actually, it is just that the evangelist John has transferred what the voice from heaven says in Matthew, Mark, and Luke into the mouth of John the Baptist. Why? Because, remember, the evangelist John decided to sidestep the embarrassment of Jesus having received John's baptism of repentance by omitting the baptism altogether. For him, the whole baptizing project was just a pretext for the Baptizer to gain the public ear so he could announce Jesus. So if he is going to have Jesus declared Son of God in connection with John the Baptist, he is going to have to make John himself, and not a heavenly voice, say it. Was John the gospel author writing straight history? No more than novelists O’Reilly and Dugard. And here is a bit more of their fictionalization of the gospel narrative:

The believers drop to their knees and press their faces into the earth. Jesus does not react to this sign or worship. He does nothing to discourage it either. The Nazarene simply wades down into the water and takes his place alongside John, waiting to be baptized…. The crowd remains on its knees as Jesus steps onto the shore and keeps on walking. (pp. 104, 105)

This little sequence has no basis whatever in the gospels. Our authors combine John's Gospel, where John the Baptist publicly announces Jesus as God's Son, with Matthew, where John tries to dissuade Jesus from submitting to baptism but says not one thing to the crowd about him, and then they interweave the business about the crowd bowing before Jesus, which is nice, vivid detail but occurs in no gospel—except the Gospel according to Bill. Isn't this just the sort of funny business that cost former journalist Jayson Blair his job at the New York Times?

UNCLE JOHN WANTS YOU

O’Reilly and Dugard inform us that John's teachings are “radical” (p. 95) and that they “directly challenge the Roman Empire” (p. 96). Herod Antipas (as Josephus records) was fearful of John's great sway with the people, dreading that he might foment a popular uprising. Though O’Reilly and Dugard call John's message “nonviolent” (p. 99), there is reason to question that. Our authors quote John's counsel to various groups of penitents who had come to him for baptism: To tax collectors he says, “Don't collect any more than you are required.” To soldiers he says, “Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely. Be content with your pay” (p. 96). But Robert Eisler pointed out long ago that the Greek word is not , “soldiers,” but rather , “those going off to war,” in other words, about to ship out.6 Eisler then compares the words of the Baptizer to the marching orders Josephus gave to his rebel soldiers some forty years later when preparing to fight Roman troops in Galilee.

If you thirst for victory, abstain from the ordinary crimes, theft, robbery, and rapine. And do not defraud your countrymen; count it no advantage to yourselves to injure another. For the war will have better success if the warriors have a good name and their souls are conscious of having purified themselves from every offence. If, however, they are condemned by their evil deeds, then God will be their enemy and the aliens will have an easy victory.⁷

One can expect little support from the population one is fighting to liberate if one treats them no better than their current oppressors do. And, as is implied in Josephus’ reference to the rebel troops purifying themselves before marching forth, John's baptism of repentance may well have been a ritual to make sure God was on the side of the Jewish freedom fighters. Even the question of the tax collectors would make sense in light of preparation for war. One of the main objects of the rebellion against Rome was the abolition of taxes, and that would likely result in putting the quisling tax collectors, working for Rome, to the sword. John's advice? Taxes will still be necessary, but would now be needed to supply and support the rebel forces, without defrauding one's own people.⁸

A saying in Matthew seems to ascribe revolutionary violence to the preaching of the Baptizer: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men seize it by force” (Matt. 11:12). There have been many attempts to defuse the ticking bomb of this saying, but all of them seem like ad hoc products of theological desperation.

Raymond E. Brown drew attention to a saying that, in its present context in the Gospel of John, refers to Jesus as the sacrificial Passover lamb9 (as in 1 Cor. 5:7), but that, before being thus Christianized, may have formed part of the preaching of John the Baptist: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away [i.e., does away with] the sins of the world” (John 1:29). Brown suggests that John, without reference to Jesus, had been preaching the coming of a warrior king who would eradicate the forces of evil oppressing the world and Jews in particular. The same imagery of a warrior lamb or ram appears in two contemporary Jewish apocalyptic works, 1 Enoch 90:38 and the Testament of Joseph 19:8. This is certainly warlike imagery, implying an imminent military crusade against Rome.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke have it that John was arrested by Herod Antipas because the Baptizer persisted in publicly denouncing the Tetrarch as a scofflaw vis-à-vis the Torah: “It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife” (Mark 6:18). Mark says Antipas had wooed Herodias away from his brother Philip. (Though Josephus says it was his brother Herod instead—it was hard to keep the Herodians straight without a scorecard. Still is.) Herodias could not stand the embarrassment, and we are told it was she who nagged Antipas into arresting John. Antipas was fascinated with John and did not wish him harm, but Herodias wanted the troublemaker dead. In a famous story, she used her daughter, Antipas’ stepdaughter, Salome (as Josephus, but no gospel, names her) to trick Antipas into having John executed. This already sounds like something out of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, but O’Reilly and Dugard decided the story would be even more exciting with a scene in which the manacled Baptist confronts Herod Antipas face to face, though the gospels do not provide one. So they save the line “It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife” for this fictive scene instead of placing it back where Mark did, during the public activity of John. Admittedly, it might have happened this way, but there is no evidential basis for it. The gospel story may be a tissue of myth and legend already, but O’Reilly and Dugard have made it into literary fiction.