Killing Jesus

The retelling of Jesus’s crucifixion and death, as horrific as it was, is a never-ending process as new information comes to the surface — be it via excavations or digging deeply into lesser known documents. In the case of Killing Jesus, O’Reilly and Dugard did just that. Though much of their research pointed to fastidiously detailed Roman documents, it comprised of a plethora of resources, particularly of the behind-the-scene political struggle, not widely known or at the very least not yet documented for the public to read, until now.

O’Reilly and Dugard do an exceptional job storytelling, but in this account of Jesus’s life, they have incorporated the lives of Roman leaders whose empirical influence not only greatly affected life in Jerusalem that pre- and post-dated Jesus’s time, but especially the power struggles not always captured in the Gospel accounts that occurred concurrently during his childhood, youth, and as an adult — above all, at the time of his eminent arrest, crucifixion, and death.

Killing Jesus is “a violent story,” but well worth the read, and definitely earmarked as a welcomed addition to the historical collection of that time period.