Killing Jesus – Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard, 2013 ★★★½

The Greatest Thriller Ever Told

For centuries, The Greatest Story Ever Told has been retold as medieval passion play, as oratorio, as cinematic spectacular, as business primer, as Marxist parable, as Monty Python spoof, and even, if my English composition teacher was correct, as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Why not a potboiler thriller, too?

Killing Jesus, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s 2013 installment in their series of books on famous deaths, debuted atop the New York Times’ best-seller list, and remained on that list for the next 51 weeks. An expensive miniseries produced by the National Geographic Channel debuts today, on Palm Sunday, and is expected to draw strong ratings. It’s also a great conversation-stimulator, as close to 9,000 reviews drawing as many as a hundred comments apiece on Amazon.com would indicate.

Relying primarily on the four Gospels with corroboration from ancient historians, O’Reilly and Dugard present the classic Jesus story as one of political machination common for its time: As ancient Israel, then known as Judea, suffers under harsh Roman rule, a young carpenter from Nazareth emerges with a message of hope and transcendence. He draws large crowds. For the Roman occupiers, he is a harmless curiosity, but for the Jewish high priests, or Sanhedrin, Jesus is a menace. He challenges their authority, disrupts Temple trade, and hints at the blasphemous idea he is the Son of God. Enlisting the aid of one of Jesus’s closest followers, the priests entrap the renegade preacher and prod Roman governor Pontius Pilate to put him to death.

“We do not address Jesus as the Messiah, only as a man who galvanized a remote area of the Roman Empire and made very powerful enemies while preaching a philosophy of peace and love,” writes O’Reilly in the book’s preface. “In fact, the hatred toward Jesus and what happened because of it may, at times, overwhelm the reader. This is a violent story centered both in Judea and in Rome itself, where the emperors were also considered gods by their loyal followers.”

The version of the Jesus story told here keeps violence in the forefront. We begin with the wholesale slaughter of children younger than two in the Judean town of Bethlehem, as Rome’s puppet ruler King Herod believes an infant there will someday usurp him. Then we journey further back in time and hundreds of miles northwest to Rome, where Julius Caesar is about to meet his famous end. Transitioning at the time from republic to absolute monarchy, Rome was a famously cruel master of many subjugated peoples. They took power seriously, and played for keeps.

Into this maelstrom came Jesus, whose first big scene in the narrative as a grown man involves a similarly dramatic moment; taking on the moneychangers and merchants who set up shop in Jerusalem’s Second Temple.

“Heavy as the tables might be, their weight does not bother Jesus – not after twenty years of hauling lumber and stone alongside his father,” O’Reilly and Dugard write. “He places two hands beneath the nearest table and flips it over. A small fortune in coins flies in every direction. And even as the stunned shulhanim cry out in a rage, and coins cascade down onto the stone courtyard, Jesus is already at the next table, and then to the next.”

Throughout the book, the accent is on action and blood-soaked drama. There’s an early sidebar with a Jew who rebelled against Roman authority, one Judas of Gamala, who like Jesus was crucified for his trespasses. O’Reilly and Dugard describe in detail how he was first flogged, then forced to carry the crosspiece of the crucifix he was to be nailed upon to the place of his execution. "He would hang in full view of the thousands that call Sepphoris home, helpless to stop the urination and defecation that would stain his cross and compound his humiliation," the authors write.

There are also detours to Rome, where Caesar’s successor Tiberius takes his pleasure molesting small boys he then tosses off a cliff on his island retreat. In time, he gets murdered, too.

Walon Green, the screenwriter who adapted Killing Jesus for the miniseries debuting tonight, was quoted by the Hollywood Reporter on the book’s merits: “The book is a good read, it’s an airplane read.” That grinding sound you may hear are the molars of a million devout Christians, but never mind. Green is essentially correct about Killing Jesus; it is written as the sort of book one could take on an airplane, rather than to pray over or read for solace. It’s fast-paced, full of action and intrigue, and doesn’t waste your time with fussy scholarship.

It’s a controversial approach. But it does work in the book’s favor. In the Four Gospels, the story of Christ’s Passion is presented in a parable-heavy fashion, the emphasis always on the theological questions and man's place in the world. O’Reilly and Dugard highlight political turmoil instead, not in an ideological sense so much as by presenting Jesus confronting a harsh and seemingly omnipotent establishment. What you get is a bit like a “House Of Cards” episode and a bit like the first Rocky movie, only with more blood.

The establishment of a firmer chronological order gives the story of Christ a kind of immediacy it lacks in more overtly devout depictions. The emphasis here is on retelling a thematically packed story in a simple way, focusing less on miracles and more on the hows and whys. Like how did the chief priests fix it so a Roman governor indifferent to Jesus’s reputed offensives wound up not only crucifying the poor man but sentencing him to be flogged beforehand? And why was it that a citywide population went along with Jesus’s killing just five days after they eagerly welcomed him with cheers and by placing palms in his path?

O’Reilly and Dugard put forward a scenario they say is based on the factual record, by which as believing Catholics they mean the New Testament as well as corroborating source material. The chief priests saw Jesus as a threat not only to the efficient management of their temple but the nature of their unique authority over Judea, and pushed Pilate to put him to death. According to O’Reilly and Dugard, the scourging, which is presented here in the same gory detail that informed Mel Gibson’s famous film The Passion Of The Christ, was initially devised by Pilate as a way to avoid putting Jesus to death, figuring such intense corporeal punishment would sate the mob. But the mob he presented Jesus to for release was no random gathering, but rather a group selected by the chief priests for their willingness to call for Jesus's execution.

"It is not the Jewish pilgrims who want Jesus dead, nor most of the residents of Jerusalem," the authors write. "No, it is a small handful of men who enrich themselves through the Temple. To them, a man who speaks the truth is far more dangerous than a mass murderer."

While his mother Mary weeps at his side, Jesus is depicted dead on the Cross in the 1873 painting "Stabat Mater" by the Russian artist Evgraf Semenovich Sorokin. There's less blood in evidence here than in the version you get in Killing Jesus. [Image from Wikipedia.]

Likewise, in explaining the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot, O’Reilly and Dugard advance a theory of Judas as pragmatist to a fault. Already inclined to abuse his position as keeper of the Apostles’ shared finances, Judas becomes more disaffected as this man he follows who talks of being the Son of God fails to do so openly. So Judas opts to force his hand, and in the process get himself out from under the Sanhedrin’s wrath. There is even money to be made, as Caiaphas the head priest agrees to pay Judas for delivering Jesus for arrest.

“Judas is a schemer,” the authors write. “He has plotted the odds so that they are in his favor. He knows that if he takes the money, one of two things will happen: Jesus will be arrested and then declare himself to be the Christ. If the Nazarene truly is the Messiah, then he will have no problem saving himself from Caiaphas and the high priests.”

The narrative presents this account of Judas as the real story. There is no way of knowing if it is so. O’Reilly and Dugard cite passages in the gospels of John and Luke, but the degree of specificity offered in Killing Jesus suggests much creative elaboration at work. This elaboration may be fact-based, but it is not Gospel.

Yet in the main it works rather well. Every version of the Christ story presents its own idiosyncrasies; even the Gospels themselves diverge from one another on key pieces of the narrative, which O’Reilly and Dugard note here. When they detail the size and shape of a particular item that gets passing mention in the Gospels themselves, or itemize the internal thought processes of Caiaphas and the other Sanhedrin, they are the sort of liberties one tolerates, albeit with reservations. The core of the story remains the same; only the experience of reading it seems different, at times fresher, at times a bit too glib. Those with stricter sensibilities can always read the Gospels themselves, and see where Killing Jesus takes liberties and where it follows a straighter line. In the end, I suspect it's much more the latter.

This is the third of the Killing series by O’Reilly and Dugard I have read, after Killing Kennedy and Killing Lincoln, and the best. Of them, this tells the trickiest story in the most engaging way. I also found O’Reilly and Dugard more informative about the bigger assumptions they made and their reasons for making them. The lack of ambiguity in the narrative that hobbles Killing Lincoln is still here, but less hobbling.

Like the other two books, Killing Jesus takes some wide detours from the title subject. Here you get a lengthy section on Julius Caesar, first as he is about to be assassinated, then a look back to the day he led his troops across the Rubicon to initiate a civil war. All this is presented as backstory, but as the narrative is so tight, it doesn’t really flow. Nothing about it is as off-point as the battle scenes that fill the first half of Killing Lincoln, and all of it is told in a gripping enough way that you are never bogged down by anything.

Killing Jesus manages to be both respectful and vigorous in its novel, novelistic approach, giving us a fresh angle from which to observe the last actions of Jesus on this earth. It's not an especially deep work, but given the subject, it doesn't need to be. The depth here will be in the heart of the reader.