Given how often my position on Pantera is distorted into the three things I do not say—namely, that the biological father of Jesus was not Joseph, that Pantera was a Roman soldier who raped Mary, and that his tomb is in German. So, it kind of amazed me to get…
If one were filling out the some equivalent of a “birth certificate” for Jesus’ the the best legal category within Jewish tradition for his father would be ” Unknown.” [Hebrew “Hushling” שְׁתוּקֵי] As a historian I work with the obvious assumption that all human beings have fathers. Stated like that,…
Contrary to what is often asserted by scholars as well as general readers, the early traditions that Jesus had a biological father named “Pantera” has nothing to do with an assertion that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier. Further, the name Pantera was never said to be a pun…
Contrary to what is often asserted, by scholars as well as general readers, the early traditions that Jesus had a biological father named “Pantera” has nothing to do with an assertion that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier. Further, the name Pantera was never said to be a pun…
I have begun to do a series of interviews with various Youtube channels from hosts who have long ago requested such. I have cleared some of my other immediate writing projects before moving on into July-August. During this window of time I have done interviews with Jacob Berman and Derek…
I am sure many of my older readers will remember Hugh J. Schonfield’s , 1965 blockbuster international best seller, The Passover Plot, now re-released in a special 40th anniversary edition. Schonfield was somewhat of a “maverick” independent scholar, well trained but never pursing an academic university career, but publishing dozens of…
As many of my readers know I have been working on my new book, The Lost Mary: How the Jewish Mother of Jesus Became the Virgin Mother of God now for three years! I am still doing final re-writing and editing and it won’t be published until 2020. I hope it…
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…
Although only Matthew and Luke assert the “virgin birth” of Jesus, and the teaching is found nowhere else in the New Testament, the belief that Mary’s pregnancy resulted from a divine act of God without any male involvement developed into a fundamental theological dogma in early Christianity. For millions of…
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…