Bryan Bruce is a Wellington-based documentary maker who has written Jesus: the Cold Case to accompany a documentary of the same name. Fittingly for a film-maker, the book comes generously illustrated with maps, diagrams and colour photographs.

The book also comes with considerable hype. The cover blurb tells us that it seeks to solve "the ultimate cold case: who killed Jesus and why?" and it was released at Easter for maximum impact.

The title is a giveaway. By calling this a "cold case" it is clear that a huge assumption is being made, namely that we don't know the answers to the questions "who killed Jesus and why?" or (more accurately) that the answers we've been given for twenty centuries are wrong.

And so it proves. Bryan Bruce's thesis is that the Gospels are totally unreliable as historical records and in fact present a deliberate lie. The Gospel writers were intent on currying favour with the Romans in order to alleviate the persecution that Christians were suffering at the hands of Rome. Therefore they misrepresented the events of Jesus' crucifixion to make the Jews blameworthy and present the Roman Governor, Pilate, as a hero who seeks to free Jesus. The Gospel writers are thus guilty of an anti-Semitism that leads directly to Nazism and the death chambers of Auschwitz.

To some this will seem like more tiresome revisionism of the type we are well used to from John Spong and others. And it is no surprise that Bryan Bruce's two main authorities for his assessment of the New Testament are Bishop Spong and the members of the radical Jesus Seminar.

Bruce knows that the methodology and conclusions of the Jesus Seminar are highly debatable, but shows not the slightest interest in examining their credibility. So much for a balanced, unbiased investigation. It quickly becomes apparent that this was never the intention.

It is impossible to give credence to a book which simply ignores mainstream biblical scholarship. To take but one example, no one in this field can sustain any credibility without coming to terms with Richard Bauckham's landmark book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, which argues, with huge learning, that the four canonical Gospels are based on the eyewitness testimony of those who personally knew Jesus.

Not only does Bruce's book lack credible scholarly foundations, it is also built largely on speculation. Repeatedly statements begin with "My guess is that..." or "I'm picking that ..." Argument proceeds by supposition - the triumphal entry into Jerusalem could not have happened because Pilate would not have allowed it; Jesus could not have debated with the Sadducees and Pharisees in the days before his arrest because they would not have stooped to engage with him.

There are numerous arguments from silence - Paul doesn't mention Judas, so Judas didn't exist. Theological questions are explicitly avoided; they apparently have no bearing on why someone claiming to be the Son of God should die. Evidence which doesn't fit the book's thesis is simply denied: the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin was illegal, so it can't have happened because the Jewish leaders would never have broken their own law.

The case for the Gospels being anti-Semitic is based entirely on the references to "the Jews" (especially in John's Gospel) in the accounts of Jesus appearing before Pilate. However, it is very clear that the phrase applies there to the Jewish leaders and the crowd that has been incited by them, not to all the Jews as Bruce claims. Incidentally, it is also a little hard to see how a religion whose founder, apostles, first adherents, and Scriptures are all Jewish could be called anti-Semitic.

Jesus: the Cold Case is shallow, speculative and unconvincing. It is also cheaply journalistic in tone - John the Baptist is referred to derisively as "John the Plunger"; the apostle Paul was Christianity's greatest "salesman"; and Jesus' cleansing of the temple was a "temper tantrum". At times it descends to the crass - James and John, the "sons of thunder," were perhaps "two brothers with flatulence problems".

Finally the book breaks down into incoherence. Its central thesis depends on the Gospel picture of Pilate being seen as sufficiently heroic to placate later anti-Christian sentiment amongst the Romans. Yet Bruce himself admits that the Pilate we see in the Gospels is a "weak and vacillating" figure. Perhaps we've had the true solution to this "cold case" for twenty centuries after all.

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