LOUSY FIRST IMPRESSION

One of the most outrageous harmonizations of gospel contradictions offered by apologist spin doctors for biblical inerrancy is to say that Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple not once but twice. All historical plausibility is against it. Common sense shudders at it. But the fact remains that in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus “cleanses the Temple” at the end of his ministry, while in John the event opens his career. Spin-meisters O’Reilly and Dugard side, as usual, with the fundamentalists. It happens twice in their gospel, er, I mean history.

Anyone ought to see the insurmountable problem here. In the Synoptics, it is this event that figures in Jesus’ arrest a few days later. No one could get away with doing what Jesus did even once. He didn't get away with it. If he had done this at the beginning of his ministry, it would have been a mighty short one. There wouldn't have been time for a second Temple altercation. So you're really left with deciding whether the single Temple cleansing happened at the start or the finish. And it is obvious it would have to have been the latter. So then we must ask why John transferred it from its original and proper place. There is a good, though not historical, reason for it. As J. Ramsey Michaels notes, John has decided, in effect, to make the whole gospel into a Passion narrative.1 It will culminate with the Triumphal Entry, the trials, the cross, and the resurrection, like the others, but he has the trial extend retroactively through the whole book.

This is why there are numerous scenes in which “the Jews” accuse Jesus of being a transgressor of the Torah and a blasphemer (John 5:16–18; 8:59; 9:16, 24; 10:24–25,2 31–33, 39; 11:8) and even try to execute him on the spot (John 7:1, 19, 25, 30, 32, 44; 8:40, 45). This is why Jesus is constantly depicted as speaking of witnesses who testify on his behalf (John 1:7, 32, 34; 3:26; 4:39), of his own testimony (John 3:11, 22; 4:44; 5:31–35; 8:13–18), and so on. The whole gospel becomes one long courtroom drama, as if to say, “Everything points to this.” This is also probably why there are no exorcisms in John, though the Synoptics fairly swarm with them. It is why the institution of the Eucharist happens not at the Last Supper but at an earlier Passover in John chapter 6. The presentation is thematic, not historical. Nor is this in any way a criticism. But we must criticize O’Reilly and Dugard for failing to see it and for treating it as history, and as even more historical than the Synoptics since they make John the chronological framework of Killing Jesus.

LIFE OF THE PARTY

If John is the template for the O’Reilly Gospel, it is not surprising that Killing Jesus includes the Wedding at Cana story, which transpires before the Temple cleansing in the fourth gospel. While at the wedding reception, Jesus changes hundreds of gallons of water into (presumably white) wine. If this is real history, then Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Abraham Lincoln. O’Reilly and Dugard are discreet about miracles, committing only to saying that “rumors” or “reports” were circulating that Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead or walked on water. O’Reilly says this is because he is merely reporting history and realizes the affirmation of miracles would cross the line from history to faith. That is a valuable point, but I get the feeling he is just being coy. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more. Well, here he doesn't say that anything out of the ordinary took place at Cana. But without the miracle, of course, there is no story. But with the miracle, there is no history. Let me explain why this should be. Historians do not claim to know with dogmatic certainty what happened in the past unless they happened to be on the scene to witness it. My father, Noel B. Price, was no historian, but he laughed off the claims of Holocaust deniers for the simple reason that he was present at the liberation of Dachau and saw for himself what had happened there. But we were not there to witness events of the remote past. So the historian can only weigh what evidence survives and make an assessment of the probability of some account being historically true.

And one of the most useful, indeed indispensable, tools for doing so is the Principle of Analogy.3 Suppose you are studying a medieval chronicle that “reports” that one day a dragon flew into town and incinerated the whole populace. Well, technically, you weren't there and so do not know for sure that some dragon didn't show up. But you know that there are zero verifiable reports by contemporary, reliable witnesses of dragon attacks occurring today. And you know there are loads of fairy tales and myths in which dragons devastate villages. Which does your source's dragon story match: contemporary experience? No. Myths and legends? Yes. So you regard the story as no more than a story. Not a terribly difficult choice. But when you start treating biblical miracle stories the same way, then the outrage begins.

Samson kills a thousand Philistine soldiers with a sun-dried jawbone of a donkey (Judg. 15:14–15). Let's see: history or legend? You will look in vain through military history to find a story where something like this happens. No, it happens only in superhero comics. So wouldn't it seem inevitable that you are going to classify the Samson story as most probably a legend? It has nothing to do with your philosophical presuppositions or with a “naturalistic bias” against the miraculous. It's just a question of the way in which things happen, as far as we can tell. Those who protest such judgments of probability against miracles in the Bible have no interest in the way historians evaluate ancient evidence. Rather, their objections arise from the will to believe in the inerrant accuracy of the Bible. So O’Reilly is right: mixing miracles in alongside historical events is not possible in a pure work of history—or a book that wants to be regarded as history. I think O’Reilly and Dugard are just being cagey, though, especially since they do not hesitate to tell us, more than once, in a matter-of-fact way, that Jesus fulfilled this or that prophecy. (Someone ought to tell them that the verb corresponding to the noun prophecy is “to prophesy,” not “to prophesize.”)

So what about the water-into-wine miracle? Do you recall the last time you saw any such thing on the Food Network? I don't. But then there is Pausanias’ account of the priests of Dionysus who used to impress the gawkers every year by setting out three empty kettles in the temple, sealing the doors, then “discovering” the receptacles full of wine the next morning (Description of Greece 6.26.1f.). It seems not unlikely that Dionysus’ reputed feat inspired that attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John. But that's not all.

Remember the story of the adolescent Jesus educating the scribes in the Temple? That was, I suggested, a specimen of the child-god stories with which the apocryphal Infancy Gospels swarm. This is another one, slightly adapted, as Raymond E. Brown observed.4 It has all the classic features: Jesus is stuck amid a bunch of buffoonish (mortal) adults who have somehow underestimated how much wine they will need for a festive occasion, and now they are in danger of ruining it. Jesus’ mother looks to him, as if she were Ma Kent knowing her son, Superboy, can save the day.⁵ Jesus is impatient. “What fools these mortals be.” He speaks to his mother in a supercilious tone, annoyed at being bothered. But she knows he cannot finally resist her and so assures the master of ceremonies that her son will take care of it somehow: “Do whatever he tells you.” Jesus saves the day via an extravagant miracle, transmuting hundreds of gallons of water into wine—when everybody is already drunk (John 2:10).⁶ It is a piece of apocryphal legend sneaking into the canon. Jesus has been made into an adult, and his disciples have been added to the story. We might wonder if perhaps the story of Jesus blasting the fig tree that disappoints him (“May no one eat fruit from you again,” Mark 11:14), and even the story in which he rolls his eyes at the inability of the disciples (originally professional but incompetent exorcists?) to help the deaf-mute epileptic boy, are not more of the same. “O faithless generation. How long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?” (Mark 9:19).

OCCUPY THE TEMPLE

O’Reilly and Dugard not only follow Jesus into the Temple; they show us through his eyes what any pilgrim to Jerusalem for Passover would have seen, which for them means Jesus, too, must have seen it and therefore did see it. And since typically pilgrims took a ritual dip in the baptismal mikvah, so did Jesus. He must have. O’Reilly once claimed on-air not to know the word “syllogism.” This was probably self-deprecating humor. But he doesn't seem to know what a syllogism is in this case: All Jews visiting the Temple entered a mikvah. Jesus was a Jew headed for the Temple. Therefore Jesus entered a mikvah. That constitutes valid deductive reasoning, if, that is, the premises are true. But I suspect the major premise is a case of the Fallacy of Division, as if, for example, I were to infer from the statement “America is a wealthy country” that I, being an American, am personally rich. Oh, the rubber checks that would result! Isn't it a questionable assumption that Jesus was your typical Jew, or indeed, your typical anything? So much of Jesus scholarship today makes the same mistake: in order to promote ecumenical bridge-building between Jews and Christians (an excellent idea in itself), Christian7 as well as Jewish⁸ scholars rush to make Jesus a conventional Jew. “If it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.” But this is very far from obvious, given the way Jesus is presented in the gospels as doing many things for which conventional Jewish authorities frowned on him. And one of those was “cleansing the Temple.”

What precisely was supposed to be so bad about the Temple that Jesus felt he had to interrupt its operations? O’Reilly and Dugard do a good job sketching the spectacle one might have seen in the Court of the Gentiles, a forecourt, or outer ring, into which pious Gentiles might enter to observe Jewish worship at a distance, as they did back home in Gentile territories in the local Diaspora Jewish synagogues. What we know was wrong was that the authorities had allowed the sellers of livestock and the money changers to set up their pens and tables in this area, which would have made it pretty difficult for a Gentile to concentrate on the liturgy going on down front, as if you were trying to follow the plot of a movie standing at the popcorn counter. What were these functionaries doing there? As inconvenient as they were for visiting Gentiles, they were quite convenient for Jewish worshippers who could (and had to) offer animal sacrifices. The Torah stipulated three Temple festivals on high holy days throughout the year. You could drag your own sheep along with you from the hills of Galilee or wherever, but it was not unlikely that the poor beast, unaccustomed to such travel, might break a leg along the way. And if it did, you couldn't offer it, since the sacrifices had to be physically perfect, not a cast-off. You had to give God your best. So you get there with a defective animal: you're screwed, right? Why take the risk? Why not just go to the pens and buy a “government-inspected” animal from the priests who had already certified it?

But suppose all you had in your pocket were “idolatrous” Roman coins with portraits of Caesar on them? Images were forbidden to Torah-observant Jews. You couldn't use Roman coins to purchase animals in the holy precincts of the Temple. But you're in luck. There were currency exchange booths, just like in international airports today (I'm still stuck with a couple of Canadian quarters from my last trip). And there you could trade your pagan coins (“Mammon,” good enough for everyday needs) for non-idolatrous Hebrew or Phoenician coins, unmarred by images of human beings. With these you could buy that perfect lamb.

What gets Jesus so riled up, as if he were Bill O’Reilly interviewing Barney Frank? Jesus says, “Take these things away. You shall not make my Father's house a house of trade” (John 2:16). It looks as if Jesus felt this buying and selling was allowing the profane to intrude upon the sacred, defiling the sanctity of the Temple. People ought to bring their own animals and trust God to keep them safe. After all, the Torah must have presupposed they would bring them from home. And if they still needed cash for the trip, they should have made sure they had the right money before they left.

But our authors surmise something more sinister than this. Invoking the invidious stereotype of Jewish Shylocks, O’Reilly and Dugard jump to the conclusion that the livestock dealers and money changers must have been skinning the pilgrims, since they had them where they wanted them, like movie theaters charging you ten bucks for a box of popcorn. But where does the text say anything of the kind? Sure, it's possible, but that's all you can say. I've never visited the Vatican, but I would not just assume that the sellers of souvenirs there were ripping me off.

O’Reilly and Dugard proceed with their shameless fictionalizing. They pretend to know that Jesus’ actions in the Temple were the result of a spontaneous freak-out: “Something within him snaps” (p. 123). And his table-turning rage was uncharacteristic because “Jesus usually exudes a powerful serenity” (p. 123). How do our authors pretend to know this?9 Or this: “Heavy as the tables might be, their weight does not bother Jesus—not after twenty years of hauling lumber and stone alongside his father. He places two hands beneath the nearest table and flips it over” (p. 124)? Somehow our authors know that Nicodemus was present to see all this transpire. Well, they must know more than any of the gospel writers. And on and on go the gratuitous embellishments. If anyone thinks he is reading a historical work, he has been deceived. We are reading a novel. And I don't think it even qualifies as a historical novel.

“Despite the commotion, soldiers do not run in to quell the disturbance…. No one blocks Jesus’ path as he leaves the Court of the Gentiles” (p. 125). I will return to this matter when we accompany O’Reilly and Dugard to Jesus’ “second” cleansing of the Temple later on. For now, suffice it to say that they casually glide right by a gaping historical implausibility: how on earth did the armed Temple police, especially on the watch for trouble during Passover, with the city and the Temple crowded with visitors, not arrest Jesus on the spot? The apologist might ask us to believe they wanted to avoid escalating the chaos, planning to have Jesus followed and arrested later, on the sly. While this makes some sense later, when we hear the Sanhedrin wants to prevent rioting by having Jesus apprehended away from the madding crowd, this is different. Surely the simple fact of stationing troops throughout the Temple means that they were on hand to intervene in the Temple with armed force. If it had been the policy to let Jesus go and to catch up with him later, then would this not also be the policy all the time? And then why would there be armed guards there at all? No, surely they would have swooped down on Jesus—in the real world. But that may not be where this scene is set. Or it may be that something more, much more, took place, and that we are reading a heavily redacted version of the story, just like mainstream media reports on Benghazi, or Eric Holder's account of Operation Fast and Furious.

NICK AT NITE

As usual, O’Reilly and Dugard are “omniscient narrators,” pretending to know details they have actually fabricated, which would be perfectly fine if they admitted they were writing a novel.10

Jesus has returned to the Temple time and again during his Passover stay, teaching from that Temple cloister known as Solomon's Porch. This is his favorite place in the Temple, and even when he is not listening to the scholars or joining in to offer his own teachings about the kingdom of God, he often lingers in that area, walking and soaking in the atmosphere. (p. 126)

Where does this “information” come from? Jesus’ Facebook? His Twitter account? I guess a little bird (specifically a dove) told our authors.

The Pharisee Nicodemus sneaks out to see Jesus under cover of darkness. O’Reilly and Dugard earlier placed Nicodemus on the scene during the Temple cleansing, without any biblical grounding, in order to prepare for the present scene. He admits to Jesus that “we,” presumably his fellow members of the Sanhedrin, supreme council of the Jews, recognize that he is the real thing: a teacher sent by God, since otherwise he would never be able to perform the miracles he does. What miracles would those be? Are we supposed to picture Nicodemus having been present at the Cana wedding feast? The reference is to John 2:23: “Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in his name when they saw his signs which he did.” These must be the ones Nicodemus refers to, so was he there to see these, too? Maybe so. But wait a second. “We,” the Sanhedrin, all know Jesus is a teacher sent from God? Everywhere else in the Gospel of John the whole bunch of them, except for Nicodemus (this gospel does not make Joseph of Arimathea a member of the council), dismiss Jesus as the worst kind of heretic and blasphemer. It sounds more like the confessional “we” in 1 John, speaking on behalf of Christian believers in general: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we saw it and testify to it,” and so on. Also in the Johannine Appendix (John 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.” Even in the Nicodemus passage, the same author seems to be speaking through the mouth of the Jesus character: “We speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen” (John 3:11). Again, we?

O’Reilly insists on taking as historical reporting what is plainly written as edifying fiction. First, the very name “Nicodemus,” an actual though uncommon name among Jews, seems to denote a type-character, what Tzvetan Todorov calls a “narrative-man,” a character who amounts to no more than the embodiment of his function in the story.11 He exists to typify a group, in this case, secret Christians among the Jewish leadership. No sooner are we introduced to him by name than we hear he is “a ruler of the people.” What a coincidence; that is the meaning of the name “Nicodemus.” Nico () means “victor” or “ruler,” while demos () means “people.” As M. de Jonge made perfectly clear, Nicodemus typifies a certain group of intended readers for whom John is writing: Jewish leaders who privately assure Christians that they, too, believe in Jesus but who will not “come out of the closet” since they know they would be excommunicated from the synagogue and the Sanhedrin if they did.¹² This was all going on in the very late first century, after Christianity had taken form as a separate religious movement.¹³ It is anachronistic for the time of Jesus, even though John 9:22 pretends this ban was already in effect in Jesus’ day. John 16:1–4 makes it a future development to transpire after Jesus is gone. It is typical for John to read the conditions of his own day back into the career of Jesus as a literary device enabling him to let Jesus (fictively) comment on them. “What would Jesus do?”

So Nicodemus stands for crypto-Christians in the late first century. They are willing to go only so far as to admit Jesus was a teacher sent by God. Privately they believe more but dare not say so. And this is why John has Jesus abruptly confront Nicodemus with the demand “Unless one is born anew [or “from above,” a double entendre in Greek], he cannot see the kingdom of God…. Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:3, 5). Protestants are surely wrong; Catholics are right: this refers to water baptism, believed by early Christians to convey the Spirit. John has Jesus tell the fearful Jewish believers in Jesus that they must take the crucial step and receive baptism if they wish to be saved. As in Romans 10:9–10, “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For a man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved.” “Anyone who is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38).

When the apostles O’Reilly and Dugard quote John 3:16, they say Jesus “is expressing the predominant theology of his teaching. He has been telling all who will listen that a person must be spiritually reborn if he is to be judged kindly by God” (p. 127). What the…? This is not a predominant theme even in the Gospel of John. Something like it turns up in Mark 10:15 (repeated in Luke 18:17), “Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive [i.e., welcome] the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it,” but this may either mean “welcome it as a child would” or “welcome it as he would welcome a child,” which seems to be the point in the context. We can't say for sure. Matthew 18:3 rewrites the saying in a manner that seems to have caught John's eye, prompting him to rewrite it in the form we find in John 3:3. The Matthean version reads, “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” But this statement is immediately interpreted by its continuation: “Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:4). Thus the point is to encourage humility, not to teach spiritual rebirth. One must infer that being born again is our authors’ favorite part of the teaching of Jesus in the gospels. But then they seem to be writing their own gospel.

Finally, are we even supposed to understand the greater part of John chapter 3 as Jesus’ speech? There was no punctuation in the ancient manuscripts, and it sure sounds like someone talking about Jesus, rather than Jesus talking about himself. Some translations of the New Testament end the quote (and the speech of Jesus to Nicodemus) at the close of verse 15, making verses 16 to 21 commentary by the evangelist. These include the Weymouth,14 Schonfield,¹⁵ and Goodspeed¹⁶ versions. William Barclay ends the quote even earlier, at the end of verse 13.¹⁷ Thus it is not clear that O’Reilly is entitled to find in John chapter 3 Jesus’ own declaration of his divine Sonship.

LOCAL BOY MAKES BAD

Back in the summer of 1974 I was visiting an innovative Evangelical congregation in hip Harvard Square. Everything had gone swimmingly until just before the benediction, when some church member surprised everyone by going up to the front and blurting out that the Reverend Sun Myung Moon was the true Messiah. Those near him hustled him out fast. Something similar is told of Jesus in Luke 4:16–30.

In Luke 4:16–30, Jesus has come home to Nazareth (though Mark does not supply this name), and his local congregation welcomes him home, asking him to read the scripture lesson for the day. He finds the appropriate passage in the Book of Isaiah and reads it, then begins to expound on it. As in Acts 13:14b–15, a visitor might be invited to give the sermon, an informal devotional on the prescribed reading, in this case Isaiah 61:1–2: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, and he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” When he finishes, his sermonette is a doozy: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” The reaction? “And all spoke well of him and wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth, and they said, ‘Is this not Joseph's son?’”

This is just the opposite of the reaction O’Reilly and Dugard attribute to the congregation: “The crowd is shocked…Jesus should remember his place…. He is the son of Joseph, and nothing more. In their eyes, Jesus exalting himself as the man sent by God to preach the good news is offensive” (p. 131). Uh, no it's not. By the end of the story, the crowd will have turned into an ugly lynch mob, but not because of this. What happened? As you can read for yourself in Luke 4, Jesus proceeds inexplicably to goad the crowd into enmity, mocking the enthusiasm they had expressed mere moments before. He says, essentially, “Oh, so now you're going to ask me to do some free miracles here, like I did in Capernaum. Well, I'm afraid a doctor doesn't treat his acquaintances. After all, Elijah didn't feed any of his fellow Israelites during the famine, only a foreigner. Elisha didn't heal any of the Israelite lepers, just a Syrian. Tough luck.” This infuriates the crowd, one might add, understandably. But this is so crazy that O’Reilly and Dugard figure they can make it sound more reasonable by having the Nazarenes become affronted by Jesus’ heroic, daring announcement of his Messiahship. That ought to be enough to set off those Jesus-hating Jews, right? Why did Luke make Jesus look like such a jerk?

Luke has rather extensively rewritten the scene as it appeared in Mark 6:2–6, but, typically, evangelists O’Reilly and Dugard ignore the fact that Luke's version is a product of literary art. They prefer this one, so, bingo, it's historical. Well, it looks like Luke was trying to improve Mark's underlying version, which does have its problems. Mark gives no idea of what Jesus may have said on the occasion (which is probably why Luke decided he had to expand it). Mark, too, had Jesus win the praise of the congregation, then turns on a dime and has them explode in unmotivated anger. “Many who heard him were astonished, saying, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is the wisdom given to him? What mighty works are wrought by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’” But suddenly: “And they took offense at him.” Why?

Just because Mark had another snippet he wanted to use, because it was sort of on the same topic, even though it contradicted the scene he had just written. We read the original version in the Gospel of Thomas (31): “No prophet is welcome in his own village; no physician cures those who know him.” Like the opening scene in the hometown synagogue, the saying deals with the motif of a prophet in his own village, only in the proverb, the prophet gets a chilly reception, whereas in the story, he is warmly received. What was Mark to do? He just jammed them together.18 First Jesus is applauded, and in the very next moment he is scorned, the result being that, à la the proverb, he proves unable to heal anybody because they do not believe in him. In Mark, there is no narrative motivation for the change, and this is what Luke sought to clarify. But he only made things worse by having Jesus intentionally alienate the crowd. In any case, the parallel between Elijah and Elisha spurning their needy countrymen and Jesus kissing off the Nazarenes serves Luke's larger agenda of God's offering the gospel to Gentiles once Jews reject it (Acts 13:46; 18:5–6; 28:25–29).

Luke's version is a much more exciting adventure than Mark's. Mark simply ends with Jesus surprised at the unbelief of the congregation and unable to perform many healings for them. The artificiality of that is evident. The ending note presupposes that several sick folks approach Jesus hoping to be healed. “Lord. I am affected by a bald patch.”¹⁹ But they have no faith to be healed? Then what were they doing standing in the healing line? Anyhow, the Markan scene concludes with a big fizzle. Not so Luke's new and improved version in which the crowd drags Jesus to the precipice on the cliffside on which Nazareth perched,20 planning to execute him by the tried and true method of dropping the condemned man to his crashing death on the rocks below. But at the last moment, Jesus simply (and miraculously?) walks away through their midst. O’Reilly and Dugard feel their novelistic muse stirring.

But at the last minute he turns to face his detractors. Drawing himself up to his full height, Jesus squares his shoulders and holds his ground. He is not a menacing individual, but he has a commanding presence and displays an utter lack of fear. The words he says next will never be written down [so how do O’Reilly and Dugard know there were any?], nor will the insults these men continue to hurl at him ever be chronicled. In the end, the mob parts and Jesus walks away unscathed. (p. 132)

This is Jesus as played by Jeffrey Hunter, who starred in the 1961 film King of Kings. Of course it is an almost plausible scene, but I suspect it is another “rationalistic paraphrase” (though even so it has the marks of fiction, even in Luke's terse version). It seems at least as likely that Jesus’ ability to escape the crowd without effort reflects a popular early Christian heresy called Docetism, the belief that Jesus was too holy to possess a physical body of flesh and was instead a kind of divine phantom lacking substance and weight. He could merely drift through such a mob like a ghost. The gospels not infrequently toy with this idea, as in Mark 6:49 and Luke 24:36–43, though it is generally opposed (1 John 4:2). The Killing Jesus version is almost like the old rationalist reading of the walking on the water miracle, that he knew where the stepping stones were.

O’Reilly and Dugard sum up, informing us of something we would never know if we confined ourselves to what the gospels actually say. “Three times he has declared himself the Son of God, a blasphemous statement that could get him killed” (p. 132). The first, our authors imply, was during the cleansing of the Temple, when Jesus called the place “My Father's house.” Too bad O’Reilly and Dugard did not take care to compare their favorite source, John's Gospel, with the earlier version of Mark, where Jesus simply quotes Isaiah 56:7, “Is it not written ‘My house shall be a house of prayer for all the nations’?” (Mark 11:17). John has added the “My Father's.” It is a theological embellishment, not a piece of historical reporting. The second declaration of his divine Sonship was that to Nicodemus in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” But this statement technically does not specify that the speaker is referring to himself. And who is the speaker? It sounds like the evangelist himself, putting a Christian creed into the mouth of Jesus, a character in his drama. The third declaration is supposed to be the application of Isaiah 62 to himself in the Nazareth synagogue. But this passage does not say anything about anyone being God's Son, only that the speaker has been anointed to free the captives, give sight to the blind, preach glad tidings to the poor, and so on. Here and elsewhere throughout Killing Jesus O’Reilly and Dugard blur the various Christian beliefs about Jesus into one another, regarding “Messiah” (anointed one), “Son of God,” and “God on earth” as completely interchangeable. Like the old beer commercial with the Clydesdales: “When you say Bud, you've said it all.”

So where are we? Mark's original was already a badly cobbled-together mess defying all psychological realism. Luke is a total rewrite, producing an even more grotesque result. O’Reilly rewrites Luke, much as Luke rewrote Mark. We are very far from any historical Jesus.