VERSUS THE PINHEADS
In a couple of chapters of Killing Jesus, O’Reilly and Dugard adoringly portray their hero Jesus (oh, I'm sorry—for a second there I forgot Killing Jesus is a purely factual piece of sober, historical repor-tazh) as a great intellectual, easily making fools of the best point men in the Judaism of his day. We might as well be hearing the Hosannas in passages like these: “Word of Jesus's intellectual victory spreads through the Temple courts” (p. 203). “The brilliance of Jesus's words will last throughout the ages” (p. 204). “Jesus has now defeated the sharpest minds in the Temple” (p. 205). Alas, such superlatives are never going to be showered upon Killing Jesus.
In the present chapter I propose to survey the issues over which O’Reilly and Dugard have Jesus lock horns with Jewish leaders, with a view to assessing how fairly the gospels depict the latter, as well as how impressive Jesus’ reasoning is. And I want to give some attention to a couple of the disputes O’Reilly and Dugard skip, looking at why they did so.
These gospel episodes are variously classified by scholars1 as “pronouncement stories” and “controversy stories.”2 The main difference is what one imagines was the original reason for telling (or creating) them. Did they function to define the Christian position on issues like fasting, almsgiving, and divorce? And if so, do they reflect debates between Christians and non-Christian Jews in the early days when the two faith communities were drifting apart? Many scholars think so.3 Others, pointing out that a bottom-line pronouncement by Jesus was not likely to carry much weight with anyone who did not already believe in his divine authority, suggest that these anecdotes addressed issues of controversy between Christians.4 Others5 believe that the substance, at least in some or most of them, was not really the point, that the tales were told pretty much as O’Reilly and Dugard tell them: to delight in the spectacle of “our guy” whipping the behinds of his opponents in public. “No man ever spoke like this man” (John 7:46). In these cases, it is not only the subject matter but also quite possibly the cogency of Jesus’ reasoning that is secondary. Burton Mack comments: “If one…tried to assess the persuasive power of the pronouncements from the objectors’ points of view, Jesus’ responses did not appear all that enlightening.”6 How cogent are Jesus’ replies? And is he really talking to Jewish leaders as known to history?
HEALING ON THE SABBATH
In Mark 3:1–6 some Pharisees know Jesus’ habits well enough to suspect he will heal a man's withered hand on the Sabbath, in the synagogue, which he does. This constitutes a violation of the holy day of inactivity. Was this the view of the Pharisees? It doesn't seem so. What the Sabbath law forbade was professional physicians working for payment on the Sabbath. Explicit exception is made (in the Mishnah, the compilation of rabbinical traditions) for “healing by word,” that is, divine healing such as Jesus practiced. So the Pharisees are portrayed as fictional straw men. It looks like the gospel writers are giving Jesus easy wins against opponents who did not actually exist.7
Not only that, but the response of Jesus seems to assume that it was an urgent, life-or-death case: “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But this man is only handicapped. There is no necessity to heal him on the spot. Even if there had been, no one forbade healing on the Sabbath in a case like that. And who is proposing “to do evil” on the Sabbath? (O’Reilly and Dugard rewrite Jesus’ lines to “It is always lawful to do good on the Sabbath,” presumably in order to make Jesus seem to have avoided this absurdity. And why would it be absurd? Because Jesus is shown blatantly committing the Bifurcation fallacy. “Well, if I have to decide whether healing on the Sabbath is doing good or doing evil, then I guess it's good.” Jesus wins. But does he?
Luke 13:14 has a similar case. During the synagogue service, Jesus spots a woman who has suffered with a bent spine for all of eighteen years. Jesus heals her. “But the ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the people, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be healed, and not on the sabbath day.’ Then the Lord answered him, ‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger, and lead it away to water it?’” Well, we don't know if they did or not. More than likely, strict Sabbatarians would have provided a double portion of food and water for their animals before the Sabbath arrived. In any event, the cases are not analogous, since neglect of one's livestock would be inflicting suffering and should be avoided, while making the woman “bound by Satan for eighteen years” wait one more day is a minor inconvenience. (For the analogy to be valid, Jesus should have told Satan to give the old lady a day off.) And this takes us back to the synagogue ruler's rebuke. Isn't he right? Why make an exception if there's no emergency? Only for convenience? The fact that Luke has the crowd delighted that Jesus has put the elites in their place doesn't make Jesus right, as anyone who has heard the applause for each side's favorite candidate in a debate knows perfectly well.
Another one awaits us in John 5:1–18ff. Jesus heals a lame man on the Sabbath. “The Jews persecuted Jesus because he did this on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them. ‘My Father is working still, and I am working.’ This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also called God his Father, making himself equal to God” (verses 16–18). Is that what John's Jesus meant? I would say so, though with a bit of hesitation, since sometimes John seems to be telling us that Jesus’ critics had misunderstood what he said. If he was pulling rank, though, we do not have an argument at all, only an assertion of divine prerogatives that wasn't winning Jesus any friends in this crowd. But perhaps he is offering a theological argument that would have legitimatized anyone working on the Sabbath. We know some rabbis traded learned opinions on whether or not the Almighty really rested from his work on the seventh day (Gen. 2:2–3). What about Divine Providence? Wasn't God maintaining creation pretty much nonstop every day since he made it? Some said yes, he was. Jesus appears to share that opinion. If the rabbis were trying to say that God is exempt from the Sabbath rest commandment, and Jesus is appealing to that, then he is saying he has the same exemption, thus making himself equal to God. But if he means to say everyone is entitled to follow God's precedent, then he is in effect repudiating the Sabbath commandment. And thus he is removing himself from the game of legal deliberations. And that is not exactly winning the argument.
There is more of a legal, scriptural argument in play elsewhere in John 7:22–23, where the same healing seems to be in view. Jesus defends himself: “Moses gave you circumcision…and you circumcise a man upon the Sabbath. If on the Sabbath a man receives circumcision, so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made a man's whole body well?” Jesus is shown employing the qal wahomer type of argument familiar from rabbinical arguments, reasoning that the same principle that applies in a lesser case mentioned in scripture must also apply to a more important matter that scripture does not explicitly mention.8 If you can circumcise a baby boy's penis even though it is the Sabbath, how can it be wrong to heal a whole body on the Sabbath? But no one should accept this reasoning for the simple reason that the Torah mandates that a baby boy must be circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, whenever in a week it happens to fall. Thus the circumcision commandment supersedes the Sabbath commandment. That was no news to anyone. But there is no requirement that a chronically sick man, in no acute danger, must be healed on any particular day. It doesn't work.
Jesus comes out a bit better in a Sabbath controversy in Mark 2:23–28.
One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck ears of grain. And the Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of man is lord even of the Sabbath.”
So human need takes precedence over Sabbath observance. And Jesus buttresses his reasoning with an apt scripture precedent. The only trouble is that all the ancient rabbis on record share the opinion ascribed to Jesus here. In the Mishnah we read the same thing several times: “The Sabbath is delivered unto you; you are not delivered unto it.”9 So it looks again as if Jesus’ opponents are cardboard cut-outs, caricatures of the real thing.
The appended comment is perhaps originally a parallel saying from a different occasion: “So the Son of man is lord even of the Sabbath.” In a Jewish context it would seem to mean that the dominion over the whole earth granted human beings in Genesis 1:26 extends even to the Sabbath, hence the discretion exercised by the scribes to decide how strictly or loosely it is to be observed. “Son of man” originally meant only “humanity,” as in Psalm 8:4 and Ezekiel 25:2, and others.
If, however, Mark intended “Son of man” in a Christian sense as a Messianic title for Jesus, then we would have another case of Jesus simply pulling rank, which is no argument at all. And that would seem to make the preceding scriptural argument beside the point. But Morna D. Hooker notes that David was not setting aside the Sabbath and that the disciples are criticized, not for eating, as David did, but for plucking the grain.10 She thinks that Mark means the David precedent to prepare the way for Jesus, the Messianic heir of David, being above the law. Again, this would cut no ice with the scribes whom Jesus is depicted as debating.
BY WHAT AUTHORITY?
O’Reilly and Dugard make Mark 11:27–33 a prime case for Jesus’ intellectual superiority over his foes (p. 203). The Temple officials demand to know what right Jesus has to do what he does in the Temple. Who gave him permission? Jesus answers a question with a question: “Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Was the baptism of John from heaven or from men?” They go into a huddle and decide that any answer they give will be wrong. If they say John had no divine authorization, they take a risk of reprisals from John's fans. If they admit John acted under orders from God, then Jesus will demand to know why they boycotted him. So they say the jury is still out on the matter. Jesus replies, “[Then] neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.” Is he just stonewalling? “If you won't be straight with me, then I won't be straight with you.” Could be. But it seems more likely he means that they can answer their own question. If they think John was a false prophet, as they no doubt do, then they must think Jesus is just as much a charlatan. If they think John was the genuine article, then Jesus is, too. As Joachim Jeremias suggested, the silent premise here seems to be that Jesus is claiming a kind of “apostolic succession” from John and to have inherited his legitimacy.11 But that's not much of an argument, either. Early Christians believed that the heretics Simon Magus and Dositheus the Samaritan were disciples of John, too. Were they sent from God? Was Judas Iscariot divinely ordained because Jesus commissioned him as a disciple?
IHS AND IRS
The question put to Jesus in Mark 12:13–17 is said to be a pretext for getting Jesus to say something incriminating—or discrediting. In any case, Jesus’ reply is no rhetorical ploy or evasion but shows genuine insight into the issue.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?”…[Jesus replied:] “Bring me a [denarius], and let me look at it.” And they brought one. And he said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said “Caesar's.” Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” And they were amazed at him.
As well they might be. It is a brilliant answer. The issue was an important one. In the year 6 CE, the formerly and formally independent kingdom of Judea, ruled by Herod the Great and his son Archelaus, became officially a Roman province. Everyone knew Judea had been a client state, even a puppet state, dependent on Rome, but, as it had been technically independent, Judea had paid no taxes to Rome. Eventually Rome decided to end the legal fiction. To Rome, this might have seemed a mere adjustment on paper, but not to the Jews. The loss of even nominal independence placed them back under pagan rule, as their ancestors had endured for centuries. Some Jews believed that God was their only proper king and that therefore paying tribute to any mortal king not ruling under the aegis of the Jewish deity amounted to a compromise with idolatry. They thought of paying taxes to Caesar much the same as later Christians regarded the requirement to offer a pinch of incense in sacrifice to the divine Caesar. Just a pledge of allegiance in Rome's eyes, idolatry in the eyes of Christians who risked life and limb refusing to do it. It was such opposition that prompted Judas of Galilee to raise up a Jewish revolt against Rome in 6 CE. Decades later, the issue continued to fester: by paying Roman taxes, were Jews receiving the mark of the Beast?
This is why the question put to Jesus was a particularly loaded one. And it need not have been a trick question. But the answer could be controversial, that's for sure. If Jesus said not to pay, this put him in sympathy with seditionists. If he said the opposite, some would consider him, so to speak, a JINO (Jew in name only). So what was so special about Jesus’ reply? O’Reilly and Dugard do not tell us. They just quote it and praise it. One wonders what they think he meant. Most Christians seem to think it means separation of church and state, but I think that is an application of Jesus’ answer to a modern issue (and as such, it is a good and fair one).
Jesus seems to be saying that even devout, especially nationalistic, Jews need have no qualms of conscience about giving Caesar's coins back to him if he wants them. It entails no compromise, since this money, bearing “graven images” (Exod. 20:4), is “filthy lucre” (1 Peter 5:2), unclean by Jewish standards. That's why there were exchange tables in the Temple. Roman denarii could not be used to purchase sacrificial animals in the Temple or to pay one's annual Temple dues. They had to be traded in for good Jewish and Tyrian coins that lacked “idolatrous” images and therefore could be “rendered to God” (Mark 12:17). So what religious compromise could there possibly be in giving Caesar's stinking coins back to him? Bravo.
ONE RULE TO RULE THEM ALL
O’Reilly and Dugard think that the request for Jesus to choose the greatest commandment of the Torah (Mark 12:28–34) was another trick question. One might argue that such a question was near-blasphemous. If all the Commandments were ordained by God, how could any of them be less than ultimately important? “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ said also, ‘Do not kill.’ If you do not commit adultery but do kill, you have become a transgressor of the law” (James 2:10–11). But in fact, the question was a common one. The great first-century BCE rabbi Hillel had said that the entire Torah was summed up in the so-called Silver Rule, “What you do not want done to you, do not do to another.” Rabbis have historically ranked service to one's fellow man above the obligations of worship. You should choose good deeds over worship if you had to choose, though in fact you don't.12 Good works may not be sufficient to please God, but they are necessary. So it was a real and fair question. Jesus names the Shema, the great creed of Israel, as Commandment number one: “Hear, O Israel. The Lord your God is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (loosely quoting Deuteronomy 6:4). But he cannot leave it at that. A close second, equally important in its own way, is “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18).
O’Reilly and Dugard tell us it is a trick question, but Mark has a scribe congratulate Jesus on the wisdom of his answer (Mark 12:32–34). Our authors seem to think that only the Ten Commandments were ascribed to Moses. “Under the teachings of the Pharisees, there are 613 religious statutes” (p. 205). No, all these are given in the Torah of Moses, the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). O’Reilly and Dugard have somehow confused the 613 Commandments of the Torah with the centuries-later Traditions of the Elders (which they mention on p. 157).
DIVORCE IS DIVORCE, OF COURSE, OF COURSE
We come across what at first looks like another piece of legitimate halakhic13 dialogue in Mark 10:2–9, though on closer inspection it appears it has been skewed a bit by being placed in a later Christian context.
And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.” But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ [and] ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”
We know that the Pharisees were debating the matter of divorce. But they did not question whether divorce was permitted by the Law of Moses. It is impossible to imagine them even asking the question they are depicted asking here. The contemporary debate was over what constituted adequate grounds for divorce. The school of Hillel took a liberal perspective: a husband might send his wife packing for so trivial an offense as burning supper. The rival school of Shammai, by contrast, insisted that there had to be some sexual irregularity, mainly adultery. The evangelist Matthew, himself a Jewish scribe (Matt. 13:52), had a more secure grasp of scribal thought and so corrects Mark at this point. He has the Pharisees ask Jesus, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” (Matt. 19:3). They are in effect asking Jesus if he agrees with Hillel's more liberal stance.
Jesus’ reply is quite interesting. He grants that Deuteronomy allows for divorce, so it is certainly legitimated in the Torah, but that doesn't make it God's will. For that, one needs to turn some pages and look at the Genesis creation account, which shows God's original blueprint for human life. And there one finds that God has united husband and wife, virtually organically, and that it is not the prerogative of mere mortals to surgically separate these “conjoined twins.” Does Genesis, then, contradict Deuteronomy? No, because the two texts are not on the same level. Genesis gives us God's original intent, his perfect will, while Deuteronomy is a concession offered in view of human stubbornness.14 (We see an analogous distinction in 1 Corinthians 7:6.) Some marriages, obviously, just do not work out in the real world, and maybe that is due to human sin, but that sin and its consequent abuses are only going to get worse if the couple is imprisoned in the toxic relationship. As Tony Soprano would say, “Whadda y’gonna do?”
This does not really sound like a legal opinion, at least not until we get to the third-person imperative in the concluding sentence: “let not man put asunder.” Without that, it sounds like a sadly wise comment on an unavoidable state of affairs. After all, we are given no hint that Jesus thinks the human heart has become less hard since Moses. So it seems odd that he would go on to reject divorce as an option, even as the lesser of two evils in a fallen world. We may suspect that someone has made this observation into a law for Christians.15
We also detect a heightening of Christology in Jesus’ reference to Moses having given “you” the divorce commandment, not “us.” He is either speaking as a non-Jew or as a divine being. Or as the Marcionite Jesus, the son of a different God than the one who gave the Law to Moses. Forgive a momentary digression, but it will be useful to explain this just a bit. Marcion of Pontus,16 the first great Paulinist, read Paul as teaching the existence of two Gods: the Creator and giver of the Law, a righteous but severe judge, and the hitherto-unknown Father of Jesus Christ. He sent Jesus into the world to make it possible for the creatures of the Hebrew God to jump ship and swim over to him, becoming the adopted children of the Father. Marcion's Jesus revealed the existence of his Father and his gracious offer. He died to purchase us from the Hebrew God, like paying for the freeing of a slave. Marcion was an ascetic who discouraged marriage because it only led to the production of new souls trapped in the sinful, fleshy bodies made by the Creator. However, if one were already married, one ought not try to undo the damage by dissolving the marriage, given the hardships involved. Best to wait for freedom from the flesh after death. If the divorce saying attributed to Jesus came originally from Marcionite Christians, this would neatly explain why Jesus says Moses gave “you,” the hapless creatures of the Hebrew God, the divorce commandment as well as why Jesus would forbid divorce: you poor wretches are already in too deep.
There is another such passage that first circulated independently of any gospel text, finally preserved by Christian copyists who recognized it as too good to risk losing and added it to the Gospel of John as John 7:53–8:11,17 the famous story of the woman caught in adultery. Again Jesus is asked an impossible question: “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?” Do they have any reason to suspect Jesus will say, “Verily, I don't give a damn what the law says. I say let her go”? Or “Let her off with forty hours of community service”? It has to be a Christian creation, presupposing that, Christianity having split off from Judaism, all bets are off and we have to rethink everything. “Are we bound to keep the regulations of Judaism? What would Jesus say?” Even so, in Mark's divorce passage, Jesus says, “Moses wrote you the commandment,” referring to Jews, as opposed to Christians.
KINKY RESURRECTION
One of the most fascinating exchanges between Jesus and the Jewish authorities (Mark 12:18–27) pits him against not the Pharisees, the usual gospel whipping boys, but the Sadducees. O’Reilly and Dugard characterize them as some sort of philosophical demythologizers of Judaism, having absorbed too much influence from the Hellenistic world around them.18 This, supposedly, was why they could be said to reject beliefs such as the end-time resurrection of the dead, like Modernist Protestants.19 The Sadducees were the Jerusalem nobility and dominated the Sanhedrin and the Temple priesthood. Their name comes from the word Syndikoi, Greek for “Syndics,” meaning “councilmen.”20 They were probably arch-traditionalists who rejected as theological innovations the doctrines of the Pharisees and the Essenes, who had borrowed a great deal from the Zoroastrian religion of Persia. These beliefs included angelology, a virgin-born end-times Savior, an apocalyptic end to history, the resurrection of the dead, and the idea of an evil anti-God. The Sadducees scoffed at these ideas as foreign corruptions of Judaism, and thus they dubbed the partisans of these notions “Pharisees,” denoting “Parsees,” “Persians,” in other words, Zoroastrians.21 Sadducees viewed the Jewish adoption of the resurrection doctrine as traditionalist Christians regard suggestions that reincarnation be worked into Christian theology.22
So the Sadducees are depicted as posing a hypothetical question to Jesus that they had probably also asked the Pharisees. Given the law of Levirate marriage, if a man dies without an heir, his brother must try to impregnate his widow. If successful, the son would be considered the dead man's son and heir. Well, suppose such a husband dies, and his widow marries her brother-in-law, but he dies, too, without impregnating her. He had a lot of brothers, but, between them, they had a lot of bad luck. She marries each of them, one after the other, but each husband proves sterile and dies. Finally, she's had it and joins them in the grave. When the trumpet sounds on Resurrection Morning and they are all united in a joyous reunion, uh, which one of the brothers is she going to be married to? Judaism tolerated polygyny, usually when a man's original wife proved infertile, but there was no way Jews were allowing polyandry, one woman with a harem of husbands, though some cultures do. If they had, there would have been no problem. But they didn't.
How is Jesus, himself a believer in the doctrine of resurrection, supposed to get out of this one? He does some fast thinking and says that all earthly marriage bonds will be dissolved in the age to come. Sex will be a thing of the past, because inheritance will be a thing of the past because death will be a thing of the past. Not a bad answer. But, as Morton Smith put it, “That the resurrected are not married is not a legal principle, but an ad hoc revelation.”23 Again, we cannot picture anyone not already believing Jesus is a divine revealer taking this bit of “information” seriously. Not even O’Reilly and Dugard make this a win for Jesus, and it is thus no surprise that they skip it.
But it gets worse. Jesus takes the fight to the Sadducees, seeking to prove from scripture that they are wrong about the resurrection. “And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong.’” How's that again? Jesus seems to be resting the whole weight of the resurrection doctrine on the slim reed of a verb tense. Abe, Ike, and Jake were all dead by Moses’ day. But here is God announcing that he is still their God, which Jesus says implies they are still alive and available for him to be their God. Hm.
Obviously this is pretty lame. The present tense only implies that God is the same God that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob once worshipped. And any idiot knows that.
Jesus wasn't the only one to argue this way. The Talmud records a defense of the resurrection belief by quibbling that, because the Hebrew imperfect tense is variously taken as past or future depending on the context, we should really read Exodus 15:1 not as “Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to the Lord,” but as “Moses and the children of Israel will sing this song to the Lord,” in other words, in the distant future of the resurrection.
Apparently this sort of nonsense was enough to convince some people, so maybe it sounded good to some of Jesus’ contemporaries, too. But that hardly entitles us to call Jesus a brilliant dialectician. Some may have thought so, but then some people today take politicians’ cant seriously. I think we can guess why Killing Jesus conspicuously skips this particular bit of Jesus’ “intellectual brilliance.”
Incidentally, why didn't Jesus just appeal to the two Old Testament passages that actually do seem to refer to the end-time resurrection, Daniel 12:2–3 and Isaiah 26:19? Simply because, as traditionalists, the Sadducees did not accept the recent addition of these books to the Hebrew canon. So they were off-limits in a debate like this.
APOCALYPSE NO
Another conspicuous omission, and another easily explained, is Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse in Mark chapter 13 (repeated in rewritten form in Luke 21 and Matthew 24). O’Reilly and Dugard set the stage, having Jesus sit with an inner circle of disciples atop the Mount of Olives. He had startled them earlier by quipping that the impressive architecture of the Temple would soon wind up a thin coating of crushed rubble on the ground. They want to know when. In Mark, they ask, “When will this be?” In reply, Jesus embarks on a lengthy list of calamities leading to the Abomination of Desolation, culminating in the Great Tribulation, the end of the age and the advent of the Son of man. And there is a very definite timetable: “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place” (Mark 13:30). But of all this we read not a word in Killing Jesus. Instead, we read this:
With the disciples sitting at his side, Jesus summarizes his short life. Darkness is falling as he tells his followers to live their lives to the fullest, speaking in parables so that they will comprehend the magnitude of his words. The disciples listen in rapt fascination but grow concerned as Jesus predicts that after his death they, too, will be persecuted and killed. Perhaps to lessen the impact of this, Jesus shares his thoughts on heaven and promises the disciples that God will reveal himself to them and the world. (pp. 206–207)
Well, this is a bunch of gibberish that bears no relation at all to the Olivet Discourse, as it is called, of Mark 13. It seems to reflect, albeit very distantly, the Farewell Discourse at the Last Supper in John's Gospel, but it is really a banal and pedestrian substitute for both gospel passages. O’Reilly and Dugard seem to have discarded the gospel material altogether, though they have nothing of any substance to substitute for it. This passage is an insult to both their readers and the gospels. One can only surmise that they wanted to bypass, really to censor, the monumentally embarrassing prediction of Jesus that the world would end in his own generation. Looked at the calendar lately? The statute of limitations has long ago run out.
Jesus is supposed to be a revealer of hidden realities that our senses could never otherwise know. And here is the single one of them that is subject to verification. He predicted the Second Coming to occur in the next thirty or forty years, so we can verify or falsify that “revelation.” And it simply didn't materialize. So what reason is there to believe any of the other “revelations” he bequeathed us? It is like Edgar Cayce predicting that Atlantis would rise from the ocean in 1971. No sign of it. Tough to get around that. Better to ignore it, eh? That is what Christianity has done for two millennia. And that is surely why O’Reilly and Dugard completely omit any mention of these difficulties. Is this impartial history or faith propaganda? We report, you decide.