Oh, Jesus! Bill O' Reilly's Next Book Is Going to Be About the Killing of a Carpenter from Nazareth

Fox star and makeshift historian Bill O’Reilly has unveiled the subject of his next book, “Killing Jesus: A History,” which in December he teased would be “a blockbuster of epic proportions.” O’Reilly, who has clearly developed a formula for his best-selling historical “thrillers,” will follow up his “Killing Lincoln” and “Killing Kennedy.”

But both came under serious fire. As former Salon politics editor Jefferson Morley pointed out, O’Reilly fabricated a story in “Killing Kennedy,” saying he heard an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald commit suicide when, in fact, O’Reilly did not. And Justin Elliott has noted that O’Reilly’s Lincoln assassination account was so grossly inaccurate that the historic site, the Ford Theater, refused to sell the book on its premises “because of the lack of documentation and the factual errors within the publication.”

It remains to be seen how O’Reilly will spin what publisher Henry Holt and Co. describes as the retelling of “the story of Jesus of Nazareth as a beloved and controversial young revolutionary brutally killed by Roman soldiers,” adding that “O’Reilly will recount the seismic political and historical events that made his death inevitable, and the changes his life brought upon the world for the centuries to follow.”

The book is due to hit shelves on Sept. 24.