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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph never shows up again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No more references to Joseph

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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