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Killing History: Jesus In The No-Spin Zone
Killing Jesus, the bestselling blockbuster by Bill O'Reilly, claims to be a purely historical account of the events in the life of Jesus leading up to his crucifixion. New Testament scholar Robert M. Price (a member of the Jesus Seminar) shows how unfounded this claim is in this critical review of O'Reilly's work. In fact, he judges the book to be the number one source of misinformation on Jesus today. Ignoring over one hundred years of New Testament scholarship, O'Reilly and his coauthor, Martin Dugard, have produced what Price describes as a Christian historical thriller that plays fast and loose with the facts.
Price goes through the key events of Jesus’ later life as described in the gospels and retold in Killing Jesus, painstakingly showing in each case what scholars know and don’t know. Using humor, down-to-earth analogies, and witty sarcasm—not unlike O’Reilly’s own interview style—Price makes it clear that O’Reilly’s book is more historical novel than a work of serious history. By cobbling together the four gospel stories, ignoring the contradictions, and adding plenty of quasi-historical background embellishments, O’Reilly and Dugard have created a good narrative that resonates with a lot of Christians. Entertaining reading this may be, but history it is not.
Killing History provides lay readers with an accessible introduction to New Testament scholarship while showing the many problems in O’Reilly’s book.
Price goes through the key events of Jesus’ later life as described in the gospels and retold in Killing Jesus, painstakingly showing in each case what scholars know and don’t know. Using humor, down-to-earth analogies, and witty sarcasm—not unlike O’Reilly’s own interview style—Price makes it clear that O’Reilly’s book is more historical novel than a work of serious history. By cobbling together the four gospel stories, ignoring the contradictions, and adding plenty of quasi-historical background embellishments, O’Reilly and Dugard have created a good narrative that resonates with a lot of Christians. Entertaining reading this may be, but history it is not.
Killing History provides lay readers with an accessible introduction to New Testament scholarship while showing the many problems in O’Reilly’s book.
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2014
18 people are currently reading
77 people want to read
About the author
Robert M. Price
405 books239 followersRobert McNair Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, asserting the Christ myth theory.
A former Baptist minister, he was the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism from 1994 until it ceased publication in 2003. He has also written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos, a "shared universe" created by H.P. Lovecraft.
A former Baptist minister, he was the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism from 1994 until it ceased publication in 2003. He has also written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos, a "shared universe" created by H.P. Lovecraft.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 29, 2018
This is an excellent and much needed rebuttal to Bill O'Reilly's best-seller "Killing Jesus". Unlike O'Reilly (and "Killing Jesus" co-author Martin Dugard), Price is an actual Biblical scholar and dives into what the evidence provided by scholars and historians on the Gospel accounts of Jesus. He takes us through the hundreds of misinterpretations, half-truths, deliberate omissions, and out-right fabrications that are used in "Killing Jesus". Far from being a work of history, as its authors would like you to believe, "Killing Jesus" is pseudo-historical fiction AT BEST, and could more accurately be described as "fan fiction" - fans taking an already fictional story and putting their won spin on it.
November 12, 2014
Pop-history has become very popular as a form of entertainment. But to the disdain of actual historians. Books like The Da Vinci Code, fiction claimed to be based on history, ridiculous claims made in the show Ancient Aliens, along with books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Killing Jesus, and numerous others claiming to be historical or based on history but are misleading and used to propagandise ideas and (or) to make money.
The actual historian gets frustrated and annoyed because of the amature nature of the books and how much time they have to spend cleaning the misinformational mess pop-culture history leaves behind.
Robert M. Price does this very well in his book Killing History, calling out the pseudo-history done by O'Reilly and Dugard. He does this more because he respects O'Reilly and expected better.
He does this by critiquing the book point for point unmasking it as religious propaganda and not in any way factual history. It is written in a comedic, playful style that only Robert M. Price could pull off. He is hard hitting with his criticisms, pointing out gross errors of structure, anachronisms of construction and pointless regard for modern up to date biblical scholarship.
Killing History is well paced and entertaining for a hard hitting work of biblical scholarship and shouldn't have been needed but as books like Killing Jesus become increasingly popular more of this needs to be done.
I would recommend this book for anyone interesting in early Christian history, biblical/ historical criticism and all the different ideas floating around and influenced the birth of Christianity.
The actual historian gets frustrated and annoyed because of the amature nature of the books and how much time they have to spend cleaning the misinformational mess pop-culture history leaves behind.
Robert M. Price does this very well in his book Killing History, calling out the pseudo-history done by O'Reilly and Dugard. He does this more because he respects O'Reilly and expected better.
He does this by critiquing the book point for point unmasking it as religious propaganda and not in any way factual history. It is written in a comedic, playful style that only Robert M. Price could pull off. He is hard hitting with his criticisms, pointing out gross errors of structure, anachronisms of construction and pointless regard for modern up to date biblical scholarship.
Killing History is well paced and entertaining for a hard hitting work of biblical scholarship and shouldn't have been needed but as books like Killing Jesus become increasingly popular more of this needs to be done.
I would recommend this book for anyone interesting in early Christian history, biblical/ historical criticism and all the different ideas floating around and influenced the birth of Christianity.
October 15, 2014
An excellent book by the humorous, Dr. Price critiquing "Killing Jesus" by the good Bill O'Reilly. Price shows how the "No Spin Zone" plays twister with the New Testament literature. This book was very informative in a fun way, and shows what great liberties evangelical apologists take when writing on such topics. Killing History underlines the issues with writing on the historical Jesus and how quickly it turns into historical fiction. A nice little book to have around. Also the last chapter on the resurrection was both creative and entertaining, almost as the gospels themselves. The appendixes were also informative, giving up to date theories on the dating of the Gospel texts. Well done Dr. M. Price! My sides hurt from laughing while I learned something about early Christianities!
July 22, 2015
I love the fact that my local library loans out digital books. However there are only limited titles available so I sometimes end up picking up a book I should not have, such was the case here. This rating is therefore harsh but since I have never read O'Reilly's book "Killing Jesus" of which this is a critique, it left me somewhat cold.
The contempt and dislike I hold for Bill O'Reilly is actually hard to articulate without resorting to profanity but I find him a bully; pretentious, holier-than-thou, dismissive and generally highly rude and unpleasant. I realize that this is a view that many don't support. I would never read one of his books on the grounds that I dislike him so intensely.
Therefore this book didn't make much sense to me. As I say, should never have read it - my bad!
The contempt and dislike I hold for Bill O'Reilly is actually hard to articulate without resorting to profanity but I find him a bully; pretentious, holier-than-thou, dismissive and generally highly rude and unpleasant. I realize that this is a view that many don't support. I would never read one of his books on the grounds that I dislike him so intensely.
Therefore this book didn't make much sense to me. As I say, should never have read it - my bad!
October 8, 2014
I didn't finish this. If you are interested in the historical Jesus there are better books out there. As for a critique of O'Reilly, this could have been done in a critical essay/review. Also wonder who the audience for this is -- not sure readers of O'Reilly would pick this up.
October 22, 2015
The book provides some needed perspective in response to Billy O'Reilly's KILLING JESUS, but for anyone interested in New Testament scholarship, the works of Bart Ehrman (e.g., MISQUOTING JESUS) are clearer and richer in content, covering the same underlying information in a vastly superior way.
dnf
April 16, 2024Really snide and almost cliquish tone so far.
***
This is a very offputting book. Given my dislike of Bill O'Reilly, it might seem like a great fit, but it's just so snotty and regularly throws in contemporary political digs that make the author just sound petulant.
***
This is a very offputting book. Given my dislike of Bill O'Reilly, it might seem like a great fit, but it's just so snotty and regularly throws in contemporary political digs that make the author just sound petulant.
October 2, 2018
I have to confess that I have not read O’Reily’s books, but Dr Price’s analysis is cogent, biting and very easy to read.
May 27, 2024
THE SKEPTICAL SCHOLAR CRITIQUES O’REILLY’S BOOK “KILLING JESUS”
Robert M. Price (born 1954) is an American theologian and writer---and former Baptist minister---who taught philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, and is now a professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 2014 book, “I hope to show … that the task of reconstructing the events connected with a figure like Jesus Christ, the deity of the Christian faith, and that of writing about modern political figures, is as different as the heavens are from the earth… I should estimate that reporting the historical truth about Jesus falls somewhere between documenting the facts about Robin Hood and Superman. It is just not the same thing at all. Another thing I aim to demonstrate is that to treat Jesus as one treats Abe Lincoln tends to make nonsense of the gospels… we are dealing with a genre very different from straight history.” (Pg. 7-8)
He notes, “[Bill] O’Reilly and [Martin] Dugard highly value the eyewitness reliability of the Gospel of John, and indeed it serves as the central source of their version of Jesus’ teachings about his identity as the divine Son of God. It is merely church tradition that identifies John, son of Zebedee, as the fourth evangelist… The subject matter in John is very different from that portrayed in Matthew, Mark and Luke. In them, Jesus is all the time preaching about the kingdom of God, while in John the recurrent theme is ‘eternal life.’ The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke … talks about the Father, but in John he talks about the Son… Most striking of all, everyone in the Gospel of John speaks the same way, whether that be John the Baptist, Jesus, or the narrator. Sometimes we cannot even tell when a character’s speech leaves off and the narrator’s comments begin.” (Pg. 26-27)
He asserts, “'Killing Jesus' is by no stretch of the imagination the purely secular historical account O’Reilly stridently says it is.” (Pg. 31) He adds, “Don’t let it escape your notice that O’Reilly and Dugard are not truly critical at all. The factors they say would explain sight discrepancies between the gospels are all assumed to be virtual guarantees of gospel accuracy… What O’Reilly and Dugard are conspicuously omitting to mention is the very good possibility that, first, the gospels are compilations of fiction and legend and, second, that one evangelist seems to have edited and rewritten his predecessor with considerable freedom, as any glance at one of those three-column parallel comparisons of Matthew, Mark, and Luke will make inescapably clear.” (Pg. 39-40)
He suggests, “the trouble is that they are reading religious spin doctors like William Lane Craig who like to argue that Jesus must really have risen from the dead because, they say, contemporary Jews did not believe that anyone would or could be resurrected within history, before the Last Day, when ALL the righteous would rise… They conveniently ignore Mark 6, where it plainly says that people thought John had already been resurrected.” (Pg. 81)
Of the so-called “Messianic Prophecies,” he observes, “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. No, these esoteric prophecies were visible only to the eye of faith… Thus no one could have known these prophecies WERE prophecies until after the secretly predicted events had occurred… it did not matter whether the Christian reading made any sense in the original context. What they were doing was much like … the modern ‘Bible Code’ manner of reading the scriptures.” (Pg. 106)
Of C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” trilemma, he comments, “This spurious line of reasoning … is often laid down like a trump card by popular apologists who fail to see the grossly fallacious nature of it… It is a classic propaganda technique to lead one’s audience to believe that only two (or in this case, three) alternatives lie before them, and then seek to disqualify the ones you have mentioned, ignoring the choices you have not… the real Achilles’ heel of Lewis’s argument … is the false premise that the historical Jesus claimed to be God. That assertion is founded on the unstable sand of the Gospel of John.” (Pg. 119-121)
He notes, “we can see that the Last Supper is not supposed to be a Passover at all. First, when Jesus tells Judas to go and do his business and get it over with, John says none of the others lifted a finger to stop him because they assumed ‘that… Jesus was telling him, “But what we need for the feast.”’ This by itself is enough to prove that it cannot have been the seder… A little late for buying the food and wine if they were right then sitting down to a Passover meal. And what Jewish merchant would have been open for business?... No, this is just the evening meal on the night BEFORE Passover.” (Pg. 163)
This book will be of great interest to Atheists, skeptics, and other freethinkers who doubt Christianity.
Robert M. Price (born 1954) is an American theologian and writer---and former Baptist minister---who taught philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, and is now a professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 2014 book, “I hope to show … that the task of reconstructing the events connected with a figure like Jesus Christ, the deity of the Christian faith, and that of writing about modern political figures, is as different as the heavens are from the earth… I should estimate that reporting the historical truth about Jesus falls somewhere between documenting the facts about Robin Hood and Superman. It is just not the same thing at all. Another thing I aim to demonstrate is that to treat Jesus as one treats Abe Lincoln tends to make nonsense of the gospels… we are dealing with a genre very different from straight history.” (Pg. 7-8)
He notes, “[Bill] O’Reilly and [Martin] Dugard highly value the eyewitness reliability of the Gospel of John, and indeed it serves as the central source of their version of Jesus’ teachings about his identity as the divine Son of God. It is merely church tradition that identifies John, son of Zebedee, as the fourth evangelist… The subject matter in John is very different from that portrayed in Matthew, Mark and Luke. In them, Jesus is all the time preaching about the kingdom of God, while in John the recurrent theme is ‘eternal life.’ The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke … talks about the Father, but in John he talks about the Son… Most striking of all, everyone in the Gospel of John speaks the same way, whether that be John the Baptist, Jesus, or the narrator. Sometimes we cannot even tell when a character’s speech leaves off and the narrator’s comments begin.” (Pg. 26-27)
He asserts, “'Killing Jesus' is by no stretch of the imagination the purely secular historical account O’Reilly stridently says it is.” (Pg. 31) He adds, “Don’t let it escape your notice that O’Reilly and Dugard are not truly critical at all. The factors they say would explain sight discrepancies between the gospels are all assumed to be virtual guarantees of gospel accuracy… What O’Reilly and Dugard are conspicuously omitting to mention is the very good possibility that, first, the gospels are compilations of fiction and legend and, second, that one evangelist seems to have edited and rewritten his predecessor with considerable freedom, as any glance at one of those three-column parallel comparisons of Matthew, Mark, and Luke will make inescapably clear.” (Pg. 39-40)
He suggests, “the trouble is that they are reading religious spin doctors like William Lane Craig who like to argue that Jesus must really have risen from the dead because, they say, contemporary Jews did not believe that anyone would or could be resurrected within history, before the Last Day, when ALL the righteous would rise… They conveniently ignore Mark 6, where it plainly says that people thought John had already been resurrected.” (Pg. 81)
Of the so-called “Messianic Prophecies,” he observes, “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. No, these esoteric prophecies were visible only to the eye of faith… Thus no one could have known these prophecies WERE prophecies until after the secretly predicted events had occurred… it did not matter whether the Christian reading made any sense in the original context. What they were doing was much like … the modern ‘Bible Code’ manner of reading the scriptures.” (Pg. 106)
Of C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” trilemma, he comments, “This spurious line of reasoning … is often laid down like a trump card by popular apologists who fail to see the grossly fallacious nature of it… It is a classic propaganda technique to lead one’s audience to believe that only two (or in this case, three) alternatives lie before them, and then seek to disqualify the ones you have mentioned, ignoring the choices you have not… the real Achilles’ heel of Lewis’s argument … is the false premise that the historical Jesus claimed to be God. That assertion is founded on the unstable sand of the Gospel of John.” (Pg. 119-121)
He notes, “we can see that the Last Supper is not supposed to be a Passover at all. First, when Jesus tells Judas to go and do his business and get it over with, John says none of the others lifted a finger to stop him because they assumed ‘that… Jesus was telling him, “But what we need for the feast.”’ This by itself is enough to prove that it cannot have been the seder… A little late for buying the food and wine if they were right then sitting down to a Passover meal. And what Jewish merchant would have been open for business?... No, this is just the evening meal on the night BEFORE Passover.” (Pg. 163)
This book will be of great interest to Atheists, skeptics, and other freethinkers who doubt Christianity.
July 11, 2024
Good critique of a conservative book on the life and crucifixion of Jesus. Price takes a historical-critical approach and cites many primary and secondary sources. His dating of the Gospels is late in the opinion of the majority of New Testament scholars, but his ability to show the differences in viewpoints of the Gospel writers is in line with most historical scholars. The book is well written and humorous in places.
October 13, 2014
Much of this book is Bob-Price-Lite, but that is due to the nature of the O'Reilly book he is responding to. I did find some of his criticism to not be strong enough (and found a few sentences that made me cringe, "Bob, I expect more from you"), but that is just because I have read most of Bob's more critical works (such as The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man). What pushes this work up to 5-stars is actually his appendices which address Price's current thoughts on when the christian gospels were written, and whether there really is Josh McDowell-type "evidence" in the writing of the 1st-3rd c. historians. These two sections alone are worth the price [uh, sorry Bob, that was not intended as a pun] of the book.
March 9, 2015
Bill O'Reilly getting smacked down by a biblical scholar, can you imagine anything more fun?
Though a word of warning to any liberals out there, the biblical scholar in question is a conservative, and while it does give him a Nixon-in-China cover that wouldn't be available to, say, Bart Ehrman, Price tries to boost his street-cred by peppering the book with digs at President Obama and praise for O'Reilly as an interviewer. (Though ironically, since Price favors the high end estimates of when the Gospels were written, he's probably harsher on O'Reilly than Ehrman would have been.)
Though a word of warning to any liberals out there, the biblical scholar in question is a conservative, and while it does give him a Nixon-in-China cover that wouldn't be available to, say, Bart Ehrman, Price tries to boost his street-cred by peppering the book with digs at President Obama and praise for O'Reilly as an interviewer. (Though ironically, since Price favors the high end estimates of when the Gospels were written, he's probably harsher on O'Reilly than Ehrman would have been.)
April 12, 2015
Robert Price takes O'Rielley's book apart piece by piece and demolishes. Price is a serior intellectual historian, bible schlor and theologian. O'rielly is a TV talking head without any qualifications to comment on the historical Jesus. I delighted in every paragraph. A must read for those interested in bilble history.
February 15, 2016
This was a very detailed critique of O'Reilly's book. It did an excellent job of highlighting where the authors took liberties with the facts of the time and the biblical accounts, or where they presented their own opinion as facts. There were many of these situations.
September 7, 2014
almost halfway, looking good ATM, heading for 4 stars at his rate, ( at least )
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews