Archive for the ‘Panthera’ Category

I have recounted previously on this Blog the remarkable story of my discovery of the late great Poet James Whitehead and his historical and literary interest in the sources that refer to Jesus of Nazareth as “Yeshua ben Pantera.” Whitehead, who died in 2003, co-founded the prestigious Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas with colleague and poet William Harrison. He was a wonderful poet and novelist who left many unpublished works behind due to his untimely death. Among those were his poems on “The Panther” as he called them.

Whitehead had first encountered the “Yeshua ben Pantera” references in the writings of historian Morton Smith. Whitehead ended up traveling to Germany in search of the tombstone of the 1st century Roman soldier Julius Abdes Pantera, who was from Sidon in Palestine. He ended up writing a remarkable set of poems that imagined the relationship between Jesus’ mother Mary and Pantera, who became the father of her firstborn son Jesus. As it turns out, Whitehead was not the first poet to be captured by the Panthera story. Thomas Hardy had published a long and passionately composed poem titled “Panthera.”

Just last month a lovely chapbook version of Whitehead’s Pantera poems was released by Moon City Press, edited by Michael Burns, a student of Whitehead and Professor of English at Missouri State University. It is titled simply The Panther. Prof. Burns asked me to write the Introduction, offering an historical context for Whitehead’s fascination with the Panthera story. He also shared with me a few of Whitehead’s poems. I found them profoundly moving and I was more than pleased to have a small part in the production of this wonderful project. This was one of my favorites, in which Whitehead imagined the angel Gabriel appearing to Panthera in Germany where he was stationed, just as Jesus was achieving some fame in Galilee:

GABRIEL VISITED ABDES PANTERA,
DISPLAYED HIMSELF AND SPOKE TO HIM,
BUT THERE WAS NO RESPONSE
OF ANY KIND. FIGURE WHY.

Wearing my specialty wings, the ruddy ones,
Cinquecento, I stooped through April rain
To just above the Rhine at BinKerbruck,
Shrugged, continued motioning gracefully

Toward the bowyer-archer on his shingle,
Who was done with practicing his shots
From shore to shore.
He didn’t seem to see me,
But maybe he would listen

To the four languages I knew he knew—
Sidonian Aramaic, Levantine Greek,
And of course his soldier Latin,
And finally the local whitebread German tongue.

I was so fluttering because he’s beautiful
In the sturdy way of soldier artisans—
He’s a master of composite bows,
The seven woods, sinew, bone and glue.

O I was positive he’d love the news
And the flashing bearer of it: I’m GABRIEL!
HAIL ABDES PANTERA! YOU THE MAN!
YOUR SON IN GALILEE IS MAGICAL.

I offer it here as a small taste of the wonderful talents and imagination of James Whitehead. I urge my readers to order a copy of the complete collection, it is truly an elegantly crafted work, outside and within, and reasonably priced at that. You can obtain copies for $15.00 (Missouri residents add 39¢ sales tax) plus $4.00 shipping. Checks should be made out to Missouri State University. Please order copies from the following address: Moon City Press, Department of English, Missouri State University, Springfield MO 65897. If you have had the slightest fascination with the Pantera story I know you will not be disappointed.

Of all the controversial elements in my book The Jesus Dynasty, my treatment of the Pantera traditions is perhaps the most disturbing to some Christians. I really regret that this is the case. As I have argued elsewhere, if Joseph was not Jesus’ father, and the “illegitimacy” tradition has some historical legitimacy, we can not dismiss the possibility that Jesus’ father was named Pantera. This would not have to imply something sinister or immoral, see my post “Joining the Slanders.” In fact, if Pantera were close to the age of Mary when she became pregnant he would not have even been in the Roman army at the time. We will never know the details, but as I have asked–why imagine the worse? In fact, there is some emerging evidence that Pantera was a family name and he was actually related to Mary.

I have posted quite a few other entries on this Blog related to many aspects of the Pantera discussion. Here are some of the main posts for easy reference:

Pantera as a Real Name

The Pantera Traditions

More on the German Tombstone

An Unnamed Father of Jesus

In the meantime I hope my readers will order the Whitehead book of poetry and let their imaginations have a role as we wonder about the “earthly” father of Jesus.

For years I have considered Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) one of the most moving, informative, and influential novelists of my own reading experience. I remember first reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure over 30 years ago and the images and power of those tragically realistic portrayals of human life on planet earth still remain with me today.

What I have only learned the past few weeks is that Hardy gave up writing novels after completing Jude the Obscure in 1895, and largely spent the remainder of his literary career writing poetry. Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, in 1898. In 1909 he published another volume titled Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses. Imagine my surprise, just last week, when I was told by poet Michael Burns (see previous January 8th Blog on poet James Whitehead) that this volume contained a long and passionately rendered poem called “Panthera.” Hardy apparently began to think deeply about the Panthera story as related in Celsus and other sources. I am also convinced that he was aware of the revelation, in 1906, by Adolf Deissmann, of the Panthera tombstone in Germany (see my Jesus Dynasty, pp. 65). The entire tale fired his romantic and melancholy heart.

This largely forgotten poem is amazingly executed in perfect iambic pentameter and rhymed mostly in couplets. Literary critics have found in it much to admire and evaluate in terms of its contributions to form and genre (see Renner’s lovely analysis). It chronicles the sexual and romantic love between a teenaged Mary and a Roman soldier Panthera, stationed in Palestine, but narrated from the point of view of the aging Panthera, thinking back on his life and what he has left behind. The lines are memorial and I urge readers to find the entire poem and read it themselves in the closest good library. Among those that jumped out at me:

A son may be a comfort or a curse,

A seer, a doer, a coward, a fool; yea worse…

Pantera recalls how he had first met Mary at a stopover in Nazareth, at the town spring, with touching imagery:

I proffered help to one–a slim girl, coy

Even as a fawn, meek, and as innocent.

Her long blue gown, the string of silver coins

That hung down by her banded beautiful hair,

Symboled in full immaculate modesty.

He was thoroughly taken in by her goodness and her innocence, what he calls “The tremulous tender charm of trustfulness.”

We met, and met, and under the winking stars

That passed which people earth–true union, yea

to the pure eye of her simplicity.

He leaves the country, only to return 30 years later at Jesus’ death, where he sees Mary at the crucifixion and he learns:

Though I betrayed some qualm, she marked me not;

And I was scare of mood to comrade her

And close the silence of so wide a time

To claim a malefactor as my son–

(For so I guess him). And inquiry made

Brought rumour how at Nazareth long before

And old man wedded her for pity’s sake

On finding she had grown pregnant, none knew how,

Cared for her child, and loved her till he died.

He never sees her again but a near the end Pantera offers sage advice to all who might hear:

Now glares my moody meaning on you, friend?-

That when you talk of offspring as sheer joy

So trustingly you blink contingencies,

Fors Fortuna! He who goes fathering

Gives frightful hostages to hazardry!

Hardy’s poem can surely be seen against the backdrop of his general aversion to conventional forms of religious authority and Christian tradition. However, I think it is likely more than that. He finds in the Pantera story a most apt expression of the most touching aspects of a universal humanness. Human love, separation, the uncharted life of a child, and all they might mean to one old and thinking back on it all. And who could better portray the “human all-too-human,” than the enshrined Mary, mother of God and her divine Son Jesus Christ of Nazareth. It is not just that Hardy disbelieved such orthodoxies, but more that he wanted these figures, the chief symbols of all that is heavenly and perfect and removed from our world, to end up serving that very thing–our very human existence on this planet, so fraught with uncertainties, foolishness, hope, and finally death.

Although I do not share all the details of Hardy’s vision, I do indeed find the Panthera poem profoundly moving for its human sentiments. I have to wonder if James Whitehead might have been influenced by Hardy’s work, though he surely forges his own imaginative account of things in his poems on “The Panther.” I anxiously await the time when the Whitehead corpus will be published and available for all to read. It is truly a legacy worth passing on by a great and gifted mind and heart.

I want to share an amazing story.

Not too long after the publication of my book The Jesus Dynasty in April, 2006 I heard from an old friend who shared my interest in Pantera. This friend moves in literary circles and told me that she had heard of a professor in Arkansas who had recently died who had done a wealth of research on Pantera, had traveled to Germany to study the Pantera tombstone, and had a treasure of unpublished material. I was interested but since she did not know the professor’s name or anymore details I more or less put the story out of my mind.

Last September I was in Austin, Texas as part of the Biblical Archaeology Seminar on “Lost Christianities,” as I reported at the time in this Blog, giving lectures with Profs. April DeConick of Rice University, and Charles Hedrick at Missouri State University. One of my lectures dealt with the “Pantera” tradition. It was a kind of “state of the question” report on what we can say from an historical perspective on the subject. I could have never imagined what happened next.

When Hedrick returned to Missouri State University he mentioned my book and my Pantera lecture to a colleague of his in the English department–one Michael Burns, a poet. He recalled that Burns had mentioned Pantera a few times. As it turns out, Burns had been a student of another poet, James Whitehead, at the University of Arkansas, who had died in August, 2003. In his later years, Whitehead, an accomplished poet and novelist (author of the 1971 bestseller Joiner), had become fascinated with the Pantera legend. He had come across it in Morton Smith’s 1978 book, Jesus the Magician, in which Smith comments on the Pantera tombstone in Germany, making the passing suggestion, partly tongue-in-cheek, that it is possible, though not likely, that this tombstone might be our only “genuine relic of the Holy Family” (p. 47).

Whitehead’s imagination was fired by the idea that the young Mary might have loved and become pregnant from this young man from Palestine who ended up a Roman soldier dying at age 62 on the German frontier. He traveled to Germany to visit the tombstone and contacted a couple of young German archaeologists, Peter Haupt and Sabine Hornung, who guided him in his research. Whitehead ended up writing an entire series of poems on “The Panther,” as he affectionately called his protagonist. He was also working on a dramatic documentary about his own Quest that had taken him to Germany.

Imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail “out of the blue” from Michael Burns back in late September. Burns told me the story of his late mentor James Whitehead, of Whitehead’s passion for the Mary and Pantera story, and he offered to let me look at both the poems and the drama. When I received copies a few days later I was totally “blown away” and deeply impressed by Whitehead’s work. He had somehow captured in his skillful poetic imagination a version of this ‘greatest love story never told,” that was historically plausible and profoundly moving.

Over the past few months I have learned much more about James Whitehead and the illustrious poetic circles at the University of Arkansas of which he was a part (Miller Williams, who read at Clinton’s 2nd inaugural was part of that scene). I have spoken with Michael Burns at length, talked to Gen Whitehead Broyles, Whitehead’s widow, and corresponded with Thomas Kennedy, a dear friend and colleague of Whitehead’s who had accompanied him on his trips to Germany.

The Whitehead “Pantera” material has never been published. It was given to Burns by Whitehead’s widow and he had explored various possibilities of having it published. As we talked I think we inspired one another and over the past few months we formulated a plan to bring out a special edition of this important work–a “chapbook” of the Pantera poems, with lovely illustrations by the renowned Russian artist Eric Pervuhkin. We are also exploring the possibilities of a more widely published edition. Burns will write the preface of course, and I will provide some historical background on the Pantera story, but the book will mainly contain these beautiful poems of Whitehead with some stunning illustrations by Pervuhkin. The Missouri State University Press will publish the initial collectors edition and subscribers are welcome..

I find the whole development quite fascinating, how it came to me “out of the blue,” and where it appears to be heading. And last night, while talking to Burns, he reported another discovery he had recently made. As it turns out the famous British novelist and poet, Thomas Hardy, had picked up on the Pantera story, probably from Adolf Deissmann’s publication of the tombstone in 1906, and written a long and moving poem called “Panthera” published in 1909.

More on that in my next Blog entry…

Kerry Shirts, who goes by the tag “The Backyard Professor,” has an extensive review of The Jesus Dynasty on his latest Blog. Kerry is a Christian and a Mormon, a exceptionally wide reader of books and ancient sources related to ancient Judaism and early Christianity. He has the refreshingly rare ability to profitably engage with historical materials and approaches without considering such methods of inquiry as a threat to his faith. I recommend this and other interesting posts on Kerry’s site to my readers.

I noticed this morning his Blog had already drawn one negative comment from a reader who refers to my “dubious resurrection of the Pantera legend.” This reader passes on the “solution” to the occurrence of the name Pantera as a pun on “parthenos,” (virgin), and refers Kerry Shirts to Ray Brown’s treatment of the subject in his book The Birth of the Messiah, as if that would somehow settle the question. This reader then informs us that “Pantera” is a common Roman name and asserts that the Pantera tombstone in Germany is of no more significance than one finding a tombstone today with “George” on it and concluding it was the tomb of George Washington.

I doubt if this reader has read my book, as I address this matter rather thoroughly in the chapter called “An Unknown Father of Jesus,” but beyond that, as regular readers of my Blog know, this site has become a thick archive of further research and material on the entire Pantera question, taking anyone who is truly interesting in learning and knowing the facts, far beyond these sorts of unsubstantiated assertions. I respected and knew the late Raymond Brown, and have learned much from his work, but his treatment of the Pantera subject, as is the case with many “historical Jesus” scholars, does not reflect all we now know. The Pantera/Parthenos pun idea is a recent creation and simple does not hold up to examination, and as for Pantera being a “common” name, like “George,” …well, what can I say, other than what I tell my students. Argue anything you want, but do it from a position of knowing the evidence.

Obviously the whole “Pantera” subject is a particularly sensitive issue with readers, a kind of “lightening rod” because of certain unfounded assumptions and resulting emotional reactions. Not long ago I wrote a long post trying to set the subject itself in a wider more positive context:

Joining the Slanderers

In terms of getting the facts straight on the Pantera subject itself I will highlight here some of the main Pantera materials I have put up on this site for those who are open to learning more:
Pantera as a Real Name

The Pantera Traditions

More on the German Tombstone

An Unnamed Father of Jesus

A Review Response on Pantera

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.

I wanted here to offer a few notes and observations in response to Jack Poirier’s on-line review of my book, The Jesus Dynasty on the Jerusalem Perspectives Web site. I would not attempt to respond here to the underlying theological differences between us, and how Mr. Poirier’s assumptions differ from my own as a “liberal scholar,” nor to the tone and attitude Mr. Poirier adopts in his review. I will leave that to readers of my book and of his review to judge. I do want, however, to get some facts straight in the hope of bringing some clarity to a number of points he raises.

1. Regarding the tombs and ossuaries that I discuss in the “Introduction” of my book, it is not the case that the “vast majority of scholars” have concluded that the James ossuary is a forgery, as Mr. Poirier states. First there is no dispute about the authenticity of the ossuary itself. Second, even the Israel Antiquities Authority committee did not claim the entire inscription was forged, but only that the words “brother of Jesus” were added by the owner Oded Golan. So minimally, we have an ossuary that reads “James son of Joseph.” Finally, the results of the patina tests, upon which the forgery conclusion was based, have been questioned by a number of other competent experts, most recently Prof. Wolgang Krumbein, and it remains a fact that no qualified epigrapher has yet taken the position that the inscription is forged. In fact, Ada Yardeni, one of the best in the business, has said if the ossuary inscription is a forgery she will quit her job! All of the relevant materials, pro and con, are nicely archived at the Biblical Archaeology Review Web site. If anyone cares to spend a bit of time browsing those hundreds of pages of documents it will be abundantly clear that the James ossuary and its authenticity and provenance are far from settled.

Mr. Poirier mentions a number of other points regarding the ossuary in an effort to imply that my discussion is flawed and uninformed—that I have the dimensions wrong, that the missing Talpiot ossuary is described as “plain,” so it could not have been inscribed, and that I ignore the worn rosettes on the reverse side of the ossuary. Unfortunately, Mr. Poirier, in taking me to task, seems to have not kept up with some of the most basic parameters of the discussion, whether the Krumbein report, the re-measuring of the James ossuary, or the details of when and how the missing 10th ossuary was catalogued and described and by whom. I have examined all the ossuaries I discuss, have copies of the original excavation notes of the late Joseph Gath, the excavator, and I have consulted extensively with Dr. Gibson, who was part of the original team. As far as I know what I present in my “Introduction” is accurate and if I find that I am mistaken I will gladly revise it in future editions.

It is the case that I do not attempt to adjudicate between the two tombs I discuss and their possible links to the James ossuary. I present the evidence for each to the best of my knowledge at the time I wrote and I left things open, pending further tests, whether DNA or patina. I fail to see how or why Mr. Poirier would find my presentation in any way strange or slight of hand. Unfortunately, in the world of the antiquities markets it is often the case that we simply cannot be sure of the provenance of certain items, though we can often present what appears to be best evidence. This is even true for the provenance of many of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were turned in by Bedouin in the early days of their discovery.

2. With regard to the Pantera tradition, and the dating of the birth of Jesus, Mr. Poirier has misunderstood a number of important points. I do not base my discussion of the Pantera evidence on a number of “anti-Christian” writers. To the contrary, the earliest references to Jesus as “son of Pantera” come from Jewish sources, where the name is mentioned for identification purposes, not in an effort to besmirch his reputation. Further, it is the case that early Christian writers, in responding to the anti-Christian claims, never deny the validity of the name, or that it is indeed part of the Jesus family lineage, but just that Pantera was not Jesus’ father—but his grandfather. In fact, the idea that Pantera is a play on the Greek word for virgin (parthenos), which Mr. Poirier thinks is the best explanation for the origin of the name, is a modern apologetic invention dating to the 17th century. Apparently our ancient sources took the name as a real person from the Jesus family, and now that an ossuary from a Jewish tomb in Jerusalem has been found with that name, the “pun for virgin” explanation seems rather moot. Mr. Poirier tells us that the name Pantera was popular in the Roman army, and somewhat equivalent to calling an American soldier “Joe.” I have looked at all the extant occurrences of “Pantera” in its various spelling of which I am am aware and the evidence seems to show that it is relatively uncommon, certainly under 1% in terms of standard onomastic statistics for Greco-Roman Greek and Latin names.

My date for the birth of Jesus is 5 B.C. so I am not clear as to why Mr. Poirier thinks that I challenge “the gospel’s dating of the birth narratives.” I have no idea of the details of any potential union between Mary and someone named Pantera, nor how or when he might have become a Roman soldier, and I do not connect her pregnancy with presence of the Roman legions from Syria following the death of Herod. My assumption, given the character of Mary, was that the pregnancy was honorable (see my Blog of September 29, 2006 “Joining the Slanderers”), at least in the eyes of those that mattered. My entire point on this matter is that the name should be taken seriously as a real name, referring to a person who existed, and not as a pun. Jesus’ father is unknown, but I do think he had a human father, and I felt obligated, as an historian, to lay out for readers what does survive in this regard from our ancient sources. Mr. Poirier does not tell us what he thinks in this regard, or whether he thinks that Jesus had no father at all, so it may well be that we are really pursuing very different agendas here.

We know nothing about the circumstances of Mary’s pregnancy other than the two accounts in Matthew 1 and Luke 2, and the traditions that Jesus was called “Yeshu ben Pantera,” son of a Roman soldier named Pantera. If Jesus had a human father, and Joseph, who later married his mother Mary/Miriam, was not responsible for the pregnancy, which even the Gospel accounts insist upon, then we are left with nothing but imagination.

In other words, we simply do not know the circumstances of the pregnancy. I say this in my book, The Jesus Dynasty, but I have been utterly amazed at the ugliness of some readers who can only imagine the worse when it comes to such a scenario. But why imagine the worse? Why join the slanderers? Why use words like “bastard” and “illegitimacy.” Why imagine rape and violence, or sexual looseness? One has to ask, illegitimate in whose eyes? Bastard according to whom? Matthew hints to the reader that one should be careful in judging those of the past, even those of this holy lineage of David of the tribe of Judah. What about Tamar and Rahab and Ruth and Bathsheba, each presumably the subject of slander and evil tongues in their own times? And even if the name Pantera does represent a real person, the father of Jesus, we know nothing of his life at the time he met Mary, at what age he might have joined the Roman army, or really anything at all about him–unless the German tombstone tells us a bit–and there is no way to link that Pantera to the one spoken of in Sepphoris in the 2nd century A.D.

I am a Romanticist, so I am keen on imagining the best. My reading of ancient literature convinces me that the passion of love between a man and a woman is ubiquitous in every culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. Despite societal expectations and strictures the heart has always had its ways. Why not imagine, since we are imagining, Mary and Jesus’ father deeply in love? I had someone tell me after a lecture that such ideas were anachronistic projections into the past–Marriages were arranged, individual love between couples simply did not exist as an ideal to be sought. I had to wonder what literature from antiquity this person had been reading. Why not imagine honorable motives and pure intentions? Perhaps the family objected to the whole thing? Perhaps Mary was forced to flee to her relatives? I like to imagine her firmly standing her ground and honoring the child growing within her as a gift of God.

How Joseph comes into the picture we don’t know, whether he was indeed older, or the pick of the family, or what, but he appears to be a “good man” and he can be honored for that. The father, whoever he might have been, disappears. But who knows what Mary might have told Jesus about it all, if she chose to relate to him the circumstances? He seems to have grown up under the stigma of being called “son of Mary,” with no father named, in our earliest text. But again, I prefer to imagine Mary standing firm for her choice of his father and telling him that his father was a good and holy man in the eyes of God–no matter what the wagging tongues, ancient or even modern, might imply to the contrary. Only a woman knows the inner secrets of her heart, and who and why she decides to share her bed. Maybe Mary believed in destiny, in chosenness. Maybe she raised Jesus with a sense of his specialness, his uniqueness. All of this could be the case without angels appearing and pregnancies coming from on high, like some pagan Greco-Roman tale of the god Zeus or Jupiter impregnating a woman with a “son of God.”

Because of the extraordinary character of Jesus, of James his brother, and the others in the family, I choose to imagine the best about Mary and the unnamed father of Jesus, and I am convinced, even though we can only imagine in this case, that such imagination is in the direction of the truth.

One of the most intriguing subjects in our New Testament Gospels is the near silence about Joseph, husband of Mary. If one reads the Gospels in the order in which we think they were written, that is Mark first, then Matthew, then Luke, then John, the case of the “missing Joseph” is even more obvious. It is very helpful to just set forth what is said about Joseph in each Gospel, as all of us as readers of the Bible tend to conflate and combine the various accounts in our memory. Let’s begin with Mark.
Mark
Mark contains no record of the birth of Jesus whatsoever. His narrative begins with Jesus as an adult going to the Jordan River to be baptised by John. In the entire Gospel of Mark we have only this line:

Mark 6:3 “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary”

This is the famous scene when Jesus comes back to his hometown Nazareth and the locals question him for what he has been doing.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the “silence” here and what it implies about the birth of Jesus.

Joseph is never named and no father of Jesus is alluded to at all–whether human or divine.

With no father named or even alluded to, the birth not even mentioned, and Jesus simply called the “son of Mary,” we seem to have the bare facts that hint of some kind of irregularity in terms of the paternity of Jesus.

Matthew
Matthew does have a “birth story” in which he relates the pregnant Mary, is taken nonetheless as wife by her betrothed husband to be, Jospeh.

Matt. 1:18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ was like this : When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. [v. 24b-25] And Joseph . . . took unto him his wife; and knew her not till she had brought forth a son: and he called his name Jesus.

Then the ONLY other reference to Joseph is as “the carpenter,” but he is not named, in the rejection at Nazareth scene.
Matt. 13:55 Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary?

Joseph never shows up again.

Luke
Like Matthew Luke includes a “birth story” in which Joseph is named as Mary’s fiancee. Their marriage is not mentioned but perhaps can be assumed to have followed the birth of Jesus:

Luke 1: 26-27 …the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,
to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.

Luke 2:4-5 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David; to enroll himself with Mary, who was betrothed to him, being great with child.

Luke also gives us a geneology in which he says Jesus was the “son as was supposed of Joseph,” but clearly wanting the reader to know that Joseph was not the father. He then mentions Joseph, but not by name, in the story of Jesus at age 12 traveling to Jerusalem for Passover with his parents:

Luke 2:41, 48 Now every year his parents whent to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old they went up as usual for the festival…Your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety…[Jesus] Why? Did you not know I must be in my Father’s house.

Like Mark and Matthew he has the scene at Nazareth where Jesus is rejected, and he is called “Joseph’s son.”

Luke 4:16, 22 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day…and they said, Is not this Joseph’s son?

No more references to Joseph

John
Finally in John there is no birth account, and two references to Jesus as “son of Joseph,” one by Nathanael, which seems to function in John as a prelude to the grand confession in 1:49; and again when some listeners began to question his right to Messianic claims since his common origins are well known:

John 1:44 We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, “Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.”

John 6:42 And they said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?

That is it, no other references to Joseph whatsoever and with no birth account.

This kind of evidence surely demands some kind of verdict. It is startling and noteworthy. Other than the scene at Nazareth that Mark records (and Matthew and Luke repeats, and John echoes) we have Joseph mentioned by name only in the two birth stories. Joseph is either ignored totally (Mark and John) or disappears from the scene so early on with no part in the Jesus story at all.

In my book I offer a couple of theories that build upon this phenomenon of the missing Joseph, including the common idea that Joseph died early on and was “replaced” by his brother Clophas/Alphaeus. This is only a theory and it may or may not be the case, but it does seem to satisfy some of the evidence we have regarding the references to “Mary wife of Clophas” and the brothers of Jesus beings “sons of Alphaeus.”

In the end we are left very much with the mystery of the missing Joseph and laying out the texts in this fashion I think really helps to pinpoint the problem in terms of evidence and data. I think that many Christians just assume, from the place later given to the pious Joseph in Christian tradition, that we have a lot about him, but the silence seems to me to be deafening, and indicative of something very irregular about the birth of Jesus and the paternity of the seven children that Mary bore.

I recently received the following e-mail message from a reader of my book in Germany. I thought his research and comments were worth passing along. Some of the issues he raises I have addressed in previous posts at this site, but I pass it on as is, unedited, for what it might contribute to the discussion:

A similar ‘pun theory’ like that discussed in your blog was proposed by Samuel Krauss in his award-winning work “Griechische und lateinische Lehnwoerter im Talmud, Midrasch und Targum” (2 voll., Berlin, 1898–1899, reprr. Hildesheim, 1964, 1984). He explained the name Pandera as a malapropism of pornos (paramour) which was insistantly rebutted by Immanuel Loew, with whose commentaries Krauss’ work was published (vol. 2, pp. 464, 614). Their terse arguments in a dictionary of greek loanwords in Aramaic texts seem to draw upon philological reasons like the other, the ‘parthenos-pun-theory’. Krauss later wrote that the Jewish anti-Christian polemic had made a pornogeneia (fornication birth) out of the parthenogeneia (virgin birth) (Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen. Berlin, 1902; Ndr. Hildesheim, 1994). This brings the anti-Christian polemic of the Panthera-story to the point but does not support the philological reasoning in the ‘pun-theory’.

However philology in my view provides as weak an argument against the ‘pun theory’ as it does in support of it. Satirical playing on words does not care about philological accuracy. The only persuasive argument against the ‘pun theories’ remains the frequent occurrence of the name Pantera in Latin, mainly epigraphical, sources as cited by Deissmann. He repeated his arguments in another work (“Licht vom Osten. Das Neue Testament und die neuentdeckten Texte der hellenistisch-römischen Welt“, Tübingen, 4th ed., 1923, p. 57) and added, relying on a postcard message by W.W. Baudissin, an explanation of the name Abdes which he reads as ’BD-’S, meaning “servant of Isis”. The cult of Isis, Deissmann adds, had been widespread among the Phoenecians (to which the Sidonians belonged). If this is plausible (and here strictly philological/onomastic reasoning would apply) Tib. Iul. Abdes Pantera hardly was a Jew. But at the same time there is no proof of him being a non-Jew. He might well have ‘converted’ to Judaism like many of his contemporaries, the so-called “God-fearers”. (I admittedly don’t know whether it is likely that a God-fearer keeps his gentile name after the ‘conversion’.)

An important aspect of the ‘Abdes Pantera story’, namely the history of his unit, the cohors I sagittariorum seems to be somewhat disregarded in your book but this lack occurs in all the other works I read about the Panthera-story as well. I was not yet able to trace back the claim that this cohort had been transfered from Syria to the Rhine. Deissmann only quotes an oral communication of Alfred von Domaszewski (who told him that the unit had been stationed in Syria, transfered in 6 CE. to Dalmatia and 3 years later to Bingerbrueck). This information is time and again repeated in the literature without giving any reference to sources. Obviously it would be crucial for the claim that Abdes Pantera was Jesus’ father to prove that his unit had indeed been stationed somewhere in Palestine, or, better in Galilee around Jesus’ date of birth. Lutz Greisiger

I think I have to agree with Mr. Greisiger that philological arguments are not decisive against the use of a “pun” per se, and that Deissmann’s citations of the name are more decisive. However, as I have pointed out in several posts, I still think the strongest argument against the “pun theory” for the origin of the name Pantera for Jesus’ father, and the designation “Jesus son of Pantera,” is that Christian apologists such as Origen and Epiphanius, in countering the charge took it seriously as a name, even arguing it was part of the genuine geneaological record of Jesus’ ancestors. And I also pointed out in my book that we now know of a Jewish ossuary, found in Jerusalem, with the name Pantera. This gets even closer to “home” than Deissmann’s Latin epigraphs.

On the history of the Cohort of our Sidonian Pantera I know little beyond what Deissmann reports though I too have noticed that everyone just passes on what he had by oral communcation without documentation. I am not at all convinced that Deissmann’s postcard message that Abdes=Servant of Isis is valid. I have discussed some other possibilities in various Blog posts here. Likewise I don’t think we should assume in speculating about the Sidonian Pantera is that he was necessarily already in the army around the time of Jesus’ birth. What we need to determine, and I think it can be done from evidence related to the cemetery “excavation” in 1859, such as it was, is the dating of the tombstones and thus the approximate date of Abdes Pantera’s death. I hope to be able to write something about that in future posts.

As some of you know, and as I mention in my book, The Jesus Dynasty, the most commonly accepted explanation for the tradition that Jesus is “son of Pantera” is that the word pantera is a pun for the Greek word parthenos or “virgin” in Greek and not a “real name.” In other words, the Jewish enemies of Jesus were making fun of the idea of Jesus being the “son of a virgin” by called him the “son of a panther,” or a lusty animal.

I am amazed at how this explanation, which I consider to be wholly without any historical or linguistic basis, has become so widespread. I can’t tell you the number of reviewers of my book who have matter-of-factly pointed out, apparently Dr. Tabor is not even aware of the origin of this term and mistakenly thinks it might refer to an historical person! Even major scholars pass on the explanation as if the matter is settled. I think many of them have been influenced by Joseph Klausner, the Israeli/Jewish scholar whose book Jesus of Nazareth (published in Hebrew in 1929) was one of the earliest treatments of Jesus in the light of Jewish sources. As I have pointed out in previous posts on this Blog, as well as in my book, Adolf Diessmann in 1906 showed conclusively that the name “Pantera” is a real name, and further, that it was favored by Roman soldiers.

So the question arises–where did the pantera=parthenos explanation originate? I knew it was not ancient but I was not sure how far it went back since no one who uses it ever gives a source, but just passes it on as if it is self-evident. Recently one of my graduate students, Chad Day, who is independently working on Jewish traditions about Jesus in antiquity, passed on the following to me. I want to thank him for his good sleuthing work, though we are not sure we have yet arrived at the one person who first came up with the “pun” explanation. Here is what Chad Day sent on to me:

The Parthenos pun explanation seems to go back at least to Nitzsch and Bleek (Nitzsch, K. I. “Appendix to Bleek.” Page 116 in Studien und Kritiken zur Theologie und Philosophie. Edited by J. Frauenstadt. Berlin: Voss, 1840). Nitzsch (Nitzsch, Karl Immanuel, 1787-1868) seems to be the one that influenced Joseph Klausner.I found this in Heinrich Laible’s “Jesus Christus im Talmud,” 1893. Interestingly, as one of the most rabid Christian apologists (as well as cunningly anti-Semitic) of the bunch of turn-of-the-century scholars commenting on Pantera, Laible finds Nitzsch’s argument about the Parthenos pun totally unconvincing, primarily on philological grounds. However, he does not mention whether this pun business was initiated by Nitzsch. I seem to recall in my recent reading that they did in fact receive this “explanation” from another source (and one which was probably apologetic in some modern fashion). You are quite right that such explanations do often become consensus overnight without any serious investigation, or in this case, perhaps philological logic.

Klausner does indeed take this “pun explanation” right from Nitszch and Bleek (see p. 24, Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth), thus propagating the idea even more widely, because his work was published in English in 1957, whereas the important work of Krauss and Strack on this issue was not available to the English-speaking world. Strack (Die Haretiker, 1913) is still only in German. Part of the Krauss volume of course was presented by Horbury just a few years ago, but the consensus explanation is now firmly implanted, especially since Klausner offhandedly remarks that Herford’s (1903) argument against this pun is unconvincing.

Another interesting aspect of this consensus has to do with the intended audience (and thus this speaks to bias) of Klausner’s now famous treatment of Jesus, namely that he wrote for a “Hebrew” audience. I would argue that this gave his formulations a certain credibility over against Herford’s lenghty (and sometimes anti-Semitic) treatment and conclusions. This business of “overnight” consensuses on some issues is grounded in decidedly unscientific (as well as unscholarly) assertions. Apparently Nitasch attempted to read the Greek panthera as the equivalent of Latin lupa–which means “she-wolf” or “prostitute,” thus making the epithet (or what we are calling the “pun”) “Son of the Prostitute.” Now Nitzsch (and later Klausner) wants to understand this pun as an anti-Christian slogan in response to the early Christian practice of calling Jesus by the title, “Son of the Virgin.” The problem is that we have not even one example of this practice in order to give warrant to the notion that such an experssion became the basis for punning a counter-slogan? This “pun” seems to be thoroughly modern, and frankly, quite apologetic, from those who want to dismiss the “Jesus son of Pantera” designations as having any possible historical basis. Nonetheless, from Celsus through Epiphanius as well as the Rabbis (i.e., second through the fifth century), Panthera was understood as a name of a person, not merely a noun or adjective. In fact, some of the Church Fathers go to great lengths to “explain away” this name as it concerns the historical figure of Jesus. And Deissman, just 100 years ago, should have effectively laid to rest the notion that the name Pantera is a made-up pun.

Thanks to Chad Day for this information.