Next Up, James Tabor's The Jesus Dynasty

It has been a busy week for apologists and those interested in things historical. After The Jesus Papers and The Gospel of Judas, I thought I could take it easy around here until The Da Vinci Code movie debuts later in May. But then Professor Witherington entered a lengthy critique of Dr. James Tabor's new book, The Jesus Dynasty. BK has already posted good stuff about Dr. Tabor's theory, which is that Jesus and John the Baptist were something like co-messiahs. After John was killed, Jesus reconsidered his mission and began preaching against the Romans and their collaborators anew until his own death in Jerusalem.

Jesus' family featured prominently during his ministry and upon his death, James took the helm. Dr. Tabor considers James to be "the beloved diciple." But then Paul usurped the Christian message, altered it according to his own personal revelations, and founded what we know today as Christianity. Which is not something, apparently, Jesus would have much to do with. Jesus had intended for his family to govern Israel (hence the "Dynasty"), not to found a new religion.

Professor Ben Witherington has posted the first of a four-part response to Dr. Tabor. As to Dr. Tabor's claim that Jesus' father was really a Roman soldier:

Tabor trots out for us the shop-worn tale of Mary being impregnated by a Roman soldier named Pantera. As he rightly notes, this story first appears in a work written by a Greek philosopher named Celsus (circa A.D. 178), a work entitled ‘On the True Doctrine’ which is a polemical document Origen was to take on. Tabor then points to rabbinic traditions, predicated of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus which refers to Jesus as the ‘son of Panteri’.

The problem with this evidence is two fold: 1) the earliest Jewish text which includes this idea is Palestinian Tosephta t. Hullin 2.22-24. This is certainly not a first century text at all, and indeed it was written at a time when the polemics between early Christianity and early Judaism were in high gear. The same can be said about the text from Celsus, only in that case the debating partner is a pagan. As even John Dominic Crossan recently said on the CBS 48 Hours ‘Mystery of Christmas’ show we both appeared in December of 2005, these stories about Pantera are the later rebuttals to the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin. They are not the origins of the Gospel stories which are clearly earlier than such texts.

Next, Professor Witherington responds to Dr. Tabor's dismissal of Mattthew's account of the slaughter of the innocents:

This is unfortunate, since the archaeological and historical records support the likelihood of this event. Firstly, it is completely in character for Herod the Great to do such a thing as he was paranoid about the succession even executing some of his own offspring and wives! Secondly, Bethlehem was a very tiny town in Jesus’ day. If all children under two were killed we still would not be talking about even 10 children in all likelihood. Such a small event in a small town, well off Josephus’ radar screen when he wrote his history of the ‘Jewish Wars’ and even later his ‘Antiquities’ could easily have been missed by him. It is not good history to exaggerate the size of the slaughter, and it is an argument from silence to say it didn’t happen because Josephus doesn’t mention it. Matthew mentions it, and not just for theological reasons either.

Prof. Witherington goes on to point out a pervasive shortcoming of Tabor's work:

And here we must register a major complaint about this study. This is not a complaint about the detailed attention to archaeological or Jewish historical detail. Tabor’s study, like the work of Bart Ehrman, is long on the author’s forte (in this case archaeology, in Ehrman’s case text criticism) but very, very short on real exegesis of relevant NT texts. Neither of these scholars has produced any commentaries on any books of the NT, and consequently they do not show any signs of having had to wrestle at length with Gospel texts in their larger literary contexts. Rather bits and pieces of verses are abstracted from their contexts in the Gospels and elsewhere to create a new creative whole, used to bolster theories arrived at on grounds other than detailed exegesis of the primary source texts.

This lack of experise concerning the primary textual evidence means that Dr. Tabor pays insufficent attention too, and gives insufficient weight too, the textual evidence regarding Jesus. The notion that Jesus viewed John the Baptist as a messianic figure finds no support in the relevant documents. Nor do the relevant documents provide any support for the notion that Jesus intended to found a family dynasty to rule Israel.

I doubt Dr. Tabor's theory will shift historical Jesus studies in any particular direction. It involves simply too much "historical conjecture" and not enough supporting evidence.

Update: Prof. Witherington has published his second of four posts on The Jesus Dynasty. He tackles Dr. Tabor's simplistic use of Q, noting that "the underlying form critical methodology used to determine the authenticity of this material, where you slice and dice even half verses into pieces, deeming one part authentic and another not, has been shown a long time ago to be deeply flawed." Prof. Witherington also tackles the flawed exegesis regarding Jesus' relationship with John the Baptist and concludes that the argument about their acting as co-messiahs is "pure conjecture." He also responds to the arguments that Jesus believed that the end of the world was close at hand and that he taught an "interim ethic." The majority of the post, however, is devoted to responding convincingly to Dr. Tabor's novel understanding of Jesus' relationship with his family.