This post is a followup to the previous one where I recount 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 He was a wonderful poet and novelist who left many unpublished works behind due to his untimely death.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.”

I am holding in my hands this 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 most easily through Amazon or Barnes&Noble.  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. 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 worst? There is evidence, as I have covered in previous posts, that Pantera was a family name and that he was therefore related to Mary.

I hope my readers will order the Whitehead book of poetry and let their imaginations run wild as we wonder about the “earthly” father of Jesus.

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.

Later that year I conducted a Biblical Archaeology Seminar in Austin, Texas on “Lost Christianities,” 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 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 next few months I 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.

I will offer an excerpt from the published book of Whitehead poetry in the next post.

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. One of my former graduate students, Chad Day, who was 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 reports:

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.

Jesus was born of a woman, of that everyone but the most extreme docetic Gnostic would seem to agree. But how was it that Mary became pregnant?

There are three basic positions that have been offered in response to the two birth stories we get in Matthew and Luke: 1) Jesus had no human father; 2) Jesus is in fact the biological son of Joseph; 3) Jesus is the biological son of an unnamed male under unknown circumstances.

The first option takes us out of the realm of history into the arena of myth and symbol and even those who would take the reports in Matthew and Luke literally, that Mary became pregnant without a male, would have to admit that such “divine” conceptions are otherwise known to us in a host of Greco-Roman stories of the supernatural births of heros, demi-gods, and divine men, sired by Gods. Generally speaking such tales tend to be alien to most forms of ancient Judaism, other than tales of humans who are the offspring of “angels,” which do appear to stem from similar conceptual realities. One can hardly expect a modern historian to take such reports as matters of serious and rational investigation.

As I point out in my book, The Jesus Dynasty, one possible purpose of the “virginal conception” story in Matthew and Luke is to affirm the “divine” origin of Jesus–that he is in some special way the “Son of God” in that his conception is not through any human male. It is entirely possible that this is all one should derive from those stories. Thus we are left with the choice of taking the tale literally or metaphorically. Either way the “virgin conception” of Jesus would be a way of expressing the extraordinary nature of Jesus.

One might well leave it at that and most historians would opt for the most simple explanation–since Mary is eventually wedded to Joseph, whatever the circumstances, he is the most likely father.

However, there are some of us who are intrigued with the core of the Matthean/Lukan story–namely, that Mary becomes pregnant before her union with Joseph and though he goes ahead with the marriage he is not the father. Jane Schaberg has probably offered the most extensive argument for this option in her excellent study, The Illegitimacy of Jesus (Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). I highly recommend this book although I differ in the end with Jane’s conclusions.

Although the “Jesus son of Pantera” sources, dating from the 2nd century AD, offer a “name” of a father, this option itself does not need to have any connection to a Roman soldier, Pantera or otherwise. The notion of an unnamed and unknown father of Jesus is worth considering on its own rights.

Here, of course, we enter the realm of pure speculation, since those of us who are inclined to the view that Jesus had a human father, and Joseph took Mary as his wife, despite her pregnancy before their union, know absolutely nothing about the circumstances of the pregnancy. It is even possible that Matthew and Luke’s report that Mary became pregnant while betrothed is an invention of these writers to bolster the case that God must have been the father. After all, who could accuse such a pious woman as the mother of Jesus of immorality? And would that not make Jesus a bastard or mamzer? Schaberg has even suggested that Mary might have become pregnant by rape, but the birth is “sanctified” by God (and Joseph!) as an act of unconditional love and grace.

I am inclined to the view that Joseph was not the father and that Jesus faced throughout his life the sigma of not having his father around, as well as rumors that his mother had acted immorally. But as we try to imagine possible circumstances leading to Mary’s pregnancy before her union with Joseph (which was after Jesus’ birth according to Luke), it is entirely possible that she evaluated the father and the pregnancy as something moral and righteous and taught Jesus growing up that his birth was honorable and sanctioned by God. Perhaps her parents had intended that she marry Joseph, who might have been older, and she had come to be attached to another. Maybe she had her own ways of processing the resulting scandal of her pregnancy than that of a “fallen woman” who had succumbed to sexual immorality. If there was such a father he seems to have disappeared from the picture and we can know nothing with certainly about him. In our earliest report of “the family,” in Mark 6, Jesus is simply the “son of Mary.” Joseph is never mentioned anywhere in Mark, nor is any other father. I think it is potentially very important to consider the potential psychological effects upon Jesus that this view of his circumstances implies: growing up “fatherless” in that society, but believing in his “divine” calling, honoring his mother as a pious woman, and facing the scorn of society. There are prophetic passages with which Jesus identified that fit like a glove–was he not indeed one “despised of the nation” but destined to rule over all Israel, and the entire world? Was he not the “stone” which the builders rejected, destined to become the chief cornerstone?

The matter of Pantera is an entirely separate issue. Those who scoff at the story having any possible historicity are mistaken I think to take the “slanderous” version, passed on by Celsus, as the most likely tale. By that time the “Jesus on of Pantera” story had become the tale of the Roman soldier seducing Mary. Why give that any historical value whatsoever? It is late, legendary, and derivative. The two elements that might be historical are the “name” itself, and the fact that this name is apparently a favorite of Roman soldiers. Thus the case of Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, who died in Germany sometime in the 1st century AD, simply offers us a model to think about. Whoever Jesus father might have been, and at whatever age, he well might have subsequently ended up in the Roman army–thus serving as a basis of the garbled story that Celsus passes on, expanded in later medieval Jewish tales that get more and more outrageous. In that sense I have resisted the facile summaries of my book as “claiming that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier.” That charge alone hardly covers the range of possibilities and even probabilities.

My inclination, and I choose this word deliberately, because no one really knows, is that Jesus was born of an unknown father, in unknown circumstances, and that Joseph takes Mary as his wife despite her pregnancy by another. My assumption is that neither Mary nor Jesus considered his conception as an immoral act but somehow destined and sanctioned by God. And finally, yes, I think it is possible that the father’s name was Pantera–whether such a one is known or unknown to us.

I just returned from meetings in Jerusalem with Dr. Shimon Gibson and we wanted to give everyone an update in these waning days of 2010 about the exciting plans we have for Mt Zion and related projects in the coming year 2011.  As most of you know we did not actively dig at our Mt Zion site during 2010 as we felt we needed to devote the year to catching up on our post-excavation work as required by the Israel Antiquities Authority and at the same time put in place a “business plan” that would allow for the proper funding of our Projects into 2011 and beyond. Let me first update you on the latest news and then outline our plans for 2011 and beyond:

News in 2010:

1. Please find attached a preliminary report: GibsonMtZion, on the first three years of digging at the Mt Zion site that has just been published, ably produced by Dr. Shimon Gibson. It offers an illustrated overview of our work in which many of you had a part (either directly or through financial support), as well as a special report on the Stone Vessel with the ten lines of cryptic Hebraic text. This will bring everyone up to date as to where we find ourselves at this point in time.

2. This inscribed Stone Vessel is clearly one of the most exciting archaeological finds in recent times. Although it has not yet been fully deciphered it has caused sufficient buzz and interest in Jerusalem that the Israel Museum took charge of its complete restoration (see photos in the article) and it will be featured in a forthcoming article in Biblical Archaeology Review. Shimon Gibson, Stephen Pfann, and I are working directly with editor Hershel Shanks on this. That feature article will also cover the importance of the Mt Zion dig as a whole and should give our dig tremendous public exposure.

3. Recently Shimon Gibson discovered in the Armenian properties on Mt Zion all the finds and field notes from the 1970s Magen Broshi excavations! These had been presumed lost. This means we now have the materials taken from our site before we began our work in 2007, plus lots of other priceless materials from other areas on upper Mt Zion. Gibson has been given custody of these materials and has been sorting through them as the bags and labels are badly deteriorated. This essential work has to be given high priority and the finds are amazing including painted frescos, materials from the Roman 10th legion occupation of Jerusalem, and intact vessels. These are all related to our wider Mt Zion expedition project as we have in mind digging, eventually, not just at our site below Zion Gate, but on the Greek and Armenian properties as well. Many of you have heard me speak of our current site being just a “toehold” for explorations of Mt Zion as a whole.

4. The municipality of Jerusalem is installing a new sidewalk and garden area just adjacent to our site and running along the wall. We have to undertake emergency excavations there by the end of February in order for the building to go forward. They have temporarily halted construction until we can complete our work so we will need to do it with hired workers under the supervision of our Jerusalem team. This is good news because the builder will not only have to replace our fence, which they have partially taken down/damaged during the construction, but it gives us a chance to find the ancient Gate that we know ran just below the tower where the sidewalk was along the wall. This will then be covered over with a walkway, preserving the remains below for tourists to view. We have to pay the costs of the excavation but the rest will be covered by the city of Jerusalem.

Plans for 2011:

1. We will be launching in January, 2011 a newly formed “Friends of Mt Zion” group that will become the main fund-raising arm for the Mt Zion projects as a whole. This will be carried out in full conjunction with our UNC Charlotte Development office and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. This organized campaign will remove the burden from my shoulders of being the primary person to raise funds for the entire project. You will receive information on this early on in the New Year.

2. We have outlined about two dozen grants for which we will be applying in 2011 to try and get outside funding for the Mt Zion projects as a whole so that our financial base can be a combination of grants and individual contributions.

3. Just last week Gibson and I visited our previous excavation at the Suba “John the Baptist” cave and there is some essential work we have to do there in order to complete publication of that seven year excavation. We need to remove more materials inside the cave, down to the floor, just under the drawings of the figures, as well as excavate some recently discovered wine presses–the only 1st century wine presses ever discovered. Because of our need to continue work on the Mt Zion materials, especially the newly discovered finds from the 1970s, we are going to devote our dig season in June, 2011 to Suba rather than Mt Zion. It is important, in terms of the Israel Antiquities Authority that we finish up what we began at Suba, and get it published in 2011, before we produce another season of finds at our current Mt Zion site. The dates are June 10-26, 2011. I will be sending out details the first week of January for those who might want to participate.

4. Our plans call for the publication of three volumes in 2011: A final publication of the Suba cave excavations; a final publication of our Tomb of the Shroud, that includes the only 1st century burial shroud ever found and the first case of leprosy; a preliminary volume on Mt Zion with the newly discovered Broshi materials included from the 1970s. Getting these materials into print will go a long way in terms of establishing our credibility both the the Israelis and the archaeological community more generally. One of the “no-no’s” in this field is to dig and dig and dig and never properly publish.

Our immediate needs require us to pay $2500 a month for storage and curation of Suba and Mt Zion finds, plus another estimated $15,000 for the rescue excavations at the Gate that will be done in February. It seems it is always easier to raise money when a major eight week dig is going on, but more difficult to get folks to realize that the post-excavation work that must be done is every bit as vital. This is the first financial appeal I have made in 2010–and here it is December 29th.

If you can help us with these immediate needs you can contribute instantly through Paypal with a credit card or Paypal account at our regular Donate link: http://digmountzion.com/information/ (you will receive a 2010 letter of acknowledgment from our partner The Foundation for Biblical Archaeology). Alternatively you can mail a check made out to UNC Charlotte Foundation/Mt Zion directly to me at (James D. Tabor, Dept. of Religious Studies, UNC Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223). Either way your contribution will be acknowledge promptly and is IRS tax deductible. Contributions made on or before December 31st will count for 2010.

Looking forward to staying in touch in 2011 and I hope to hear from many of you before 2010 has past!