A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Occasionally, while working one's way through Killing Jesus, one actually has to wonder if its authors had read the gospels lately. There are some egregious errors, if that is what they are. My guess, though, is that they just took the liberty of rewriting the story like a movie adaptation of a book, in which the reader is warned in the opening credits that the film is merely “inspired by” or “suggested by” the original work. O’Reilly and Dugard, for instance, recount the carping of Jesus’ smartass brothers from John 7:1–9, where they express surprise that Jesus is not packing up for the impending holiday in Jerusalem. If he is so eager to gain a reputation,1 surely he can't be intending to pass up an opportunity like this. And he tells them the time is not right, so he is giving this one a miss. He is fibbing to them, because, as soon as they depart, he sneaks out to make the trip separately. Well, O’Reilly and Dugard are not above a bit of fibbing themselves, because they switch this incident from the brothers of Jesus to his disciples:
The disciples are so eager for Jesus to come with them and publicly announce that he is the Christ that they try to give him a piece of advice, something they've never done before.
“Go to Jerusalem.” They beg before setting out. “No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.”
“The right time for me has not yet come,” Jesus answers. “For you any time is right. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil. You go to the feast. I am not going, because for me the time has not yet come.” (p. 171)
You can see that the whole scene is drawn, virtually verbatim, from John 7, only the sarcastic brothers (much like Cinderella's nasty sisters) have been changed to the overenthusiastic disciples. Strangely, no reason is ever provided, either in John's Gospel or in Killing Jesus, for Jesus’ deception. It would make plenty of sense if he had actually stayed behind, knowing that any visit would lead to his crucifixion, and that it is not the proper time for that yet. But, of course, he goes after all.
THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEMS SEGMENT
Up to this point, Killing Jesus has told us both that Jesus has publicly taught that he is the Christ, though he decided to cool it for a while when he saw it ruffling some feathers, and that he hasn't spilled the beans. Now we are told that his fans are eager for him to come out of the Messianic closet and that “Jesus is on the verge of admitting that he is the Christ” (p. 173). Rudolf Bultmann2 and others have cogently pointed out that Jesus cannot very well have been “admitting he is the Christ” if early Christians believed he had become the Messiah and Son of God only as of his resurrection. Jesus “was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:3–4). “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). “This [prophecy] he has fulfilled to us…by raising Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, ‘Thou art my Son. Today I have begotten thee’” (Acts 13:33). These astonishing theological fossils imply that Christians first believed that Jesus’ Messiahship dated only from Easter, not before.
But eventually Christians came to believe that Jesus had been the Messiah all along, some thinking the office was bestowed upon him at the Jordan baptism (Mark 1:11), others as of his miraculous birth (Matt. 2:2; Luke 1:35), still others from before creation itself (John 1:1, 18; Heb. 1:2). Raymond E. Brown shows how Christology developed backward. Three major motifs—the divine declaration of Sonship, the agency of the Spirit, and a display of miraculous power—were pushed back every step of the way, from the resurrection to the Transfiguration, to the baptism, to the Nativity, and finally to Creation.3 Once the Messiahship had been retrojected into the lifetime of Jesus, storytellers felt free to have Jesus speak of it openly, as if it were already in effect. But some remembered the days when the Messiahship was believed to be coincident with Easter, not before. And to iron out this inconsistency,4 some began to tell the story as if Jesus did act and speak as Messiah already but simultaneously warned people not to tell anyone else what he had said or done until the resurrection. Maybe that would explain it, though it was not clear why he should have kept it under wraps. But that was okay: the theory was mainly retrofitting, an ad hoc exercise in juggling the disparate elements in the gospels, something Christian apologists have raised to a fine art today.
WAKE UP CALL
I remember one Sunday when John's story of Lazarus (chap. 11) was one of the lectionary readings, along with Ezekiel 37:1–14 (the valley of dry bones) and other texts with the same theme: resurrection. The rector made what I considered an embarrassing mistake, explaining to the congregation that he did not plan to make Lazarus’ resurrection the text for his homily since many scholars believed the story was not historically true. So he went for one of the others. He had confused two different universes of discourse. The historical accuracy of a biblical text has nothing to do with whether or not to preach it. Even if it is a fiction, obviously it was written to teach some lesson, and Lazarus’ story certainly was, issuing in the great declaration “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25), one of the most powerful spine-tinglers in the New Testament.
Well, O’Reilly and Dugard have made the same mistake my priest did, only the other way around: they imagine it is history. Oh, they try to look like they are being objective and impartial, but once again it is perfectly obvious that they believe (and want you to believe) Jesus raised the rotting carcass of Lazarus from the dead. Why isn't it historical? Right off the bat, you have to wonder why, if this really happened, it doesn't show up in any other gospel, especially since it is so much more spectacular even than the resurrection stories the others do have.5 Mark 5:22–24, 35–43 (paralleled in Matt. 9:18–19, 23–26; Luke 8:40–42a, 49–56) tells of the raising of Jairus’ daughter, while Luke 7:11–17 has him raise up the son of the widow of Nain. It is not quite clear that Jesus is supposed to be actually raising the dead in these two stories once you compare them with a number of similar stories from the Hellenistic world.
Here, too, is a miracle which Apollonius worked: A girl had died just in the hour of her marriage, and the bridegroom was following her bier lamenting, as was natural, his marriage left unfulfilled, and the whole of Rome was mourning with him, for the maiden belonged to a consular family. Apollonius then witnessing their grief, said: “Put down the bier, for I will stay the tears that you are shedding for this maiden.” And withal he asked what was her name. The crowd accordingly thought that he was about to deliver such an oration as is commonly delivered as much to grace the funeral as to stir up lamentation; but he did nothing of the kind, but merely touching her and whispering in secret some spell over her, at once woke up the maiden from her seeming death; and the girl spoke out loud, and returned to her father's house, just as Alcestis did when she was brought back to life by Hercules. And the relations of the maiden wanted to present him with the sum of 150,000 sesterces, but he said he would freely present the money to the young lady by way of a dowry. Now whether he detected some spark of life in her, which those who were nursing her had not noticed,—for it is said that although it was raining at the time, a vapour went up from her face—or whether life was really extinct, and he restored it by the warmth of his touch, is a mysterious problem which neither I myself nor those who were present could decide. (Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 4.45)6
Once, when [Asclepiades the physician] returned to the city from his country house, he saw a great funeral pile in the outskirts of the town, and around it a vast multitude, who had followed the funeral, all in great grief and soiled garments. He went up to the spot, as is the nature of the human mind, that he might know who it was, since no one answered his enquiries. Or, rather, he went that he might notice something in the deceased by means of his art. At all events, he took away death from that man who was stretched on the bier and nearly consigned to the tomb. The unfortunate man's body was already bedewed with perfumes, and his face was anointed with odorous ointment. Having carefully contemplated the man thus anointed and made ready for the funeral banquet, he noticed in him certain signs, handled the body again and again, and found life latent in it. Instantly he cried out that the man was alive, that they should take away the torches, put out the fire, pull down the pile, and carry back the funeral banquet from the tomb to the table. Meanwhile, a murmur arose, some saying that the physician should be believed, others making a mock of medicine. Finally, against the will of all the relations, whether it was that they were disappointed of the inheritance, or that they did not believe him, Asclepiades, with great difficulty, obtained a brief respite for the defunct, and so, in the end, he took him back to his house, snatched from the hands of the undertakers, and as it were from the infernal regions, and immediately revived his spirits, and called forth, by some medicine, the vital breath that was lurking in the recesses of his body. (Apuleius, Florida 14)7
“I gave him no poison, but a soothing drink of mandragora, which is of such force that it will cause any man to sleep as though he were dead…. But if it be so that the child hath received the drink as I tempered it with mine own hands, he is yet alive and doth but rest and sleep, and after his sleep he shall return to life again….” The opinion of this ancient physician was found good, and every man had a desire to go to the sepulchre where the child was laid: there was none of the justices, none of any reputation of the town, nor any indeed of the common people, but went to see this strange sight. Amongst them all the father of the child removed with his own hands the cover of the coffin and found his son rising up after his death and soporiferous sleep: and when he beheld him as one risen from the dead he embraced him in his arms and he could speak never a word for his present gladness, but presented him before the people with great joy and consolation, and as he was wrapped and bound in the clothes of his grave, so he brought him before the judges. (Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 44)8
So saying, he ordered that a pyre be constructed immediately. But while the pyre was being carefully and expertly constructed and assembled, a medical student of youthful appearance but mature judgment arrived. When he saw the corpse of the girl being placed on the pyre, he looked at his teacher and said, “What is the cause of this recent unexplained death?” The teacher said: “Your arrival is timely; the situation requires your presence. Take a jar of unguent and pour it over the body of the girl to satisfy the last rites.” The young man took a jar of unguent, went to the girl's bier, pulled aside the clothing from the upper part of her body, poured out the unguent, ran his suspicious hands over all her limbs, and detected quiescent warmth in her chest cavity. The young man was astounded to realize that the girl was only apparently dead. He touched her veins to check for signs of movement and closely examined her nostrils for signs of breathing; he put his lips to her lips, and, detecting signs of life in the form of slight breathing that, as it were, was struggling against false death, he said, “Apply heat at four points.” When he had had this done, he began to massage her lightly, and the blood that had coagulated began to flow because of the anointing.
When the young man saw this, he ran to his teacher and said: “Doctor, the girl you think is dead is alive. To convince you, I will clear up her obstructed breathing.” With some assistance, he took the girl to his bedroom, placed her on his bed, opened her clothing, warmed oil, moistened a woolen compress with it, and placed the compress on the upper part of the girl's body. Her blood, which had congealed because of severe cold, began to flow once heat was applied, and her previously obstructed breathing began to infiltrate to her innermost organs. With the clearing up of her veins, the girl opened her eyes, recovered her breath, and said in a soft, indistinct voice, “Please, doctor, do not touch me in any other way than it is proper to touch the wife of a king and the daughter of a king.”
When the young man realized he had discovered with his skill what his teacher had failed to observe, he hurried joyfully to his teacher and said, “Come, teacher, and witness your student's skill.” The teacher, on entering the bedroom, saw that the girl he thought was dead was alive and said to his student, “I commend your medical knowledge, I praise your skill, and I admire your care. But I don't want you to be deprived of the rewards of your medical expertise; take as your payment the money that accompanied the girl.” And he gave him ten thousand gold sesterces and prescribed for the girl a nourishing diet and a regimen of fomentations. (The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre)9
In all these tales what the hero does is to save someone from premature burial. The victims were believed dead and were about to be disposed of. Luckily, the hero detected some obscure sign of life and prevented a real death. Suddenly we have to take a second look at Mark 5:39: “Why do you make a tumult and wail? The child is not dead but sleeping.” It starts looking like Mark was depicting Jesus as rescuing the girl from waking up in a coffin. I don't mean Mark hyped up the story to make it into a resurrection; rather, he did not mean for us to read it as a resurrection. In the story of the widow's son, it is a bit less clear whether the lad is supposed to be truly dead, but perhaps he is not, since the story seems to be a rewrite of 1 Kings 17:8–24, the story of Elijah raising up the only son of a poor widow. Like Elijah (1 Kings 17:10), Jesus encounters the widow “at the gate of the city” (though archaeology shows that Nain, now called the village of Ain, did not have a city gate). And the story ends the same way: Elijah, in 1 Kings 17:23, raises the boy, and then “he gave him to his mother,” just as in Luke 7:15.10 And in verses 21–22 we read that Elijah performed something like artificial respiration to bring the lad back to consciousness, so this one may not have been intended as an actual resurrection either. Why the pantomime? Why not just speak a divine command if you were miraculously restoring life to a genuine corpse?
O’Reilly and Dugard again use gospel characters as their ventriloquist dummies so they can continue to claim they do not actually say Jesus performed miracles. “Witnesses [not just rumor mongers] say he is performing miracles once again. In one startling account out of the town of Bethany, a man named Lazarus came back from the dead. And Lazarus was not recently deceased. He was four days dead and already laid in the tomb when Jesus is said to have healed him before a great crowd” (pp. 175–76). Is said to have healed him, huh? This is like the scene in the 1939 movie The Son of Frankenstein, in which the villain Ygor tells Baron Wolf von Frankenstein why he was hanged: “I stole bodies…they said.”11 Okay, I'm glad we got that cleared up. “Lazarus's body already reeked of decomposition when Jesus ordered that the stone covering the tomb entrance be rolled away” (p. 176). Or so they assumed. I have to wonder if the original story, before John got hold of it, was yet another of these tales of rescuing a comatose person from premature burial.12 Notice that, in John 11:11, having received the news of Lazarus’ illness, Jesus tells the disciples, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of sleep.” By the time they reach Bethany, Lazarus has been entombed. Jesus, as O’Reilly says, orders the removal of the stone. Martha protests, “Lord, by this time there will an odor, for he has been dead four days” (John 11:39). But suppose that he was simply comatose. They only assume he was decomposing.13 Suppose that, as in these other stories, Jesus somehow knows the man is “not dead but sleeping.” No stench. And Jesus rouses him. On this reading, John has done to the story what Mark did not do to the story of Jairus’ daughter: he has heightened the miraculous element by adding this brief exchange between Jesus and the disciples. “‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.’ Now Jesus has spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead’” (John 11:12–14).
But there is probably a still earlier version of the story in Luke 16:19–31, the story of, ahem, Lazarus and the rich man. In this well-known parable, Lazarus is a destitute beggar lying in the gutter right outside the palatial estate of an unnamed rich man, who takes no notice of him at all. Poor Lazarus would be thrilled to get the scraps that fall from the rich man's banqueting table, but he doesn't. Not surprisingly, he soon expires, only to awaken to the welcoming embrace of Father Abraham in Paradise. Not long after, the rich man dies (choking on an “imperialist tidbit,” perhaps?14). He is awakened by the smell of his own charring flesh, down in the pit of Hades. Calling out to Abraham across the great cosmic chasm, the rich wretch begs Father Abraham to send Lazarus to him with a wet finger for him to lick. Tough luck, replies the glorified patriarch. No mercy missions allowed. The rich man then asks if Lazarus might be permitted to go haunt his brothers, à la Jacob Marley, to warn them away from this disastrous destiny. Abe is honest with him: scripture ought to be sufficient to tell them how to avoid hell. But the rich man says they'll never heed what the Bible says. “No, Father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent” (Luke 16:30). But Abraham tells him he is kidding himself; Lazarus stays where he is.
Hmmm…in Luke, a character named Lazarus kicks the bucket, and the option is raised that he might return from the dead to provoke repentance, but the option is ignored, and nada. In John, a character named Lazarus actually does rise, causing some to repent and believe in Jesus (John 11:45), while others still do not get the message and are only reinforced in their opposition to Jesus. Coincidence? Which is more probable (and remember, probability is the historian's stock-in-trade): that one man raised another from the dead by shouting into his tomb, or that a man rewrote a parable into a miracle?
There is much beneath the surface here, in depths where O’Reilly and Dugard do not care to delve. They pretend to be deep divers, but they are only water-skiing.
PROFESSING PROPHECY
Is it a purely historical work or a religious one that flatly informs us that “Jesus has led a life that is a continual fulfillment of Jewish [i.e., biblical] prophecy” (p. 176)? “In order, these prophecies are Psalms 27:12 and 35:11; Micah 5:1; Isaiah 50:6; Psalms 22:18; Psalms 22:16, Zechariah 12:10, and Deuteronomy 21:23; Numbers 9:12, Psalms 34:20, and Exodus 12:46; and [a second time?] Zechariah 12:10” (p. 177). Nowhere is O’Reilly and Dugard's distortion of scripture more flagrant than here. Nowhere is it clearer that they intend to set forth orthodox Christian doctrine as if it were sober history. I do not mean to accuse them of duplicity; it is almost worse than that. I have to think they don't know the difference between the two. Certainly they have not given so much as a fleeting thought to the original context of any of the Old Testament texts they cite. Let's take them one by one.
Psalm 27:12 reads as follows: “Give me not up to the will of my adversaries; for false witnesses have risen against me, and they breathe out violence.” This is not a prophecy of anything, much less of Jesus. Many of the Psalms (hymns sung in the Temple) are what scholars call “individual laments,” prayers in musical form for people to sing (or more likely to pay Levitical singers to sing on their behalf) in a time of crisis.15 Since they were for anybody and everybody, the nature of their predicaments is not specified in detail. Others are written for the reigning king of Judah, whoever that may be at a given time.16 This one seems to be one of the latter, and the occasion envisioned seems to be the eve of warfare. The king is in distress (as Saul is in 1 Samuel 28:4–5) and calls on God to grant him triumph on the morrow, not to let him fall into the hands of his adversaries who threaten him (cf. Ps. 27:12’s “they breathe out violence” with Acts 9:1, “But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,” etc.) and slander him so as to justify their military actions. What on earth do O’Reilly and Dugard see here that pertains to Jesus? The mere fact that there were false witnesses at his trial? If that counts as “prophetic fulfillment,” there are loads of Messiahs in every courtroom.
Psalm 35:11 (“Malicious witnesses rise up; they ask me of things that I know not.”) looks like another royal psalm for the same sort of occasion, though some scholars interpret it as a lament psalm on behalf of anyone being sued or threatened by personal or business rivals. But in any case, this text is not a prediction of anything. Are O’Reilly and Dugard reading a different Bible than I am? I daresay they are hoping none of their readers are planning to look up these passages.
Micah 5:1 (“Now you are walled about with a wall; siege is laid against us; with a rod they strike upon the cheek the king of Israel.”) also sketches a scene of national and royal emergency. The capital is surrounded by siege engines, and the king has been captured and beaten (cf. King Zedekiah's treatment in 2 Kings 25:6–7). Of course, our authors are thinking of Jesus getting cruelly slapped and beaten by soldiers and guards in Mark 14:65 and 15:18–19, but, again, how is Micah, who is explicitly talking about events in his own day, predicting anything about Jesus? What does the one have to do with the other? Just because the same things happened to Jesus? That's like saying a newspaper report about Lincoln's assassination is a prophecy of Kennedy's.
Isaiah 50:6 says, “I gave my back to the smiters and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting.” This is all in the past tense, and it recounts something that happened to the speaker. This not even as much of a prophecy as Janice Dean's FOX News weather forecasts. To claim this for a prophecy fulfilled in the life of Jesus is like saying that some poor guy's diary entry from decades ago mentioning his getting audited by the IRS is a prediction of when the same thing happened to me. If I have to get a wisdom tooth extracted, is a report of someone undergoing the same procedure last week a prophecy of my surgery?
Psalm 22 is not framed as a prediction of anything either. It is another individual lament psalm. But I will wait till chapter 12, which discusses the crucifixion, to discuss that one.
Zechariah 12:10 says, “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that, when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly for him, as one weeps for a first-born.” This one is set in a context of victorious battle in which a besieged Jerusalem turns the tables on the invading troops, utterly steamrolling them. The passage itself is not clear in its reference, but the point would seem to be that, having triumphed, the victors turn and mourn for the victims of their triumph, weeping at their loss. But if one makes it some sort of a prediction of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ (as in John 19:37), one does so at the cost of making the Zechariah text into complete nonsense. What, pray tell, does the scenario just described possibly have to do with the circumstances of Jesus’ execution and the general aftermath? Did all Jerusalem mourn his passing? Did Jesus die in the course of a Judean victory over pagan armies? No, with the whole Christian tradition, O’Reilly and Dugard have no scruples about plucking the verse out of its historical and literary context.
Deuteronomy 21:22–23 is no prophecy but rather a clear-cut regulation applying to its own day and in perpetuity. “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but you shall bury him on the same day, for a hanged man is accursed by God; you shall not defile your land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance.” Joshua 10:26–27 records an instance of the application of this law. The Israelite practice was not to kill by crucifixion but rather to display the already dead bodies, hanging them on a tree for all to see and take a lesson. The gospels have Jesus crucified by the Romans, who did suspend the living from trees or crosses, leaving them to die from exposure or asphyxiation. But Jews insisted on at least removing the bodies as their own ancient law required. So in what sense was Deuteronomy 21:23 a prediction of Jesus? It was simply the rule that his executioners followed in disposing of his body. Were all the other men the Romans crucified “predicted” by this verse, too?
Numbers 9:12 deals with the disposal of the Passover lamb each year: “They shall leave none of it until the morning, nor break a bone of it; according to all the statute for the Passover they shall keep it.” The same rule occurs in Exodus 12:46, “In one house shall it be eaten; you shall not carry forth any of the flesh outside the house; and you shall not break a bone of it.” Prediction of anything at all? No. Regulation still observed in Jesus’ day? Sure. But that's all. O’Reilly and Dugard are thinking of John 19:31–36, where the evangelist tells us that the Roman soldiers had to remove the bodies of the crucified criminal, before sundown in consideration of Jewish Sabbath customs. Crucifixion usually took days to kill its victims, so the Romans had to hurry the Grim Reaper. They broke the legs of Jesus’ two neighbors so they could no longer hoist up their chests to inhale. They died quickly. But Jesus had already expired, so there was no need to break his legs. Nor was this an accident. “For these things took place that the scripture might be fulfilled, ‘Not a bone of him shall be broken’” (John 19:36). John regards Jesus as the Passover lamb (John 1:29), so it makes sense that he should apply the Numbers passage to Jesus, but even that does not make a regulation into a prediction.
Psalm 34:20 occurs in the middle of an affirmation of God's protection of his favorites: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous; but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” Is this a prophecy of anyone? Jesus or Joe Schmo? It is something of a promise made to all the righteous, so presumably it would apply to Jesus, a pretty righteous guy. But that's just not the same thing. Why do O’Reilly and Dugard include Numbers 9:12, Exodus 12:46, and Psalm 34:20? Simply because no one knows which of the three passages John intended as the prophecy of Jesus not having his legs broken. Not one of them makes any sense as a prediction of it, though. Why do our authors call these rag-tag scraps of Old Testament texts predictions of Jesus?
They are following the practice of the New Testament writers and those of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of whom meant something quite different by “fulfilled prophecy” than we do. Even if we do not believe in such things, we understand prophetic fulfillment to mean a prediction that so-and-so event is going to happen, as when psychic Jeane Dixon predicted the assassination of President Kennedy. But that is not what is going on in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the gospels. These ancient authors operated according to the pesher (“puzzle solution”) technique, whereby one sniffed out (by the use of certain key words important to one's sect's theology) esoteric meanings supposedly hidden in scripture.17 They knew that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and their colleagues had issued predictions about the future, things their contemporaries would sooner or later witness (national victory or defeat, famines, exiles, etc.), but these things had long since come to pass. Did that mean the scriptures containing those predictions were dead letters, museum relics with no further relevance? They couldn't believe that. Scripture must continue to speak. It had fresh revelations to impart if only one knew how to listen. These new messages were not to be found by a literal, straightforward reading of the old texts. Since the scriptures had been composed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and by no mere human creativity, there must be deeper levels of meaning.
Thus when Matthew says that the Holy Family taking refuge in Egypt was the fulfillment of Hosea 1:1, “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” quoted in Matthew 2:15, he knew darn well that this was not what the prophet Hosea had in mind. No, as any fool can see, Hosea chapter 11 is all about the Exodus of Israel, God's beloved child, and how the people have been disobedient ever since that time. Nothing about any Messiah. Certainly nothing about Jesus Christ. Likewise, Matthew knew as well as modern scholars do that Isaiah 7:14, quoted in Matthew 1:23, is talking about the birth of a child, likely Isaiah's own son, whose name would remind the wavering people that “God is with us” and will defeat our pagan adversaries. And so he had. But had God nothing else to say through this sacred text? Sure he did, and Matthew saw in the passage an esoteric prediction of Jesus’ conception.
The ancient writers were not appealing to these alleged prophecies in the manner of modern apologists. They did not claim that an unbeliever ought to be convinced of Christianity by these amazing predictions coming to pass.18 No, these esoteric prophecies were visible only to the eye of faith. One had to be in the fold already for this hindsight hermeneutic to make any sense. One viewed the texts through new lenses provided by Christian faith. Thus no one could have known these prophecies were prophecies until after the secretly predicted events had occurred. Since the meanings they sought were esoteric ones, it did not matter whether the Christian reading made any sense in the original context. What they were doing was much like the Kabbalistic technique of Gematria,19 even like the modern “Bible Code” manner of reading the scriptures.
This is clearly the approach taken by O’Reilly and Dugard. But this approach is completely out of place in a book that purports to abstain from theology and just to tell the history of Jesus. You just can't try to palm off as secular history a method of interpretation that is only supposed to make sense from a particular religious perspective. The authors of Killing Jesus: A History see themselves as intrepid explorers in search of truth about the past, but in their desperate wanderings they are satisfied with a mere mirage, and, tragically, they don't know the difference between the two.