Several people have (urgently) asked me to write up a review of the new blockbuster hit, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus.   So, my short answer to the request is that, well, I haven’t read it.   It did just come out after all!   But I see it is – from the get-go – the #1 book (in the world!) on Amazon.  I will obviously have to read it:  just as I have to read Reza Aslan’s Zealot.   The latter I will be reading over the next month or so in conjunction with my course on “Jesus in Scholarship and Film,” since otherwise I won’t be able to grade my students’ book reviews of it!   But I will not be assigning O’Reilly, since it just came out and I won’t be changing my syllabus.

I’ve ordered the O’Reilly book (against my wishes; I really don’t want to “contribute  to the cause.”  But I obviously have to read it) and will be able to give an evaluation soon enough.   For now I should make just a couple of comments.

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.

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