More on Pantera…from author and researcher Joseph Raymond
I thought this piece by Joseph Raymond, author of Herodian Messiah was well worth reading in the light of the posts I have put up recently on the “Panthera” traditions. There is more to come from my end of things but I want to recommend this as a supplement to what I have been presenting. Thanks to Joseph for his good and solid research. One point I think is important to make is that the early Church Fathers, in dealing with the Pantera “tag,” accept it as a family name within Jesus’s lineage! This should be factored in. In other words, our soldier boy Pantera, if he was the father, might have been already part of the family…Then there is the tomb in Jerusalem, the ossuary, with Pantera as a name–clearly a Jewish tomb of the period. Both these points show that the name in Greek is not so alien to Jewish culture at the time, and even closer, to the family names of Jesus’ lineage, both from the Miriam and Yosef sides of the family.
