Who Killed Jesus

Millions of readers have thrilled to bestselling authors Bill O'Reilly and historian Martin Dugard's Killing Kennedy and Killing Lincoln, page-turning works of nonfiction that have changed the way we read history. The basis for the 2015 television film available on streaming. Now the iconic anchor of The O'Reilly Factor details the events leading up to the murder of the most influential man in history: Jesus of Nazareth. Nearly two thousand years after this beloved and controversial young revolutionary was brutally killed by Roman soldiers, more than 2.2 billion human beings attempt to follow his teachings and believe he is God. Killing Jesus will take readers inside Jesus's life, recounting the seismic political and historical events that made his death inevitable - and changed the world forever.

The death of Jesus is one of the most hotly debated questions in Christianity today. In his massive and highly publicized The Death of the Messiah, Raymond Brown -- while clearly rejecting anti-Semitism -- never questions the essential historicity of the passion stories. Yet it is these stories, in which the Jews decide Jesus' execution, that have fueled centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. Now, in his most controversial book, John Dominic Crossan shows that this traditional understanding of the Gospels as historical fact is not only wrong but dangerous. Drawing on the best of biblical, anthropological, sociological and historical research, he demonstrates definitively that it was the Roman government that tried and executed Jesus as a social agitator. Crossan also candidly addresses such key theological questions as "Did Jesus die for our sins?" and "Is our faith in vain if there was no bodily resurrection?" Ultimately, however, Crossan's radical reexamination shows that the belief that the Jews killed Jesus is an early Christian myth (directed against rival Jewish groups) that must be eradicated from authentic Christian faith.

The popular Patheos blogger wants to restore the cross as primarily a symbol of God’s overwhelming love for us and to rescue Christians from the shame and guilt from seeing our situation as “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” which was an invention of the medieval church and became enshrined as orthodox Christianity. Many Christians believe that God the Father demanded his only Son die a cruel, gruesome death to appease His wrath, since humanity is so irredeemably sinful and therefore repugnant to God. Tony Jones, popular progressive Christian blogger, author, and scholar, argues that this understanding is actually a medieval invention and not what the Bible really teaches. He looks beyond medieval convictions and liberates how we see Jesus’s death on the cross from this restrictive paradigm. Christians today must transcend the shame and guilt that have shaped conceptions of the human soul and made us fearful of God, and replace them with love, grace, and joyfulness, which better expresses what the cross is really about. How we understand the cross reflects directly what kind of God we worship. By letting go of the wrathful God who cannot stand to be in our presence unless he pretends to see Jesus in our place, we discover the biblical God who reaches out to love and embrace us while “we were yet sinners.” Jones offers a positive, loving, inclusive interpretation of the faith that is both challenging and inspiring. Did God Kill Jesus? is essential reading for modern Christians.

Explore this stunning quality of God’s grace: It never ends! In this revision of a foundational work, John Piper reveals how grace is not only God’s undeserved gift to us in the past, but also God’s power to make good happen for us today, tomorrow, and forever. True life for the follower of Jesus really is a moment-by-moment trust that God is dependable and fulfills his promises. This is living by faith in future grace, which provides God's mercy, provision, and wisdom—everything we need—to accomplish his good plans for us. In Future Grace, chapter by chapter—one for each day of the month—Piper reveals how cherishing the promises of God helps break the power of persistent sin issues like anxiety, despondency, greed, lust, bitterness, impatience, pride, misplaced shame, and more. Ultimate joy, peace, and hope in life and death are found in a confident, continual awareness of the reality of future grace.

"Christian and Jewish scholars respond to the role of Gospel texts (particularly Lenten readings) in fostering anti-semitism"--

Nothing is more important than what a person believes about Jesus Christ. To understand Christ correctly is to understand the very heart of God, Scripture, and the gospel. To get to the core of this belief, this latest volume in the Foundations of Evangelical Theology series lays out a systematic summary of Christology from philosophical, biblical, and historical perspectives—concluding that Jesus Christ is God the Son incarnate, both fully divine and fully human. Readers will learn to better know, love, trust, and obey Christ—unashamed to proclaim him as the only Lord and Savior. Part of the Foundations of Evangelical Theology series.

The gospels and ancient historians agree: Jesus was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, the Roman imperial prefect in Jerusalem. To this day, Christians of all churches confess that Jesus died 'under Pontius Pilate'. But what exactly does that mean? Within decades of Jesus' death, Christians began suggesting that it was the Judaean authorities who had crucified Jesus--a notion later echoed in the Qur'an. In the third century, one philosopher raised the notion that, although Pilate had condemned Jesus, he'd done so justly; this idea survives in one of the main strands of modern New Testament criticism. So what is the truth of the matter? And what is the history of that truth? David Lloyd Dusenbury reveals Pilate's 'innocence' as not only a neglected theological question, but a recurring theme in the history of European political thought. He argues that Jesus' interrogation by Pilate, and Augustine of Hippo's North African sermon on that trial, led to the concept of secularity and the logic of tolerance emerging in early modern Europe. Without the Roman trial of Jesus, and the arguments over Pilate's innocence, the history of empire--from the first century to the twenty-first--would have been radically different.