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Loading...Since I posted a bit on my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, several people have asked me if I’ve ever written an evaluation of Bill O’Reilly’s blockbuster hit, Killing Jesus. It turns out, I did so, here on the blog, right after it came out in 2013. I call it a blockbuster because it was: it rose to become the #1 book (in the world!) on Amazon, and had a long run at the top of the New York Times bestseller list — staying on the list for a full 52 weeks!
I’ve looked over my posts back then, and think they are still useful. Here is the first of my posts. I wrote it before I had actually starting reading the book. As you’ll see, it’s horribly elitist while explaining why it’s not elitist. I used to write posts about that on the blog. It was one of my endearing qualities that I seem to have tempered a bit. Still, I get a laugh out of thinking about my knee jerking the whole time….
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First, O’Reilly “wrote” the book with the assistance of an author named Martin Dugard, as he has done before with his other massively popular books. I take this to mean that O’Reilly himself did not actually do much of the writing. Did he do any of it? Maybe someone on the blog knows. More important, did he do any of the “research”? I put research in quotation marks because it is not clear to me at this point how much research was done.
The excerpt from the book printed on Amazon does not inspire me with much confidence. It is basically a fictionalized version of the story of Jesus’ birth from Matthew, where Matthew’s account is taken at face-value as being historically correct and all the details (i.e., most of the account that O’Reilly and Dugard present) are simply made up out of their own imagination. This is not a good start for a book that claims to be a historical account. Precisely the *problem* with knowing about the historical Jesus is that
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“It’s horribly elitist while explaining why it’s not elitist” – hahaha! Love the sarcasm (towards yourself)!
But, there is something deeper and more serious liyng there – at least for me.
Because I also have a blog (preposterous or laughable as it may sound) and I genuinely worry quite often over the possibility I’m overextending with respect to my (non existent) erudition and expertise. Of course, I’m not claiming to be *expert* on something or to write *authoritatively*, and I don’t do it to raise millions of dollars for charities; the main idea is my writing skills are decent, I’m curious about this stupendously mysterious world and I want to share precious knowledge I burrow from precious books (such as yours, for example). I think my question to you, Mr. Ehrman, is something along the lines of “Where should we draw the line in regard to respecting or dismissing the written thoughts of someone else?”.
I mean, if I want to write about the psychology guiding conspiracy theories, e.g., do I *have* to have a PhD in psychology to do that? My approach is no, I don’t – as long as I have done my research and cite all my sources.
Nevermind O’Reilly; I really enjoyed your description of the pathway to become a serious scholar. I don’t consider it elitist at all, just realistic.
100% agree
Ironically, you’ve allowed those of us less scholarly to present our personal thoughts on Jesus in this forum. You seem to have developed an appreciation for less learned opinions about Jesus presented honestly, if not historically. I’m grateful for it.
Hi Dr Ehrman!!
My Harper Collins study Bible finally arrived! An exciting if not slightly overwhelming task lies ahead. I’ve never read the Bible cover to cover, how would you recommend I do it for the first time? Especially taking footnotes, opening essays and apocrypha into account.
Thank you!!
The problem most people have is getting bogged down after Exodus 20. But if you like legal discourse, it’s pretty interesting. Still, you will be forgiven for skipping some of the parts you don’t find as intriguing the first time through. If you get bogged down, just move elsewhere for a while.
Great post.
I dedicated my life to my sport. Touched all the bases you can attain in my sport ( except being the best at it ) and got into a lot of trouble writing articles in a major university towns newspaper ( H-T, Bloomington Indiana) about my outrage with charity races.
People putting on races for a cause which got more people involved with running who at best we’re Luke warm about the sport but we’re more into the charitable aspects of it and did make more money in entry fees etc..
You would have thought I was Mussolini or something based upon the reader reaction I got ha
IMO one is absolutely right to criticize anything written outside a person’s area of expertise (if, in fact, Bill O has any) and call them on it. Linus Pauling won the Nobel prize for his work in quantum mechanics, but deserved nothing but scorn for his embrace of quack medicine in promoting vitamin C as a panacea.
“Elitism” is a word often thrown about by people who despise intellectualism and expertise because it contradicts their emotionally-held beliefs. In everything from basic facts about history to even the shape of the Earth itself we see uninformed contrarianism being praised over actual knowledge. It is a sickness in the US that has been around a long time and, I believe, will be our undoing if we let it.
O’Reilly could probably write a pretty informed book on sexual harassment; at least from the viewpoint of the harasser.
Your point.
I went into the Blog’s archive to read your earlier posts on Bill O’Reily. I noticed that the picture next to your name in the comments sections seems to be someone other than you.
I assume there is a story about this.
There must be, and I’d love to hear it.
Wait, um, are you telling us that Monty Python and the Holy Grail are NOT historically accurate? Now I’m really bummed out.
I know. And I feel your pain.
And what about the Life of Brian? This is wise Ryan finding out about Santa Claus.
(Although in the case of the first two Python films there is at least some real historical context.)
I would expect Killing Jesus is written for the average 6th grade level reader; is supportive of a literal reading of the Bible and conservative Christian/Catholic values; is attractive to those who learn mostly what they know about Jesus from the AVERAGE minister, not scholars; and is purchased by those who find that old time religion that was good enough for their papas and mamas to be good enough for them. Probably, the only way to better educate the masses on the difference between the historical and theological Jesus is to better educate those who teach them, but then their congregational numbers and livelihood would probably fall off drastically if they incorporated that knowledge into their sermons, so don’t hold your breath that they would change their approach. Just keep teaching and writing your books and maybe send O’Reilly a copy of yours just for the fun of it, if nothing else. 😁 Remember he is writing to sell not to teach.
I laughed out loud at this, “Scholars who actually work on this material are groaning, the world over.” I would’t mind seeing more of this Bart come out on the blog once in a while haha!
In all seriousness, though, it’s super scary to me that SO MANY people listen to personalities like Bill and other Fox voices who make wild claims about God and Jesus and the Bible and then present them as if they are researched, scholarly, and accurate.
It boggles my mind that books like this not only sell, but that a publisher would actually want their name on a book about the “historical Jesus” that is not even remotely close to being taken seriously by any scholar.
At the same time, though, coming from the conservative Evangelical world (and you probably know this from your own experience), this sort of “scholarship” was fairly normal for me as the Gospels were seen as literal, historical documents and thinking they were anything other than that could cause you to lose your standing with your peers.
What a mess!
No one could confuse a wonderful, calm mind with mastery of a wide range of tools like yours to a populist. Things can become popular because they’re good or because people have connections.
Christianity doesn’t totally resemble the Way, anyway
•Jesus didn’t praise the nuclear family
•Wage work the most consistent target of his humor
•Jesus 1000% not “educated” by traditional sources
Imo, it’s become a worldview of peoples indigenous to Europe — Celticized Neolithic folks and the compounding effects of an Ice Age that may have impacted access to intellectual leisure. Greeks called them Bar Bars.
Jesus was Asian.
About credentials, one might wonder the same about non-yogis. How can they attain a clean vibration without years of strict wilderness practice? Without zikr? Good, stable mood? What miracles have happened to them?
All these experiences are really rare, so that discussion never happens.
No need to answer if this isn’t within textual criticism, but what’s the confluence between the Angel Gabriel in Luke 1:20 and in Daniel 8:15-16?
I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God…
…there before me stood one who looked like a man…”Gabriel…”
If he’s a human messenger channeling the angel Gabriel, wouldn’t Mary’s Gabriel be a divinized human too?
Hi Bart. As I’m sure you know, there are big gaps in our knowledge of the ancient world and the historical Jesus. It’s a shame that politically and/or theologically motivated, shameless hucksters seek to fill those gaps with whatever stories are required to justify their biases, worldviews, opinions etc. I guess there would be financial motivation as well.
Great blog.
Hi Bart:
I don’t understand why you seem embarrassed by your justification, which is not an elistist creed on evidence and expertise, but a valid statement on the importance of expertise. Timothy Snyder (a scholar of 20th century eastern Europe) writes on the importance of evidence, facts, and expertise in his books on democracy.
Thanks, thekla
The post seems to cut off mid-sentence in the fourth paragraph. Is this a problem on my end, or with the post itself?
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Good tips. Other tips would be not to listen to Dr Oz about medicine, Dr Phil about psychology or Gwyneth Paltrow about… anything as far as I can tell. She’s a good actress, so maybe she can teach people how to act.
Great point!
I didn’t read O’Reilly’s book. I will say this; expert or not, he got the money.
The concept of reading the bible and filling in the rest with imagination and presenting yourself as an expert will be repeated thousands of time this Sunday and millions of dollars will flow again. To me that is a bigger issue than a movie or a book.
Recently you asked the question about scholarship leading to loss of faith. The number of people that will loose faith based on the quality of pastoring available from people that had “the calling” and no scholarship is, I will say sinful.
Bill O’Reilly thinks that he knows a lot about Jesus because in so many ways he is still living in that era himself.
If you can find anything good about the Killing Jesus book, it might be that it did question some of the common assumptions about Jesus (making people think for a bit) – but it did NOT do a good job of keeping the ongoing discovery and research (and thinking) alive. O’Reilly often gave his guests the “last word” when he had his Factor show, but in his books, he does not leave much room for criticism of the findings.
I’d call that more like ‘blunt’, there’s not enough scorn for it to be all that elitist, and nowhere near enough scorn for what O’Reilly deserves. I’m surprised he didn’t write an astronomy or earth sciences book on the tides, that’s the level of knowledge he has on most of the things he yammers on about. A review of that book could then be titled ‘The Snide Comes in, The Snide Goes Out’
Really frustrating. Only getting an excerpt of the article. About to start taking the Lord’s name in vain.
Ah! Usually that happens when a subscription ahs run out: check to see if it ahs been renewed!
O’Reilly’s book is one small example of our national crisis brought on by the rejection of expertise in favor of amateur opinions that cater to cultural and political agendas. So, of course, climate scientists don’t know what they’re talking about or are cooking the books (think of the abuse heaped on Michael Mann, just to cite one example), vaccines will alter your DNA, the earth is just a few thousand years old, and so on. O’Reilly and his ilk think Dr. Ehrman is a fraud along with Dr. Fauci because scholarship doesn’t align with their narratives, so scholarship can’t be right. The fact that fundamentalists think every word of the Bible is inerrant is benign except when you consider the spin offs of their approach into science, politics, jurisprudence, etc.
I would be careful in lumping all those things into one category.
I think Bart is one of, if not THE most honest man I have come across in scholarship. On the other hand, I think Anthony Fauci is one of the biggest liars in scholarship.
There are honest folks AND liars in all walks of life, including “scholarship”.
It’s a matter of the heart, not whether one is “educated” or not.
But I do agree that guys like O’Reilly mislead a lot of people.
Also, I know of plenty of equally educated people in the field of immunization who disagree on plenty of things. There is no ONE “expert”. But it IS worth pondering, even for us plebs, what might happen to a baby boy when a concoction made from the cultured cells of a baby girl is injected directly into his body.
If my mother’s bookshelf is any indication, Bill O’Reilly is the most preeminent historian on all subjects. Did you ever get around to reading it?
Yup. More posts to come. But not too many — I couldn’t bring myself to go on about it….
My question is about the crucifixion or rather the environment of the crucifixion. There are a few passages that describe sizable followings of Jesus, people going to great lengths to seek him out and how his reputation had spread and his popularity grew. But the crucifixion seems to be scaled down to a small affair with very few people At least that’s the impression that I am left with. This should have been an event that would have produced a rock star crowd, Something that would have so many witnesses that it’s authenticity could not be disputed. Maybe they would have wanted to see him buried or mourned at his burial place. My take on the crucifixion deal is the more public it was then that was all the better.What is up with the lack of witnesses and mourning of the masses?
Crucifixions were public but I’ve never had the sense that they were like public executions in the U.S. where the whole town would turn out; for one thing they were probably reasonably common. In the Gospels there are people there looking on, but you’re right, they are not a massive crowd.
Bart,
I defend that a journalist can write a popular book about ancient history. Also, a responsible journalist writing about ancient history should read the associated undergraduate textbooks and popular books writen by experts in the field.
I judge from your post that Bill O’Reilly, his coauthor, and any ghost researchers he hired did not do that. So go ahead, keep throwing tomatoes at him 🙂
–James
I agree it’s possible. But offhand I can’t think of one who has pulled it off. It really is massively complicated. Do you have any in mind?
Good question. None come to my mind, but I learned the theory from my three Penn State Graduate School professors of literary nonfiction in the early 1990s. Most of their published literary journalism involved current events, but each of them also used their journalism skills to publish historical pieces. For example, the late Robert Gannon, science journalist par excellent, published “Hellions of the Deep” (1996), which is classified as military history, won some awards, and bumped Rob from associate professor to full professor. He was a great mentor of mine and supported my then attempts to write a narrative account of Bible history, and he was an agnostic who found my then evangelical views interesting. He and my other two literary nonfiction professors, Toby Thompson and the late Bernard Asbell, all agreed that in theory I could apply journalism to Bible history. At the time, I completed nothing more than an outline and two or three chapters, a lot of which I would not agree with now. Anyway, their impact on my life helped me to eventually publish philosophy and theology as an independent scholar while I begin studying subjects as a journalist.
I am an expert in the field of “expertise.”
Not really, though I have published on the subject, as here:
https://www.billjamesonline.com/screwballs_and_experts%e2%80%94part_three__car_talk/?AuthorId=23&pg=2
That should be a link to a (longish) article, part 3 of a series, on “expertise” written for a column on baseball, but mostly about expertise in other fields, such as cars or epidemiology, and how it’s earned and agreed upon BY THOSE IN THE PARTICULAR FIELD. The “publisher” is Bill James, a recognized “expert” in baseball analysis (I’ve written about Bart, and his odd similarities with Bill elsewhere, including being from Lawrence KS and born in early November) who differs from me in some aspects of recognizing what makes for a true expert and what doesn’t.
Bill O’Reilly (“Oh, really?”) qualifies as a faux expert, someone who takes advantage of his expertise in his own specialized field (which is what, again?) to pretend expertise in an entirely different area of specialization. This is common, and perhaps inevitable, but needs to be called out as such wherever and whenever the true experts, like Bart, can be bothered to do just that. Good job, in other words.
Going in circles trying to follow a star doesn’t sound very wise to me either. But it’s better than creeping around a cow shed at two o’clock in the morning… 🙂
And that is why? I don’t read anyone’s book. I’m very peculiar in reading books from someone who tend to falsified their writing. We learn this very issue from the Bible in the Bible we learned how people was writing in the name of someone else. I read Barts book because I think that he is legit. Bart show how the Bible has lots of mistakes, he guide us on how to read and find the mistakes in the Bible. Mostly people today, writes books with no kind of credentials.
I took out KJ from the library a couple of weeks ago.
My first impression was dismay at the poor scholarship…for example, on page 22, a long footnote presents as fact the long discarded hypotheses of Gospel authorships (Mark was written by John Mark, Luke was a friend of Paul, Matthew was the disciple/tax collector, John the disciple as well).
More striking to me is how KJ is a great example of conflation of separate gospels to create a fifth one…in this case, the “Gospel according to William and Martin”. The second-last sentence of the Afterword reads:…”I believe we have brought you an accurate account of not only how Jesus died, but also the way he lived and how his message has affected the world”.
I don’t expect Bart to write a “Da Vinci Code”- like rebuttal, but would suggest blog members read KJ since it is a best-seller and gives an indication of how hundreds of thousands who have read it have been “educated” on the NT Gospels. It’s an easy read (280 pages) and should be available in any public library (so you don’t have to pay for it!)
Ah, the footnote you reads was not part of the KJ. It was the *edition* of the King James done by modern editors — they added the footnote!
Seems O’Reilly is very much the expert… in finding an audience for his bible stories. And in truth, the original gospels were not authored by Jesus, or by his disciples. They were anonymously authored accounts of Jesus’s life story according to various disciples. In an age when pseudographic writings were the standard, attributing authorship to someone who wasn’t even there seems pretty weak, but more accurate and responsible.
My opinion about “elitism”:
I think it is perfectly legitimate for a layman to write a book on subject of which (s)he is not a professional expert, as long as (s)he is completely open about his/her non-expertise, but still tries get the facts right to the best of his/her ability. Also, whenever (s)he promotes a speculation which is not accepted as a fact by most scholars or experts in the field, this should be clearly stated.
Of course, in such a case, it is unacceptable to promote opnions which most experts condider as demonstrably false, or to claim that something is a fact when it is not considered as a fact by most experts.
To make up stories about the soldiers participating in the Bethlehem Child Massacre and about Herod’s health problems in his old age, and claim that these are facts, like Bill O’Reilly, is of course totally dishonest and unacceptable.
But journalists, and other laymen, can sometimes write insightful popular books about subjects of which they are not experts, and this should not be discouraged, although such books of not carry the same weight as books written by experts in the relevant fields.