The Jesus Dynasty / James Tabor

One of my graduate students, Chad Day, who has been working on the Pantera materials in antiquity, recently reminded me of the treatment of the Pantera tradition by the late and great Hugh J. Schonfield, a somewhat maverick UK scholar and author of the best-selling The Passover Plot, just re-released in a special 40th anniversary edition. I had read this years ago and forgotten his reconstruction, which I think is certainly worth considering. I will paste in here Mr. Day’s summary of Schonfield’s point, taken from his work, now unfortunately out of print, titled According to the Hebrews: A New Translation of the Gospel According to the Hebrews (1937):

Schonfield (According to the Hebrews, 142-50) offers an intriguing explanation which dovetails nicely with Tabor’s discussion of Luke’s genealogy (The Jesus Dynasty, 48-56) and also avoids any alleged wrongdoing on the part of Mary. Passing over the putative philological rationalization of Pandera as an Aramaic transliteration of the Greek Panthēra, Schonfield takes Panthera as a family name, stemming from the great-grandmother of Jesus: Estha who, upon the death of Matthan (Matthew’s genealogy; or Matthat in Luke’s), married a Syrian convert to Judaism by the name of Melchi, from the family Panthera (cognomen). So, for Schonfield, this matches both the reference in Epiphanius and John of Damascus of a Barpanther. This also places Jesus in the line of Nathan. Schonfield argues that, since Jesus’ (northern Gentile) heritage would have been frowned upon, many Jewish opponents began calling him by his family name instead of Jesus the Nazarene.
Schonfield adduces two texts for support of his hypothesis:
1) b. Sanh. 106a – “…she came of rulers and princes, but she prostituted herself for carpenters” (noting the confusion over the correct generation during this Gentile blood came into Jesus’ line);
2) Teaching of Jacob (634 CE) – “…she is the daughter of David and not Theotokos, for Mary is a woman, daughter of Joakim, and her mother was Anna. Now Joakim is son of Panther, and Panther was brother of Melchi, as the tradition of us Jews in Tiberias has it, of the seed of Nathan, the son of David, of the seed of Judah.”

Here we find an explanation (albeit speculative) that undermines the Parthenos Pun without recourse to an illegitimate birth of Jesus by a certain Panthera (Roman soldier or not).

My own research on the entire Pantera tradition is leading me more and more in these directions, namely that Pantera is indeed a family name, part of the line of Mary, that traced it’s ancestry to King David, but through Nathan rather than Solomon. The fact that we now have a Jewish ossuary in Jerusalem with the name Pantera, and the earliest traditions that make Pantera a member of the family, leads me to believe that whatever else we might say of Jesus’ father, this mysterious “Pantera,” whether Roman soldier or not, he was likely part of the family. This changes rather drastically the more common “Pantera” scenario, that posits the father of Jesus as an alien figure, completely removed from the family, who somehow forced his way into the world of Jesus’ mother Miriam.

Speaking of Schonfield, although I do not agree with the main thesis of his most famous book, The Passover Plot, namely, that Jesus never actually died and was revived in the tomb after the crucifixion, his lifelong work on Christian Origins, in a dozen books, plus his truly amazing translation of the New Testament (The Authentic New Testament, also sadly out of print), I greatly value. My favorite of them all is Those Incredible Christians, but all of his works, from the 1930s on, are of incredible value. I have collected them all over the years, even in the out of print editions. There is a nice summary with many links of his work on Wikepedia.

I should also mention a personal note here. I corresponded with Hugh Schonfield in the last years of his life, in the 1970s. I was a lowly graduate student at the University of Chicago and he was the seasoned and most famous scholar, but he wrote me long handwritten letters which I treasure to this day, generously offering me research ideas and feedback on my work on Paul which became my dissertation. He had given away all of his money to charitable causes and the idea to which he was most committed was laid out in his last book, The Politics of God. Dr. Schonfield became fired with the possibilities of applying the ancient Messianic ideal of a “Servant nation” to the modern world. He formed what was called the Mondcivitan Republic, or “The Commonwealth of World Citizens,” the remnants of which now survive him in the work of Hugh and Helene Schonfield World Service Trust. I highly recommend a bit of browsing at this most interesting and cause-worthy site.