Jesus Dynasty / James Tabor

Through this summer I have listened to the new CD by Sinead O’Conner titled Theology many dozens of times–every chance I get. It is the most amazing collection of songs, put together with a skill, a unity of vision, and a power that one seldom encounters. I have not been moved so deeply on a spiritual level by a CD since Ten New Songs by Leonard Cohen (2005), whom I consider to be the high priest of a prophetic musical genre of this type. The power of O’Conner’s work is based on the raw power of her soul, as with all her work, but shaped, often word-for-word, by the words of the Hebrew Bible–namely Jeremiah, Isaiah, Job, and several of the Psalms, cast at times with a Jamaican flavor (Yah for Yahweh, etc.). For me at least the effect was to leave me speechless, sort of “slain in the spirit,” I think the term is, and I have no “charismatic” background or experience.

My own understanding of the message of the Jesus movement (John the Baptizer, Jesus, and James the Just) is that the group was powerfully shaped by the visionary perspective of the Hebrew Prophets (particularly Isaiah and Jeremiah) and certain of the Psalms. That vision centered on the notion of the Kingdom of God, with the will of God being realized on earth as in heaven, through a new world characterized by peace, justice, and righteousness. In my book, The Jesus Dynasty, I try to bring to the public a perspective that many scholars share–namely that there is a vast difference between the message Jesus preached and “Jesus as the message,” as touted by later “orthodox” Christians shaped by the visions of Paul. Sinead seems to have tapped into that in an extraordinary way, but without any reference whatsoever to the “person” of Jesus per se, or anything one could recognizably call distinctively “Christian,” in the later dogmatic sense of the term. I noticed that Christianity Today eagerly latched onto Sinead for an interview when the album came out, but I sensed in reading it that the content must have been quite disappointing to those who might have hoped for something more along Christian evangelical lines. Sinead clearly values her Catholic upbringing on a cultural level, and she “loves Jesus,” as a “spiritual energy,” but she is sharply critical of orthodox Christianity and clearly rejects any kind of exclusive views of Jesus.

There are two discs with eleven songs each, with mostly the same songs recorded in different settings. The first, “The Dublin Sessions” is more acoustic and simple; the second, “The London Sessions,” has a full instrumental arrangement. I much prefer the former for its vocal intimacy and expression. Each disc ends with an interview with Sinead where she talks freely about how she came to do this particular album and what it means to her. You can listen to samples at Amazon.com.

A precious fragmented copy of a portion of the lost Gospel of Peter was discovered in 1886 by the French archaeologist Urbain Bouriant, buried in the tomb of a monk at Akhmim in Upper Egypt. On the basis of the cursive script this copy dates to the 8th or 9th century CE. We don’t know how much of the Jesus story the text as a whole might have covered since this partial copy begins with a scene of Jesus’ trial before Herod and Pilate and takes one through the story of his crucifixion, burial, and a very dramatic resurrection account. It ends, rather strangely, with a second “empty tomb” story in which Mary Magdalene and her friends visit the grave and flee in fear, and the subsequent scattering of Jesus’ followers back to Galilee. There it abruptly breaks off. Whether the original text was a more complete narrative of Jesus’ career, or just an account of his last days we can’t be sure. According to Eusebius, the 4th century church historian, it was being used by the Syrian Christians around the year 200 CE, and Serapion, bishop of Antioch, raised doubts about its orthodoxy, while declaring that most of it reflected the “right teachings of the Savior” (Eccl. Hist. 6.12..2-6).

The text itself is complex and multilayered and scholars over the past 100 years have debated whether it is an independent composition or a secondary one, cobbled together in a derivative fashion from our canonical gospels. It does in fact have elements in common with Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, but also much material independent from, and in sharp contrast to, these works. That the writer is not simply taking the canonical gospels and embellishing them by building up and expanding their narratives seems clear. John Crossan and others have argued that embedded in this fragment is indeed our earliest passion narrative, dating to the mid-1st century.

I encourage readers of this Blog who are not familiar with this text to read it through, as it is readily available on-line and in various printed editions of the so-called “New Testament Apocrypha.” I highly recommend the Early Christian Writings Web site as it has not only various translations of the text, but also commentary and critical discussion. If one is interested in a printed copy I recommend The Complete Gospels, edited by Robert Miller. It has many other texts of interest including the “Signs Source” taken from the gospel of John, the Q Source, and various fragments of the Hebrew/Ebionite gospels, all in fresh new translations.

Of the many fascinating elements in this text I wanted to note one in particular that is relevant to what I have written in The Jesus Dynasty, as well as some of my recent discussions on this Blog related to the last days of Jesus.

The GPeter has a different chronological scheme from the standard and traditional Friday-crucifixion and Sunday-morning-resurrection scheme that most assume from Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. In the GPeter we are told that after Jesus died and was buried his disciples were in hiding and the Peter as narrator declares: “We fasted and sat mourning and weeping night and day until the Sabbath” (7:3). This would indicate that at least a day and a night passed between the crucifixion and burial and the arrival of the Sabbath, impossible with a traditional Good Friday crucifixion. This chronology does make sense if one assumes, as the GPeter has it, that the “Sabbath” immediately following the crucifixion at sundown was not the weekly Saturday but the annual Passover Sabbath of the 1st day of Unleavened Bread (see The Jesus Dynasty, pp. 198-200 for a chart and discussion). This fits in well with the gospel of John that says that Jesus was crucified before the Passover Seder, and that the “Sabbath” falling at sunset was a “high day” (John 13:1; 18:28; 19:31). Thus Jesus would have been crucified on a Thursday, not a Friday, buried at sundown, with the Passover “Sabbath” falling on Friday and the weekly Sabbath on Saturday. What one has then is two “Sabbaths” back-to-back.

According to the GPeter the sealed tomb of Jesus is dramatically opened by two men who descend from heaven in a blinding light on Saturday night, not Sunday morning. The stone is rolled back and while the guards watch in astonishment the two go into the tomb and lead out a third, namely Jesus, with a walking-talking cross following them. The heads of the two “reach up to heaven,” while the head of Jesus “reaches beyond the heavens,” which I take is a way of describing their ascent to heaven (9:1-3).

Early Sunday morning “Mary of Magdala,” who is, quite significantly I think, called a disciple of the Lord, comes with some friends to complete the rites of Jewish burial and mourning, completely unaware that the tomb has been opened and is empty. They encounter a young man in the tomb, just as in the gospel of Mark, who tells them Jesus is risen and gone to heaven. They flee the tomb in fear and amazement (13:1-3). A week passes, the Passover feast is over with the last of the seven days of Unleavened Bread, and the disciples return home to Galilee, with Peter and Andrew resuming their fishing. There the text abruptly ends, though the original clearly went on with some kind of closing which is now lost to us. Whether it included any appearance of Jesus in Galilee, we can’t be sure.

What I find particularly significant about these sections of the text is that like Mark it has no appearances of Jesus, the women flee the tomb, and the disciples return home to their fishing in Galilee. There are no appearances in Jerusalem—to Mary Magdalene, to Peter, or to the Twelve. Also, in this text there are really “two” empty tomb narratives, one on Saturday night, when the tomb is vacated, and the other Sunday morning when the women visit and discover it empty.

I am convinced that the GPeter does indeed preserve an independent and early version of the last days of Jesus but with dramatic miraculous embellishments inserted at a later time. But even with these fantastic elements (the flashing angels and “talking cross”), the bare narrative sequence is most interesting—both in terms of chronology and content. Notice these elements:

• Jesus is crucified on a Thursday, with double Sabbaths falling on Friday and Saturday
• The tomb is empty on Saturday night after the Sabbath is over
• The women find the empty tomb on Sunday morning and flee the scene
• The disciples return to their homes and resume their work as fishermen in Galilee

These elements correspond closely to my own reconstruction of events based on a critical reading of our canonical gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John as I present them in The Jesus Dynasty, though I did not base my conclusions on the GPeter. I think the fourth element, regarding the return to Galilee, is particularly intriguing. Most everyone has in his or her head the movie version of the post-resurrection scenes that one finds in Luke 24 and John 20 where Jesus appears to his disciples on several occasions in Jerusalem. Luke not only reports nothing of the Galilee tradition but he seems to explicitly counter it in the scene where Jesus tells his disciples to stay in the city until Shavuot/Pentecost (Luke 24:49). In contrast the Galilee tradition is all that Mark knows, and Matthew follows him wholly in that regard. John 21, which is an appended ending to that Gospel, offers a most interesting account of Jesus encountering the disciples in Galilee when they have gone back to their fishing business. It is that tradition that the GPeter also seems to know, placing the return home, as one would expect, following the seven days of Unleavened Bread at the end of the Passover holiday. If one accepts that the empty tomb visit by Mary Magdalene and the women early Sunday morning belongs to a more original or earlier strata of the GPeter, as I am convinced is the case, then we have another independent witness to this all but forgotten post-resurrection scenario with no appearances of Jesus to the disciples in Jerusalem following the discovery of the empty tomb and their return to their fishing business in Galilee. This essential outline of things is supported by Mark, Matthew, John 21, and the GPeter with the alternative Jerusalem scenario found only in Luke 24 and John 20.

Another picture worth a thousand words. This painting acquired from a private dealer in Italy in 1811 and now in the National Gallery of Art Collection in Washington, D.C., is by an unknown artist who was apparently influenced by Cimabue (1240-1302), the great Italian painter of Florence. Cimabue is known for his move away from flat and stylized Byzantine art toward a more naturalistic attempt to portray feeling and emotion. This painting with Jesus in the center, flanked by Peter and James, seems to say it all. Notice how James is almost a “twin” of Jesus, while Peter is clearly “odd man out” in terms of the way he is portrayed. Later attempts to make this “James” the fisherman are parallel to textual moves within the New Testament documents to marginalize “James the less,” whom I take to be none other than the brother of Jesus.

The late great Hebrew University scholar Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), who devoted his life to the study of Jewish mysticism and messianism has been quoted as having once said:

“Nonsense is nonsense, but the academic study of nonsense is legitimate scholarship.”

I can’t remember when or from whom I first heard this, or even if I read it years ago*, but it always stuck with me as a particularly wise observation. I find it more than appropriate to my own specialty, a historical study of the apocalyptic Jesus movement in its wider ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts. Such a study involves one in a thick complex of overlapping areas including magic and miracles, angelology and demonology, journeys to heavenly realms, revelatory epiphanies, messianism, and a range of cosmological and eschatological models of world transformation. These and many other related categories seem to have one thing in common. They involve “imagining the world” based on claims of religious experience that tend to move outside the purview of a scientific understanding of reality. Indeed, for many post-Enlightenment thinkers they involve a way of thinking about the world that can best be described as “fantasy,” or if taken seriously enough, outright delusion.

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One of the features that distinguishes The Jesus Dynasty from many other historical treatments of Jesus is the attention I give to place. By that I mean my attempt to determine if possible the locations of various sites that become the settings of the basic gospel narratives. This is particularly the case when it comes to the Last Days of Jesus in Jerusalem, that final week that includes his daily excursions into the Temple court area, the guest house where he ate his last supper, the garden of Gethsemane, the various stages of his “trial,” first before the High Priest, then Pilate, and then Herod, the place of the execution, and the location of the tomb closeby where he was temporary placed in haste. In almost every case I have reason to question the traditional sites, many of which were settled upon in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, or even later.

Over the years, in dozens of trips to Jerusalem, I have studied the various sites and their traditions and I have shifted my views over time. For example, there was a time when I was quite convinced of the validity of the late Bargil Pixner’s theories about an Essene Quarter on what is today called Mt. Zion in the southwest corner of the Old City. I am now quite sure this entire theory is incorrect. I knew Bargil well and spent many pleasant hours with him on dozens of visits to Jerusalem. I also helped him edit two of his major articles, both of which I have linked on my University Web site: Jerusalem’s Essene Gateway and The Church of the Apostles Found on Mt. Zion. I highly recommend these fascinating treatments even though I have changed my views. I have a photo from the early 1990s taken in Jerusalem where we were discussing some of these very matters. It is of great sentimental value to me. I came to love and respect Father Pixner very deeply.

I have learned from various people over the years and I have continued to refine my conclusions but Dr. Shimon Gibson, with whom I have worked on various archaeology projects since 2000, has been one of my greatest teachers in this regard. He and I still differ on a number of these “sites,” such as the location of Golgatha and the tomb where Jesus was buried (he supports the traditional location of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), but I think he is dead right about one of them, and as far as I know this is his discovery, namely the proper location of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. In fact, the more I study it the more sure I have become that this is one site in Jerusalem, as yet totally unknown to tourists and pilgrims, that we can authenitically identify with events in Jesus’ life.

Gibson locates this judgment seat of Pilate, the Roman governor, and the scene of the trial, just outside the western wall of the Old City, with the Praetorium inside the wall through a gate leading inside the palace (John 18:28). It is unlikely Pilate would be staying in the barracks of the Antonia Fortress, near the first station of the cross on the Via Dolorosa inside the Old City, which is the traditional locaton. I remember visiting that site as a teenager, my first trip to the Holy Land, maintained by the Sisters of Sion. I was profoundly moved as our tour guide narrated how Jesus was scourged and mocked in the courtyard of the Antonia, where the stone pavement, today known as the “Lithostrotos,” is still visible three meters below the present street level. Pilate, as well as Herod Antipas, who was in town for the Passover, would have been in the palaces, on the luxurious west side of the city, the royal quarters his father had built, not doing duty in the fortress barracks. I have marked the spot of the scene with a red square on this map, just to the west of the Old City wall:

Although the Oxford map does not show it, the vast palace grounds would be just inside the wall, running south the entire length to the Hinnom Valley, as I have marked here in white. In the painting below, that artist Balage Balogh did for for The Jesus Dynasty, he puts the palace grounds just inside the wall and also shows the gate leading inside to the royal grounds:

Here in the model of Herodian Jerusalem that has now been moved to the Israel Museum. You can see how the various buildings of the palace might have looked in their splendor, just inside the city wall. It was inside this area that Jesus was taken for his interrogation and scourging at daybreak the day he was executed. The crowd of his accusors waited outside, as they would be eating the Passover that evening (John 18:28).

Shimon Gibson helped to excavate this entire western wall area many years ago under Magen Broshi. He has studied it in great detail and has been able to identify its main features. Of our four New Testament gospels it is John alone who seems to know the precise topography of the scene. The way this area looks today appears in the photo below. You can still see the steps, intact from Herodian times, leading up to the platform where Pilate sat and the area where the gate led into the Praetorium. The platform was called called Gabbatha (John 19:13) and the flat stones making up the floor are still in place. Following the interrogation inside Jesus was brought back outside on this judgment seat to face his accusors. He was then taken down these steps and led to the place of crucifixion, that I believe was on the Mt. of Olives.

Balogh produced this wonderful painting that accurately reconstructs how things would have looked. He did a great deal of research on the archaeology of the site based on Gibson’s findings, as well as careful attention to clothing and other featues:

Whenever I read the gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus before Pilate, especially in the gospel of John, I have these images and pictures vividly in my mind. It is one of those rare juxtapositions between imagination, place, and text. I hope some of my readers can manage to visit this site someday. In my estimation it is truly holy ground and as yet it is pristine and untouched by church, shrine, or tourist vendor.

In the current on-line edition of Christianity Today Gary Burge of Wheaton College has a short overview of Ben Witherington’s new book, What Have They Done With Jesus? in which Witherington does his rather typical liberal vs. conservative treatment of recent historical studies written by well known academics on Jesus and early Christianity that have made it into the mass market trade publishing world. As Burge points out, Witherington is bound and determined to save Jesus from the critical scholars but at the same time to be cute and engaging with chapter titles such as: Gullible’s Travels,” “Naughty Gnostic Gospels,” “For Pete’s Sake,” “Simon Says,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” and “Hey Jude, Don’t Make It Bad.”

I was corresponding with Witherington in the last days of his writing and final editing of his book and I provided him with a prepublication copy of my book to which he devotes an special appendix, in which we find, according to Burge, “a stinging dismantling of James Tabor’s primary theses in his speculative book, The Jesus Dynasty.” Witherington had already posted his rather dense “review” of my book on his Blog in multiple parts, so I had seen it before, and in fact, he even sent me a section by section preview as he was writing it. I have had hundreds of readers contact me and ask me when I planned to “answer Witherington’s critique.”

I find it interesting that Prof. Burge considers Witherington’s treatment a “stinging dismantling” of my primary theses, though I suppose I should not at all find it surprising that Burge would characterize my work as “speculative.” After all, I do indeed “speculate” that Jesus had a human father, or that dead bodies don’t rise and walk around and eat and drink, talk to folks, and then rise up into the heavens. Therefore I assume that Jesus must have had the normal DNA that comes from a human mother and father, and that the if the tomb into which he was temporarily and hastily place after his execution was empty someone must have removed Jesus’ corpse. It is that simple. Since I know neither the father nor what happened to the body, but I do suggest a few possible speculative scenarios, I guess I have to plead guilty of “speculation.” But is there really any serious alternative? Seriously?

There are of course many things we don’t know with certainty about the historical Jesus, and when I can I try to fill in what one might reasonably suppose, and that could well be labeled speculation as well, but I think it is the “Jesus had a father” and “dead messiahs don’t come to life” assumptions that most hackle folk who take such things literally. As for the charge that Witherington has offered a “stinging dismantling” of my primary theses I must confess I find myself at a loss here. Somehow I can not imagine that anyone familiar with the areas I cover in my book would evaluate Witherington’s critique in that way. I guess it just goes to show how Evangelicals love champions, those few of their number who go out and somehow “meet the lions” on their own terms (and I am surely not even one of the lions).

I have not chosen to “answer” Witherington’s critique of my book in an explicit and direct way. I think our basic presuppositions are so very different on many issues there is simply no room for dialogue. Witherington wrote me in the course of his questioning my discussion about Jesus having a father that he believed the blood samples tested on the Shroud of Turin had strangely showed neither X nor Y chromosones, indicating that Jesus was somehow human, but without normal human blood like the rest of us with two human parents. I must admit, it took me back abit, but it also helped me to realize that in such circles the normal rules of scholarly engagement and critical discussion are suspended. On the other hand, I have responded to most of the things Witherington mentions in his critique in the many posts on this Blog, particularly the matters relating to the tombs, the ossuaries, and the matter of Jesus having a father. It is all there for those who want to go back and read a bit. Also, I like Ben personally and I really don’t want to get into a spat with him that is based upon the kinds of presuppositions that he reflects in his entire approach to the critical study of the historical Jesus.

I think my book speaks for itself and anyone who wants to carefully read it will be able to judge for themselves whether Witherington has “dismantled” my main theses as Budge seems to think. Frankly, in my experience Christianity Today is not an objective vehicle for reviewing and airing critical reflections and debate on Christian Origins. How could it be otherwise, since the end is always determined from the beginning–the very opposite of scientific and historical processes and method? Since I grew up in that world I think I tend to have less patience with it. Months ago Darrel Bock, a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, did a web review of The Jesus Dynasty for the Christianity Today web site. I thought his review was polite and respectful, but quite misconstrued in several key ways. Of the past months I have posted a number of things related to the issues he raised, but on the whole, again, I think I operate in such a different world than that of the “dismantlers” I find it hard to respond within the normal academic parameters.

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…

I hope I did not shock regular readers of this Blog in posting Pope Benedict XVI’s end of the year message regarding Mary below. I was just so very struck by the language that so well represented the stark contrast between a more historical view of Mary, or let’s call her more acturately, Miriam, the very Jewish mother of Jesus, and the theological dogma that has developed over the centuries.

It is interesting that in the time of Jesus the name “Miriam” was by far the most common name for Jewish women, honoring the sister of Moses and Aaron, and to this day, among religious Jews, Miriam remains the most common name for women.

It is surely more than odd that a historical view of Mary/Miriam, mother of Jesus, is so out of step with this theological, or perhaps more propertly, this mythological view, that is so clearly represented here by the foremost spokesperson on earth for the Christian view of things–namely the Roman Catholic Pope.

What history tells us is that Miriam, who lived and died as a Jewish woman was the mother of seven extraordinary children–Jesus and his four brothers and two sisters. They grew up in the small Jewish village of Nazareth, just south of the Hellenistic metropolis of Sepphoris. Jesus father remains uncertain, but whether Joseph was the father of his siblings, or perhaps, as I argue in The Jesus Dynasty, his brother Clophas, the Jesus family and its contributions to the Messianic movement heralded by Jesus, deserves its proper place in our historical memory.

Unfortunately, the kind of theology represented by the Pope’s message below, robs both Jesus and his brothers and sisters, not to mention the mother that bore them, of their humanity. The very concept of an asexual “mother of God” is alien and foreign to Jewish culture and to the Hebrew Bible. Such ideas, so very familiar in “pagan” Greco-Roman culture were brought into the Jesus movement decades after the death of Jesus and were unknown even to our earliest Christian witnesses–the apostle Paul, the Q source, and the gospel of Mark. They could only thrive after 70 AD when James the brother of Jesus was dead and the original Jewish followers of Jesus were scattered with little influence or effect on the increasingly Gentile movement that was growing up outside the land of Israel. It seems that just about everything was “transferred” to a heavenly realm, and the original message of the Kingdom of God, for which Jesus lived and died, was largely lost and forgotten.
Unfortunately, Miriam as the extraordinary Jewish mother of Jesus and his siblings was lost, forgotten, or outright denied. Mary “mother of God” and “queen of heaven,” a perpetual virgin, and eventually even a divine mediator to whom one could pray, became the enshrined and dominant view.

When one backs off a bit from the theology and the mythology, the ideas reflected in the Pope’s message, as pious as they might sound to some, are in fact a kind of travesty on what she was in reality–that is the Jewish mother of Jesus and his family. It is indeed commendable that so many millions of people in our time want to remember Mary, mother of Jesus–whether Catholic or Protestant, but could removing her from her own children, and all she held dear, in terms of her life and faith, by any stretch of the imagination be considered “devotion” to her memory? I have taken more “flak” and criticism for my portrayal of Mary in The Jesus Dynasty than any other single subject I cover in the entire book. And yet, ironically, I truly believe that what I presented shows honor to Mary in a way that is long overdue.

MOTHER OF GOD, INTERCEDE TO BRING PEACE AND COMFORT

VATICAN CITY, DEC 31, 2006 (VIS) - In the Vatican Basilica at 6 p.m. today, the Pope presided at the first Vespers for the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God, and the singing of the “Te Deum” of thanksgiving for the end of the year.

In his homily, the Holy Father referred to the dimension of time, saying: “In the closing hours of each solar year, we witness the repetition of certain worldly ‘rites’ which, in the modern world, are prevalently aimed at enjoyment, often experienced as escape from reality, almost as if to exorcise negative elements and propitiate improbable turns of fortune. How different must the attitude of the Christian community be, … called to live these hours by making their own the sentiments of the Virgin Mary,” so that, with her, they may present to Jesus “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted.”

” Mary’s maternity,” the Pope explained, “is at one and the same time a human and a divine event. … The Son of God was begotten by Him, and at the same time is the son of a woman, Mary. He comes from her. He is of from God and from Mary. For this reason the Mother of Jesus can and must be called Mother of God.”

Pope Benedict called upon the “Theotokos,” the Mother of God, to intercede for the world entire, entrusting to her care “situations in which only the grace of the Lord can bring peace, comfort and justice.”

“We ask the Mother of God to obtain for us the gift of a mature faith, a faith which we would like, as far as possible, to resemble her own, a clear and genuine faith, humble and at the same time courageous, saturated with hope and enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God; a faith removed from all fatalism and that aims to cooperate in full and joyous obedience to the divine will, in the absolute certainty that God wants nothing other than love and life, always and for everyone.”

Following the celebration, in keeping with tradition, the Pope visited the nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square.