As I pointed out in the previous post on this Blog, the term “Jesus son of Pantera” comes up in 2nd century AD Greek and Jewish sources, including texts associated with stories set in the city of Sepporis, just four miles from Nazareth where Jesus grew up. In chapter 3 of The Jesus Dynasty, titled “An Unnamed Father of Jesus” I discuss the Pantera tradition, including the oft heard assertion, that the name “Pantera” is a pun of Jewish enemies of the Christians of the Greek word parthenos or virgin. It is strange how often this assertion gets repeated, though I think it has no basis either in history or linguistics. When early Christians countered the charge that Jesus was the “son of Pantera” they took the name seriously, not as a pun, and asserted that it was indeed a “family name” in the lineage of Jesus. I agree with Deissmann that the evidence shows that it is a “real” name, whether or not we can identify any historical figure to which it referred. In my book I examine the tombstone in Germany of a 1st century Roman soldier from Palestine of that name, not so much to claim it belonged to the “father” of Jesus, but rather to learn what we can of this particular individual.

When I sent in my book manuscript The Jesus Dynasty for publication most of what I knew about the Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera tombstone now located in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, was taken from two main sources: the article by Deissmann, “Der Name Panthera,” published in 1906 (see notes in my book for details), as well as the information he included in his subsequent book, Licht vom Osten/Light from East (1923); and another article by L. Patterson, “Origin of the Name Pantera,” JTS (1917), which built on Deissmann’s work.

As far as I can tell almost everything subsequently published, which is mostly people mentioning the Bingerbrück tombstone in passing, most often to dismiss it as insignificant, relies on these two initial publications. It is from those two articles that the ideas emerge that the names Tiberius Julius indicate manumission under the emperor Tiberius (thus after 14 AD), that our Panthera is a Jew or Semite based on the name Abdes (this is more Patterson than Deissmann), and that the 1st cohort of archers had come to the Rhine in the year 9 AD. Deissmann’s main point, echoed by Patterson, was not to say that this Panthera was the “father” of Jesus, or even had any remote connection to Jesus, but that the name Panthera was not an invention of Jewish enemies of Christianity, spurning the virgin birth, but a real name used by the ancients and thus likely picked up for some reason in the “Yeshua ben Pantera” traditions.

Since that time I have been able to examine much more closely the archives (mostly artifacts, paintings, and articles published in the Bonner Jahrbuch in 1859-1860, at the time of the discovery) that I brought back with me from the museum in Bad Kreusnach where the tomb stones are now housed, and thus to learn much more about the original discovery of this cemetery in 1859 as well as the others buried with Panthera. I was also able to photograph, measure, and study closely the Pantera tombstone itself. All Deissmann apparently had was the inscription itself as published in the catalogue CIL XIII 7514. He seems to know nothing of the discovery, its context, or anything related thereto.
There are lots of interesting avenues of inquiry but at least three issues that need to be resolved are the following:

1. The significance of the Semitic name Abdes. I am not convinced by Deissmann’s postcard correspondent, Count Wolf Baudissin (footnoted in Light from East, p. 74), that Abdes=Eded Isis or “servant of Isis.” I think it is more likely a name, and Deissmann himself refers to another soldier who is called “Cottio the son of Abdes,” which seems to be the same name. It was Patterson that took the name to mean our Panthera was a Jew. I would not go that far but did take it as an indication of at least a “Semitic” background. I have also wondered if the name might be related to Sbedsdas or “Zebedee,” which is found on another soldier’s tombstone in the area, who was from Tyre, which would make it more akin to Zebdas from the Hebrew root Zabad (=Doros/gift) in Hebrew.

2. Do the names Tiberius Julius indicate manumission or perhaps something else? I went with the freed slave suggestion, which seemed to have been so confidently asserted by Deissmann and Patterson, but now tend to doubt that such is the case. Our Abdes Pantera might have taken on these names much later in life, even at retirement, for reasons having nothing to do with having been a freed slave, but perhaps just as a way of honoring the emperor Tiberius, celebrating citizenship, or otherwise celebrating a higher status than that of a commoner. One very well known figure from antiquity with that name was the famous nephew of Philo, Tiberius Julius Alexander.

3. What is the evidence for Deissmann’s assertion that that particular cohort of archers had come to Dalmatia (Croatia) in the year A.D. 6 from Palestine and moved to the Rhine/Nahe river area in A.D. 9? He refers to a source by Domaszewski but gives no details in the citation, so I take it this source is well known in his time and would be known to Roman historians, which I am not. Of course we should not take 9 AD as the date Abdes Pantera necessarily arrived in the area. The cohort would have been regularly replenished by new recruits throughout the 1st century, once stationed in the area.

Given what we know so far of Abdes Pantera it is difficult to date him more precisely. We know he was from Sidon in Palestine, that he served in the army for forty years and that he died at age 62. Whether he might have been retired at the time he died or not we can not be sure, so accordingly, we can not be sure at what age his 40 year service began or when he took on the name Tiberius Julius, other than to place it sometime between the years of the reign of the emperor: 14-37AD.

I can add, just for interest, that three large tombstones, Pantera among them, were found on October 19, 1859 about 300 yards from the Nahe River in connection with the construction of the Bingerbrück railway station. The first two, individuals named Hyperanor and Julia Quintia, were in their vertical positions but the third one, Abdes, was slanted. The foundations of all three were at the same level, and all three were

headless, due to the building in earlier times of an embankment wall. Clay funerary urns were found with vessels as well as coins. These finds have been distributed in a number of museums and I am in the process of trying to locate them all. They will perhaps allow us to date at least the terminus ad quem of the cemetery. Other tombstones were subsequently recovered in the area, which was obviously a Roman cemetery. Four different army units are represented, including the 4th Legion, and the IV Delmatarum, 1 Pannoniorum, and the 1st Sagittariorum cohorts–all known to be in that area during the mid-1st century AD. Pictured here  is a painting made in 1859 of the original discovery–taking us back to a time when photography was just coming into use, but not yet for archaeology.

I believe there is still much to learn about both the cemetery and Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, so stay tuned…It is entirely possible that his funerary urn is still preserved in the archives of one of the museums in Germany.

Predictably one of the more controversial topics in my book The Jesus Dynasty is my discussion in chapter 3 titled “An Unnamed Father of Jesus?” in which I treat the “Jesus son of Pantera/Pantira” traditions. The topic has generated more than one sensational headline as well as lots of disdainful treatment, particularly from evangelical Christian readers and reviewers. As my colleague Prof. Ben Witherington dismissively phrased it in his four-part 28 page single-spaced Blog review of my book, “Tabor trots out for us the shop-worn tale of Mary being impregnated by a Roman soldier named Pantera” (Witherington on Tabor’s Jesus Dynasty)

The topic is as controversial as it is complex. My own position is that Jesus’ biological father remains unknown but is unlikely Joseph, husband of Mary. This puts me in an odd position of partial agreement with Christians who take the virgin conception/birth story literally and would likewise hold that Joseph was not the father of Jesus. In the book I then pose the sensitive question–if not Joseph then whom? Is there anything at all to be said of this matter? Has any alternative tradition regarding Jesus’ father come down to us? And the answer is yes, the name Pantera is found in a number of ancient sources. Rather than dismiss these out of hand as a “shop-worn tale” produced by Jewish opponents of the Christians who wanted to cast aspersions on Jesus’ paternity, I felt compelled to honestly examine what one might responsibly conclude about the subject. Having examined the “Jesus son of Panthera” textual traditions in their various forms I then turned to my own investigation of the tombstone of the 1st century Roman soldier, one “Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera” from Sidon who was buried outside of present day Bingerbrück, Germany.

The earliest textual evidence comes from three sources:

1) We have two stories preserved in supplements to the Mishnah called the Tosefta (as well as in other parallel rabbinic texts but primarily see Tosefta Chullin 2:22-24) that refer to “Yeshu ben Pantera” (with alternate spelling variations). The first involves the famous Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus who lived in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD. Rabbi Eliezer relates a teaching in the “name of Yeshu ben Pantera” that he heard on the streets of Sepphoris from one Jacob of Kefar Sikhnin. Eliezer himself had been arrested for “heresy” and some have suspected he might have been sympathetic to the Nazarenes. The second story also involves Jacob of Kefar Sikhnin who attempts to heal a certain Rabbi Eleazar ben Dama of a snakebite in the name of “Yeshu ben Pantera.”

Although Maier and a few others have doubted these references are to Jesus of Nazareth, most experts are convinced that they are. Since both of these texts appear to use the designation “Yeshu ben Pantera” in a descriptive rather than a slanderous or polemical way they offer us evidence that Jesus was remembered as “son of Panthera” in the region of Galilee, and even on the streets of Sepphoris, in the early 2nd century. Indeed, Richard Bauckham argues quite persuasively that this Jacob of Kefar Sikhnin might well be James, son (or grandson?) of Jude the brother of Jesus, otherwise known to us as a prominent leader in the Galilean churches (Jude and the Relatives of Jesus, pp. 114-119).

2. The Greek philosopher Celsus relates in polemical work against the Christians preserved by the Christian theologian Origen that he had found it “written” that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier named Pantera (Contra Celsum 1. 69). This text dates to the late 2nd century. Origen replies that the story was concocted by those who refused to believe that Jesus had no human father and was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

3. The 4th century Christian apologist Epiphanius seems to take the designation “Jesus son of Panthera” seriously in that he argues the name is actually a nickname for Jacob, the father of Joseph, husband of Mary. So rather than denying it is part of the family tradition he tries to explain it within that context.

If one begins to read through the literature on “Jesus son of Panthera” the most common explanation one finds is that “Panthera” is not the real name of any individual at all but a play on the Greek word “Parthenos,” or “virgin” that Jewish opponents of the Christians invented to make fun of their enemies. I am amazed at how many of my critics have referred to this idea as a way of dismissing the Panthera stories as references to a specific individual. This explanation is weak on two counts. First, linguistically, the Greek words panthera and parthenos are not even closely related in sound. But more important, none of the earliest sources quoted above, including Origen and Epiphanius, who both believed in the virgin birth, make use of this explanation. Epiphanius in particular recognizes that this is a “real” name and his only defense of it being associated with Jesus is to claim it was already “in the family” before Jesus’ birth. In that sense Jesus could loosely be called “Jesus son of Panthera.”

What Adolf Deissmann contributed to the discussion in his famous 1906 study on “Der Name Panthera” (see references in the notes to my chapter 3) was to remind us all that the Greek name “Pantera” was used by real individuals in the 1st century AD, and furthermore that it was particularly favored by Roman soldiers. He lists six examples which hardly makes the name common, but one of them is the Bingerbrück tombstone of Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, the 1st century archer who actually was from Sidon in Palestine. His point in his study is not to even remotely imply that this individual was the father of Jesus, but just that the tradition “Jesus son of Pantera” likely referred to some real individual rather than being a concocted term of Jewish polemical slander. The discovery of an ossuary with the name “Pentheros” in a Jewish 1st century tomb in Jerusalem by Clermont-Ganneau in 1891 has given us additional evidence that the name “Pantera” was in use in Palestine by Jews in the 1st century.

When I traveled to Germany in October, 2005 to examine the tombstone of Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera of Sidon found in 1859 along with other Roman officers buried at Bingerbrück my intent was to find out all I could about these individuals. I do not hold the view that this particular individual was the father of Jesus. As far as I can tell that sort of definitive evidence simply does not exist. However I did come back with a thick file of evidence relating to the original excavation and its particulars that to my knowledge has never before been brought into the discussion. Pantera is only one of 10 other tombstones found at this grave site. I was able to photograph a painting that captures the original excavation of the site when it was accidentally discovered during construction of a railway station in 1859. Artifacts from the cemetery are also in various local museums in Germany, including coin and ceramic evidence. By studying the entire site we are in a much better position to say something about Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera and his history. It seems to me those who have dismissed out of hand even the possibility that Pantera of Sidon might relate to the “Yeshua ben Pantera” stories would do well to examine more closely what can be known, and then to draw conclusions.

In a subsequent post I will begin to cover some of what I have been able to ascertain so far in my research on this particular individual. It is not the case, as Prof. Witherington and others have asserted, that his death at age 62 after 40 years of service in the army precludes him being old enough to have been the father of Jesus around the year 6 BC. Following that I also want to discuss the matter of the social and cultural implications of Mary becoming pregnant before her marriage to Joseph and how we might imagine such a possible scenario, given what we know, including what it might have meant to Jesus if he grew up not knowing his father.

More to come…

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.

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.