You're Killing Me -- a review of Bill O'Reilly's "Killing Jesus"

 

You have to admire Bill O'Reilly for his storytelling skills. He can certainly weave a compelling tale. It's a shame that many of his facts are so wrong.

 

"Killing Jesus" lays out the "history" of Jesus of Nazareth. It's a history long on religious certainty and short on religious scholarship. Bill seems to have relied more on tales he learned from the nuns in parochial school than on the work of experts in the field. He has Matthew writing his gospel first, between 50 and 70 AD, when scholars have Mark writing first around 70 and Matthew around 85. He is certain that Jesus was born in 6BC (to make him fit Luke's chronology). He has no doubts than John the Galilean fisherman was the same man who penned the gospel of John and the Revelation, when that is extremely doubtful. Without question, and based on no citations, this John died when he was 94. Not 93, 89 or 96. Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Apostle Andrew was lively. Herod was debauched.

 

Bill makes the rookie error of trying to combine al the gospels into one story, which violates the different stories they each tell. Seeing that John's Jesus cleanses the Temple at the beginning of his ministry while the Synoptics have this event at the end, Bill has him cleanse it twice, even though John likely moved the event in order to signal the inaugurating of Jesus's mission. O'Reilly's treatment of Jesus's countrymen leans toward the anti-Semitic. The priests were extorters of the people. The moneychangers were greedy and conniving. The Pharisees were priggishly fastidious and power-hungry. The high priest (who undoubtedly spoke Greek!) was little more than a pro-Roman lackey. O'Reilly's disdain for the sacrificial aspects of the Temple was almost palpable. Not to mention repeating the near-slander about the prophecies that Jesus "fulfilled," ignored by the very people supposedly on the lookout for them. News flash, Bill: the Jews of the first century were definitively not looking for a suffering, crucified Messiah.

 

"Killing Jesus" reads much more like a treatment for a movie. It's long on infusing the gospel's bare narratives with  movement and actions -- like the dove at Jesus's baptism landing on his shoulder, or the crowds witnessing this event falling to their knees. O'Reilly doesn't bother to distinguish Jesus's titles of Messiah, Son of Man and Son of God, taking the gospels as straight history when they use them. You'll get no clues about Jesus's eschatological understanding of the Kingdom of God. It's such a shame that Bill obviously spent no times reading some of the great teachers about Jesus's life, even the Catholic ones like Father Raymond Brown, preferring to pass on tarted up (and bloodied up) stories of Jesus's life that,  while striking and memorable, are unhistorical.

 

If you have not read about Jesus since Sunday school, you might pick up a few tidbits. Roman rule was brutal. Jesus and his father Joseph may well have worked in Sepphoris, the Hellenized town near Nazareth. But the few tidbits are overwhelmed by an enormous number of errors and misunderstandings -- literally on every page. The audio version even shows how little O'Reilly paid attention to the pronunciations of biblical names -- Antipas, Eleazar and Capernaum.

 

On the whole, "Killing Jesus" is less about the history of a first century Jewish prophet than about Bill O'Reilly cashing on his name-recognition and supposed "tell-it-like it is" approach. Better not to read it, than to have to unlearn practically everything in it.