He Descended Into Hell

April 9, 2014

            "Hell is a bar in Adams-Morgan, the colorful ethnic neighborhood at the intersection of Columbia Road and 18th Street Northwest in Washington, D.C.   Just above Hell and under the same management is a dance club called Heaven, where a six-foot bouncer in a pink leotard stands guard at the gate, wearing angel wings and a lopsided halo. It takes a good bit of courage to walk up the stairs and through the gate into Heaven, past that bouncer. It takes a good bit more to go down the basement stairs to Hell.   As your eyes adjust to the dim red lighting you see a banner over the bar that reads, “Welcome to Hell. Have a hell of a good time!” The walls are decorated with waxy masks and murals of grim reapers, skeletons, and doomsday scenes. A few tattered chairs and tables, complete with cigarette burns, are pushed to one side of the room. The mostly male patrons shoot pool and cackle above the gritty music blaring from the speakers. It is the owner’s vision of hell—and heaven—based on the most hackneyed clichés of each." (1)

            That's about all that's left of Hell in the modern world.  It's just a  bar in Adams-Morgan or a superlative used to emphasize a "Yes" or a "No" or  to describe a really good time!  But it didn't use to be that way.  As we make our way though the Lenten season it is fitting that we look again at how we have thought about the realm of the dead.  We'll look quickly at what the Old and New Testaments tell us about the place of the dead and, in particular, about a place of punishment in the afterlife and then remind ourselves of what people in the middle ages thought about these matters.  Excessive emphasis on punishment has given way in the last century to an awareness of God's grace toward which Jesus pointed us.  We'll end up with a few words about that shocking phrase in the Apostle's Creed that asserts, "He descended into Hell!" and ask what that has to do with God's grace. 

The Realm of the Dead in the Bible

            Just what does the Bible say about Hell or the realm of the dead?  Not much really.  In the Old Testament, whose texts span the thousand years before Jesus, the realm of the dead is usually called Sheol in Hebrew.  Sheol, in the minds of Old Testament people, was not a place of punishment.  It was just where one went after being  buried.  Sheol was "a region in the depths of the earth (Psalm 86:13) that is filled with darkness and gloom (Lamentations 3:6) and silence (Psalm 115: 17). Gates or bars prevent its prisoners from escaping (Isaiah 38:10; Job 17:16)."(2) The inhabitants of Sheol were thought of as "shades"--like faint carbon copies of the originals-- but not the complete person.  Even though Sheol was within the reach of God, they thought, the inhabitants of Sheol had no contact with God.  "In death there is no remembrance of thee; in Sheol who can give thee praise" (Psalm 6:5).  The unforgettable passage in Job stands out in the Old Testament because of its hopelessness: "Oh that thou wouldest hide me in Sheol...that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me," cries Job, only to conclude that "thou destroyest the hope of man" (Job 14:13-19).  

            But if the Old Testament figures had not yet come to an understanding that retribution could be administered after death, when did this concept of the realm of the dead as a place of punishment come into being?   Sometime after Malachi and before Jesus the old idea that retribution for good or evil would be visible in this life gave way to the belief that a distinction between good and bad people would be made after death.  There are just a few glimpses of this understanding in our Old Testament.  The book of Daniel says that "many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (Daniel 12:2).  "By the New Testament period, the idea of eternal punishment in Sheol had emerged.  Sheol had become an abode for the wicked dead only;  the righteous dead went immediately to heaven (or paradise, which is the restored Garden of Eden).  This developing concept of Sheol should not be confused with “Gehenna,” a term that appears eleven times in the Old Testament and literally refers to the valley of Hinnom (or, valley of the son of Hinnom), which is located south of Jerusalem (Joshua 15:8; 18:16; Nehemiah 11:30). The valley of Hinnom was infamous as a place of Baal worship (Jeremiah 32:35), but more so as a place of child sacrifice to the god Molech.... According to tradition, after Josiah desecrated the altar at the valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, it became a continually burning garbage dump for the city of Jerusalem. ...As the idea of life after death continued to develop, Gehenna’s fires became a metaphor for the place of punishment for the wicked, which might occur either at death or after the resurrection and final judgment."(3)

The Realm of the Dead After the New Testament

            If we skip ahead some fifteen hundred years to the time of Martin Luther we know that the concept of Hell had become so vivid and frightening that travelling priests could scare people into buying "indulgences" from the church to get deceased loved ones out of Purgatory and on the way to Heaven.  Where did these vivid and explicit depictions of Hell come from if the New Testament did not provide them?  We can thank an author named Dante  and a painter named Boticelli for some of the details about Hell.  And we can thank a very modern author for making Dante a household name once again.

            In Dan Brown's latest book, Inferno (the Italian word for "Hell"), both the title and much of the imagery of the book are drawn from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.  The Divine Comedy is an allegory in three parts:  Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise.  The first part describes in detail Dante's descent through nine circles of Hell. Dante labelled the nine circles as:  Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and Treachery.  The nine circles of Hell represent a gradual increase in wickedness and culminate at the center of the earth, where Satan is held in bondage. Each circle's sinners are punished in a fashion fitting their crimes: each sinner is afflicted for all of eternity by the chief sin he committed. People who sinned but prayed for forgiveness before their deaths are found not in Hell but in Purgatory, where they labor to be free of their sins. Those in Hell are people who tried to justify their sins and are unrepentant. Along the way he describes the kinds of sinners who inhabit each level of Hell, often naming names with official titles!  Dante's guide is the Roman poet, Virgil, whom he admired and whose works he imitated.  After passing through Hell, the next two parts of the Divine Comedy follow Dante's ascent through Purgatory and into Paradise.  The book is most famous for its vivid description of Hell but, as the other two parts show, it is fundamentally an allegory about the soul's journey to God ending in Paradise. Published in the early 1300's, the poem has had a profound influence on Christian thinking about life after death. 

Even more influential, perhaps, have been the artists' depictions of the scenes Dante described.  One famous picture of Dante's "Hell,"  Boticelli's "Map of Hell," was painted in the late 1400's.(4) An amazingly detailed depiction of the sinners in each circle of Hell described by Dante, this picture fueled the imagination of devotional literature for centuries.  Even before Dante was translated into English, Jonathan Edwards became famous in America for his sermon "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God" which brought imagery of Hell much like Dante's to our country.(5) Edwards conveyed frightening images throughout his sermon to convince his congregation that they were vulnerable to God's wrath. He continuously used images of pain and eternal damnation, such as going into detail about what Hell is like and what kind of tortures await sinners, in order to frighten those present into leaving their old ways and converting.  So "hellfire and brimstone" became staple items in revival preaching all across America in the nineteenth century.

If we move forward from Luther's time to today it is obvious that it is no longer commonplace to hear a sermon on hell or judgment.  Devotions emphasize the love of God.  Doubtless there is no one simple cause for this fundamental change in emphasis.  The modern emphasis on the individual and the advances of science have both affected our relationships to God and to our brothers and sisters across our planet.  While we are more conscious than ever of the truly evil actions of individuals and groups in our world, we are no longer comfortable making judgments about eternal salvation based on simple criteria.  We are also painfully aware that doctrines applied mechanically, as Job's friends, did may be sinful.  And in an Einstein world where time itself is a dimension, we are conscious of how complex an ultimate issue can be, and we are more cautious because of our ignorance.  Thus we are left with a profound conviction that the evil which we experience must be punished and with a discouraging realization that neither our words nor our art is up to the task of describing how such retribution will happen.

Long before Dante described Hell, however, early Christians had to make use of the existing understandings of life after death.  As we know, the Apostle Paul likened the transformation into a new life to the emergence of a full plant from a seed.  One of the questions for which early Christians needed an answer is still with us today.  Can a person who lived before Jesus' time be saved?  Dante left Virgil, the pagan Roman poet who was his guides, standing outside Paradise assuming that he could not have been saved.  Simon Peter made the case that when Jesus died he took the Gospel with him to the realm of the dead!  This positive understanding of  Jesus' death and burial made its way into the Apostles' Creed in the phrase, "He descended into hell."

What Did the Creed Mean?

While we here at MBBC use a modified version of the Apostles' Creed, we know that the original version(s) of the Creed affirmed that Jesus "descended into hell." We don't use that phrase from the Creed any longer, perhaps because it seems to affirm something unthinkable for us.  We associate "hell" with the place of punishment for evil, and Jesus was not evil, thus, he could not have descended into hell.  Surely our instincts are right!  The Creed certainly did not mean to affirm that Jesus was sent to hell to be punished.   Far from it! 

Isn't it interesting that our Gospels portray Jesus' entire ministry as a coming down.  In John's Gospel Jesus is the Word who "was with God and was God" but who came down to tabernacle amongst us.  Talk about a "come down!"  Matthew and Luke portray his birth as a  coming down, a descent to the humblest circumstances of human life.  He had nowhere to lay his head.  There was no room in the inn.  Wise men who wanted to honor him had to go to the stable and kneel in the straw. But that wasn't all!   Paul says he came down even further: "he emptied himself...and being found in human form he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8).  It was downhill all the way to the cross, but that was not all.  Peter was surely sharing what other Christians believed when he said that Jesus came down even further.  When he was put to death, "he went and preached to the spirits in prison" (1 Peter 3:19).  He went down to the very depths of death on a mission to tell all who had ever lived the good news of grace.  It was downhill all the way from heaven to hell.  And that's what the Creed intended us to affirm.

By affirming that Jesus "descended into hell," the Creed described the descent of Jesus into the realm of the dead, affirming that his death was a real death and not just a swoon.   It also affirmed that by descending into the realm of the dead Jesus was able to preach to "the spirits in prison"  as Peter put it --something Jesus announced he was sent to do early on when he read from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue in Nazareth:(6)

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the LorD has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted, he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound...

And the gates of hell could not prevent him from completing his mission.

So What About Hell

            I'm going to take the liberty of quoting at some length from Jim Somerville's article I referred to earlier because I think he has helped me with his conclusion:

" What we long to know in all of this is something about the real heaven and the real hell and what we find, to our great disappointment, is that  they can’t be known. Our end, like our beginning, belongs to God. And if Jesus knows he isn’t telling. He seems content to leave the details, like the details of the final judgment, in the hands of the father (Mark 13:32). And so, like the owner of that bar in Adams-Morgan, we resort to metaphor. We decorate our concept of hell with fire and brimstone, demons with pitchforks, and the screams of the damned. We decorate our concept of heaven with angels with halos, heavenly choirs, and streets of gold. We stretch our minds toward those unknowable realities. But in the end all we have is the best, and the worst, we can imagine. "

"The temptation is to leave it there, in the realm of imagination, but  here is the frightening truth: as surely as God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, neither is God’s imagination our imagination. If burning in hell forever is the worst we can imagine, it is altogether possible that God can imagine worse, and altogether probable that the worst God can imagine would never cross our minds. But the corollary is also true: if heavenly mansions and streets of gold are the best we can imagine, it is altogether possible that God can imagine something better."

"And altogether probable that he already has."(7)

Footnotes:

1. Jim Somerville, "Hell Is A Bar in Adams-Morgan," in Heaven and Hell: Christian Reflection, A Series In Faith And Ethics, edited by Robert Kruschwitz (Baylor University, 2002), 43-45.

2. E. Anni Judkins, "Unquenchable Fire," in Heaven and Hell: Christian Reflection, A Series In Faith And Ethics, edited by Robert Kruschwitz (Baylor University,2002), 24.

            3. Judkins, op.cit., 25.

            4. Dan Brown describes this Map of Hell in Chapter 14  of his book Inferno: "The masterpiece before him- La Mappa dell' lnferno-had been painted by one of the true giants of the Italian Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli. An elaborate blueprint of the underworld, The Map of Hell was one of the most frightening visions of the afterlife ever created. Dark, grim, and terrifying the painting stopped people in their tracks even today. Unlike his vibrant and colorful Primavera or Birth of Venus, Botticelli had crafted his Map of Hell with a depressing palate of reds, sepias, and browns."

                  5. See Kathleen Verduin, "Dante's Inferno, Jonathan Edwards, and New England Calvinism," Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society No. 123 (2005), pp. 133-161.

                  6.  "I believe it [1 Peter 3:19] means Jesus did what he said he would do, what he proclaimed his mission to be — to release from darkness those imprisoned, even if they’re imprisoned in world of the dead.  That is what Jesus meant when he said “the gates of hell” will not prevail, will not stand, against the onslaught of the Kingdom of God." Chuck Warnock, pastor of the Chatham Baptist Church in Chatham, VA whose sermon, "I Believe in Christ and Him Crucified," may be viewed in the September 2009 Archive of his blog at    http://chuckwarnockblog.wordpress.com/about.

                  7. Jim Somerville, op. cit., 45.

Bill O'Reilly's Killing Jesus 

April 2, 2014

I've been asked many times in the last few months what I thought of Bill O'Reilly's book, Killing Jesus.  When I confessed that I hadn't read it, one friend thrust the book upon me and asked that I review it at the next get-together of the Vestavia Hills Country Club Bible Study group.   I've now read the book and can offer a few remarks of my own plus the thoughtful evaluations of some others whose insights I value.
The authors have divided their book into three sections dealing respectively with:

Book I: The World of Jesus    
(Why Caesar Augustus was Emperor When Jesus Was Born)
Book II:  Behold The Man        
(Scenes from Jesus' Life from Baptism to Passover Week)
Book III: If You Are The Son of God, Take Yourself Off This Cross
(The Arrest and Crucifixion of Jesus)

Only the last section of the book deals directly with "killing Jesus."   In the middle section, the authors highlight Jesus' cleansing of the Temple as the direct cause of his arrest and the authors suggest that Jesus' action struck a blow at the economic well being of the priestly leadership, thus calling for drastic action.    The first section tells us how the major players came to their roles and how crucifixion itself was used by the Romans to deter rebellion.  Thus, while only the last section deals directly with "killing Jesus" the first two books deal with the subject indirectly.

What The Book Helps Us With

The Roman World

As you can tell from the attached listing of the chapters, much of the book is devoted to the context in which Jesus lived and was crucified.  In fact the authors actually say, "This is a book that gives context to the life of Jesus..." (p. 276).  Although I am not a historian and not really able to say that O'Reilly has described the context accurately, I believe what he has given us will be of interest and help to the average Christian reader.
The chapters in the book move back and forth between the life of Jesus and  life in the Roman Empire.  O'Reilly offers those of us who are not historians of the Roman Empire a lot of interesting and helpful information about the context for Jesus' life.  We are introduced to the events in the Roman Senate before the time of Christ that eventually gave us the Roman officials who were in place in Judea when Jesus appeared.  The figures of Pilate and Caiaphas are fleshed out for us and help us to see behind some of the scenes in the Gospels.  O 'Reilly gives us a lot of information about  the details of a soldier's equipment and the actual  process of crucifying a person that makes the biblical story come alive.  I found the book helpful in this regard.
While I think this material is fairly well done, I have read another account of all this same information that does a better job of setting the scene than O'Reilly has done.  The book is  Pontius Pilate by  Paul L. Maier.  Maier's book is admittedly a book of historical fiction, but it is a gripping story in which every person and action is historical (even though their interactions are not historical).  While O'Reilly mentions, for example, the role of a man named Sejanus in securing Pilate the job of Prefect in Judea, he does not take the time to tell this man's story as Maier does, and it is a story that needs to be told.  

A Sense of How It Might Have Been

Upon a first reading of the book I was offended by the over-dramatization of the life of Jesus.  I will say later that I think much of this is a detraction, but I think the book helps the average reader imagine the scenes and helps the scenes come alive.  Did things happen the way the authors imagine them?  Did Jesus as a 12 year old boy actually "sit in the shadow of the Great Temple, on a terrace next to the Chamber of Hewn Stone...."  (p. 70) to dialog with the rabbis?  How would anyone know.  But he had to sit or stand somewhere and imagining the location brings the scene to life.  I think the book does the average reader a service by fleshing out the scenes even though there are problems with this process as I will point out below.

How The Book Doesn't Help Us

This is the third book that O'Reilly and Martin Dugard have co-authored.  Killing Lincoln  and Killing Kennedy preceded this book which O'Reilly  says was "much more daunting that each of our past two efforts."   I haven't read either of the first two books, but I would readily agree that writing a book about Jesus of Nazareth is a daunting task partly because there have been so many over the past two thousand years whose works should inform a modern author and partly because of the cultural and linguistic obstacles that confront a modern American author who writes about the first century.  The authors do not provide many footnotes in the text of the book, but they do give the reader some indication of where they got their information about the Roman world and the life of Jesus.   It will be apparent to those who know the literature about the New Testament that the authors either are not aware of long established scholarly positions or they have chosen to ignore them.  Thus they still picture Mary Magdalene as a prostitute, an identity that has been pretty thoroughly cast aside (p. 144).   They do indicate some significant works that deal specifically with crucifixion and/or with the last week of Jesus' life, but they show little familiarity with technical New Testament scholarship about the relationships of the four Gospels.

Smoothing Out The Rough Places

One of the characteristics of the book is that the authors have harmonized the four Gospels and used the narratives as if they were all one story with no different emphases.  This is most obvious in that the authors have Jesus cleanse the Temple twice!    In Chapter 8 of the book which the authors date to A.D. 27 they have Jesus overturn the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple.  The fact that they describe him as clenching a "coiled whip in his fist" tells the observant reader that they are fleshing out the story told by John in his Gospel (2:13-22) where Jesus makes a "whip of cords."  In John's Gospel this event comes right at the beginning of Jesus' ministry.  The other three Gospels place this event in the last week of Jesus' life and none of them mentions a whip.   So, in Chapter 13 of the book, the authors have Jesus do it again!
"Once again the group walks into Jerusalem and straight to the Temple.  It has been three years since Jesus turned over rhe money changer's tables, but now he plans to do it again.  Only this time he has no whip, and he is no longer an unknown figure." (p.192)
Obviously none of our Gospels records two occasions on which Jesus took such drastic action and I know of no scholar who thinks Jesus did so.  But since one Gospel puts the event at the beginning and the others put it at the end, O'Reilly just has Jesus do it twice.  This kind of simplistic smoothing over of the differences in our Gospels is inexcusable.

Obscuring the Source of Their Narrative

Much of the book is, therefore, a re-telling of the Gospel accounts with fictional padding to make the scenes come alive.  For the average reader of the Bible, O'Reilly has produced a highly readable, interesting, fictional version of the New Testament.  It is not surprising that the masses of readers like the book.  However, the version of the story O'Reilly gives us is not consistent with any of our New Testament Gospels.  It is a composite picture made up of some of all four but not all of any of them.  And the two authors have added details that are not in the Gospels at all without alerting the reader that the details are without any historical basis.
While the authors indicate at the end of the book some of the sources they have used, they do not give chapter and verse references for much of what they use.  Thus, unless the reader knows the Bible very well it is not likely that they would know that one of the Temple cleansings comes from John and the second comes from the other three.   And if one wanted to follow up the book's description by checking the biblical text ,they would have to consult a reference work to help them find it.

Historical Errors

While the average church-goer will probably find this book both entertaining and enlightening, there are several things that will keep others from appreciating the book.  For example, right at the beginning of the book in a footnote (p. 14) O'Reilly attributes the conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C. to "Philistines."  He should have given the Assyrians credit for this.  Apparently neither Mr. Dugard nor Mr. O'Reilly nor any of the multiple editors who proof-read the copy before it was published knew even a very basic outline of biblical history.  (This would be tantamount to claiming that Vikings destroyed the World Trade Center!).  Another historical error appears on page 241 when O'Reilly has Pilate call "the high priests and church elders together to announce his decision"!  Obviously there were no "church" elders there before there was a church.  O'Reilly apparently meant the Jewish high priests and the Jewish elders.  By adding specific times to his book O'Reilly has made another error very visible.  He notes that when Jesus was born (in March, 5 B.C.) he had 36 years to live (p.7).  That would seem to place his crucifixion in A.D. 31, but the heading to Chapter 18 indicates that Jesus was crucified on April 7, A.D. 30 (p. 242).  We might have assumed that there was a partial year in there, but on page 64 O'Reilly specifically notes that as of March 22, A.D. 7 at noon "The child with twenty-three years to live is missing."  Somewhere he lost a year.
Presenting Fiction as History
And, while the fictionalizing of the events makes them come alive for modern readers who have little knowledge of the Gospels, the authors have imagined details and added them to the biblical narrative as if they were part of it.   Mezuzahs have long been a fixture in Jewish homes, but we have absolutely no information about Joseph and Mary having a home much less having a mezuzah beside the door!  The same can be said for the imagined date and time that Mary and Joseph found Jesus in the Temple:  "March 23, A.D. 7, Afternoon."  The authors created a timeline for the events they describe, but there is no basis for this attempt to add reality to the story.  They went on to imagine the scene when the parents found Jesus in the temple:  "Jesus had never shown any sign of possessing such deep knowledge of Jewish law and tradition.  So Mary and Joseph gasp in shock at the ease with which he is discussing God" (p.76).  Of course our Gospels tell us nothing about the early childhood of Jesus so this scene is pure imagination used to fill out the story.

Poor Editing

The historical errors in the book and the use of imagined details to paint a supposedly historical picture detract from the book.  Poor editing contributes too.  I didn't try to find typographical errors because there was so much else that caught my attention, but I found several anyway. It is fairly clear that the editors of this book either were not familiar with the subject matter or did not do a very good job of cleaning up the text.  The most blatant editorial errors, however, come at the end of the book when O'Reilly tries to be very specific with dates.  Note the headings in the last few chapters:

13. Jerusalem         Monday,      April 3, A.D. 30  Morning                        190
14. Jerusalem         Tuesday,      April 3, [sic] A.D. 30  Morning                        197
15. Jerusalem         Wednesday, April 4, A.D. 30  Night                         208
16. Lower City of Jerusalem Thursday,     April 4, [sic] A.D. 30  Night                              212
17. Jerusalem         Friday,          April 7, A.D. 30          Early Morning/Day 226

Apparently the authors used a word processor as we all have done and simply copied from one heading to the other, but this leaves us with two April the Thirds and two April the Fourths and no April 5 or April 6!  In most histories the editors would catch such obvious errors if the author submitted it that way.  Obviously, neither the editors nor the authors took much time looking carefully at the text.

O'Reilly says that he and Dugard used the New International Version but they quoted biblical texts that do not appear in the New International Version.  An example is the quotation of Deuteronomy 6:4 which is quoted as saying, "Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our God is one Jehovah and thou shalt love Jehovah your God.....".  The NIV does not use the name "Jehovah."  Apparently the authors chose deliberately to change the text, but the editors should have corrected this blatant  alteration.   One page prior to the Deuteronomy quote the authors quote John 3:21 and once again, although the words are enclosed in quotation marks, they are not the text of the NIV Bible.  The NIV text reads:  " But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God."  In the book the latter part of this verse reads: "...that what he has done had been done through God."  The point is not that the authors have grossly misrepresented what the Bible intends;  the point is that  the quotation marks mean nothing.  They are not quoting the NIV Bible.  They are giving a free rendering of verses.  It is either very sloppy writing or very poor editing.  There are more examples but the point is the same.

What Others Are Saying

I looked at several reviews of the book by others.  In closing I'll share just a couple of comments that will give you the sense of what is being said about Killing Jesus.
Both O'Reilly and  Dugard are Catholics so I looked for comments from fellow Catholics.  Candida Moss is a professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame and author of The Myth of Persecution.  She pointed out that:
Of the first 80 or so pages of "Killing Jesus," only 15 are about Jesus himself. The rest is history, biography, and politics of the ancient Mediterranean. Much of this is gleaned from Roman and Jewish historians like the imperial biographer Suetonius and the Jewish general Josephus.
These are authors that O’Reilly trusts implicitly. Maybe it’s because Suetonius reads like the National Enquirer, maybe it’s because the Romans loved eagles, but whatever the reason, O’Reilly gives them too much credit.
And finally, these comments from a review that appeared in The Guardian, a British newspaper:
But historical detail does not in itself make a history – that requires analysis. Despite the subtitle, Killing Jesus is not "A History". It is a breathy retelling of the gospel stories by two conservative Catholics, one of whom, O'Reilly, believes that he was inspired to write the book by the Holy Ghost. It might be unfair to expect too much in the way of nuance or new material from Killing Jesus, but since it calls itself a history, one does expect accuracy. So when the authors claim that "the incredible story behind the lethal struggle between good and evil has never been told" – cue drumroll – "until now", the reader is entitled to feel a little misled.

APPENDIX A

The Contents of the Book

Book I:  The World of Jesus

1. Bethlehem, Judea   March, 5 B.C.                        Morning
"The child with thirty-six years to live is being hunted."             7

2. Rome           March 15, 44 B.C.                   11  A.M
"The dictator with one hour to live rides atop the shoulders of slaves."           23

3. Philippi, Northern Greece   October 23, 42 B.C.        Morning
"The son of God thinks himself immortal."                   52

4. Jordan River Valley, Judea March 22, A.D. 7                 Noon
"The child with twenty-three years to live is missing."                   64

5. Jerusalem March 23, A.D. 7                                 Afternoon
"Mary and Joseph's long walk back in to Jerusalem in search of Jesus is finally complete."                                                                           70
   

Book II:  Behold The Man

6. Jordan River, Perea A.D. 26                  Midday
         "John the Baptizer stands waist deep in the cold, brown river, waiting patiently
          as the next pilgrim wades out to stand at his side."           95

7. Villa Jovis, Capri A.D. 26                  Night
"Far away from Galilee, the Roman who considers himself to be the stepson of
         god is on the move."                             108

8. Jerusalem April, A.D. 27                           Day
"Jesus clenches a coiled whip in his fist as he makes his way up the steps
          to the Temple courts."                            119

9. Capernaum, Galilee Summer, A. D. 27                   Afternoon
"The local fishing fleet has just returned from a long night and day on the water,          
         and great crowds fill the markets along Capernaum's waterfront promenade."                                                             134

10. Galilee April, A.D. 29                   Day
"Jesus has become a victim of his own celebrity and with every passing day, his              
         life is more and more in danger."                              153

11. Jerusalem October, A.D. 29                           Day
"Pontius Pilate sits tall as he rides to Jerusalem."                       165

Book III:  If You Are The Son of God, Take Yourself Off This Cross

12. Outside Jerusalem Sunday, April 2, A.D. 30           Afternoon
"The dusty dirt road from Galilee is once again clogged with Passover pilgrims            
           eager to enter the walls of Jerusalem and put their journey behind them."          181

13. Jerusalem Monday, April 3, A.D. 30                   Morning
"It is dawn.  Jesus and the disciples are already on the move walking purposefully          
          from Bethany back into Jerusalem."                         190

14. Jerusalem Tuesday, April 3, A.D. 30*                    Morning
"The serenity of Lazarus's home provides Jesus and the disciples instant relief."                                                                  197

15. Jerusalem Wednesday, April 4, A.D. 30*             Night
"Judas Iscariot travels alone....Judas walks into Jerusalem by himself."                  208

16. Lower City of Jerusalem Thursday, April 4, A.D. 30 *             Night
"Jesus has so much to do in a very short period of time."                   212

17. Jerusalem Friday, April 7, A.D. 30                                      Early Morning/Day
"The assault comes out of nowhere, a hard punch to the head delivered                            
          by a short-fused Temple guard."                                   226

18. Jerusalem's Upper City April 7, A.D. 30                              8:00 A.M-3:00 P.M.
"Jesus endures.  As with any other victim, his hands are manacled to the metal            
          ring atop the scourging post, rendering him unable to move."                   242

19. Jerusalem's Upper City April 7, A.D. 30                               3:00 P.M.--6:00 P.M.
"The race is on.  The Roman death squad has had a hard day, but there is still            
          more work to be done."                                            252

20. Pilate's Palace, Jerusalem Saturday, April 8 A.D. 30                Day
"Pontius Pilate has visitors. Once again Caiaphas and the Pharisees stand before him."                                                            256
21. Jesus's Tomb Sunday, April 9, A.D. 30                Dawn
"The morning is dark.  Dawn will soon break over Jerusalem, marking the third            
         day since Jesus's death."                                            256

Afterword "What Comes Next is the very Root of the Christian faith."            261

Postscript "Both Martin Dugard and I learned a tremendous amount while researching
         and writing this book."                                                     271

Sources "Researching and writing a book about the life and death of Jesus was
          much more daunting than either of our past two efforts."                      275

*  These dates are obvious typographical errors, but they appear this way in the book.