This book was brought to our attention by a previous book we read and we decided to read it. The author could have picked a better title than “The death of Jesus.” We had a feeling that this would not present anything new, but still we read it. After all, we do not have much hope to find the actual truth after two thousand years of lies and deceit.

Author

The author was a Joel Carmichael (1915 – 2006), an American historian, magazine editor, and translator.

Publication notes

The book was published by the Macmillan Company, New York, 1962. We obtained a first edition with a beautiful dust cover.

Book cover

Introduction

The book explores the historical Jesus and then the Biblical Jesus side by side. This has been done is many books we have read so it was not any surprise when this author did the same exact thing. Most the information seems like it has been copied from other books which is normally the case with anything history related. Of course, you cannot invent history, unless you are a gospel writer or if your name happens to be Soul, then you can create, invent, and sell history wholesale.

Summary of content

The book is a standard Jesus book, same as any other we have read that goes through very elementary information at first, then dives into the origins, myths, history, and lets not forget, the Jews. We have read many books such as this one and from the title we gathered that this book might shed some new light on the subject of death for Rabbi J. This book does not give any new information, it just expands of what is already there. To sum it up, this book is a list of contradictions in the Bible and nothing else.

Analysis

Q. What is said about the Gospel of John and others?

A. Page 1. This gospel is most theological and only shows at best 3 years of Jesus’ adult life. The other three only cover two months or less. If we collect all the saying of Jesus, it would have taken him two weeks to utter.

Q. How is it that so many books have been written on Jesus with so little information about him?

A. Page 2. It is obviously the very scantiness of the material that has enabled so many books, expressing so many divergent views, to be written: an abundance of information would have restricted the possibilities. It has become a fashion to contrive highly speculative and fanciful accounts from biographical fragments in the Gospels.

When you have scarce information about any subject, then your mind tends to wander into the realm of mystery, after which you can create ideas, manufacture theories, develop conjecture, and regurgitate myths to fill in the blanks. The finished product will have no validation nor elimination process, ready for the public to thumb-suck for eternity. This is the reason when you ask a Christian any difficult question, the answer is almost always, “it is a mystery, you just have to believe it.”

Q. What was the transformation of Jesus?

A. Page 3. Jesus as a historical personage was entirely obliterated by his transformation into the devotional lodestone of the early Christian community.

Q. Do the Dead Sea Scrolls help in solving the mystery of Jesus?

A. Page 5. The Dead Sea Scrolls do not describe any events that focus on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most were written and copied before Jesus began his ministry for devout Jews and do not mention Jesus directly. We are, again, left with the Gospels with their various contradictions for the earthly and historical life of Jesus. Even if you use vast amount of rejected Gospels for information, it also will not be considered credible due to the stigma they carry of early rejection by the council which formulated the books of the Bible.

Q. What is the best way to describe the Gospels?

A. Page 7. They are fascinating jumble of puzzles, contradictions, gaps, hints, and suggestions.

Q. What are the contradictions?

A. Page 8. Jesus is presented as the quintessence of goodness, yet he arouses an incomprehensible malevolence in his people that brings him to a cruel death.

He is called eternal and divine, yet detailed genealogies are given connecting him to with the Jewish royal house. He has a mother, four brothers and two sisters who think him out of his mind.

He is a teacher but teaches in parables that his disciples don’t even understand, and are forbidden to communicate.
p. He pretends to be meek and then says he is greater than Solomon and sits at the right hand of god.

He forbids the use of invective, yet he is constantly excoriating his opponents.

Baptism is made much of, yet Jesus never baptized anyone himself.

We seem to be lost without a compass with this man’s ambivalent behavior.

Q. What happened to the true followers of Jesus?

A. Page 11. Two sects emerged: 1) the sect that followed the message of Jesus and kept the Law and were Jews with the acceptance of Jesus, yet not a divine being but as a messenger, 2) the sect of the gentiles that did not follow the Jewish Law and made Jesus into a divine being. During the destruction of the Jewish state in the year _A.D. 70, the second sect did not participate in fighting of their own people —the Romans—, because of this the second sect survived and carried on while the true followers of Jesus were wiped out.

Another thing to remember is that the original sect had three enemies, they had the Jews as their enemy for accepting Jesus, they had the gentile group as an enemy for rejecting Jesus as god, and they had the heathen Romans to deal with. The second sect was quite safe from the Jews because they were Roman citizens and could not be harmed by the Jews, they just had to deal with the heathen Romans who eventually were won over by the gentiles later on.