James D. Tabor in The Jesus Dynasty (2006) claims that the father of Jesus was a soldier called Panthera. This is a revived story reported by the Church Father Origen, who states that according to the late second-century pagan writer Celsus, hostile Jews depicted Mary as a poor country woman who was forced to earn her living by spinning after her carpenter husband had divorced her for being convicted of an affair with Panthera the soldier (Against Celsus 1:28, 32).

This idea already appeared in, the after-dinner conversations of Adolf Hitler, recorded by Martin Bormann. In them the Fuhrer asserted on a couple of occasions that Jesus' father was a "Gallic legionary" thus making Jesus into an Aryan. (See Hitler's Table-Talk, Oxford, 1988, pp. 76,721).

Another Church Father, Tertullian, even alludes to a hearsay at the end of the second century about the mother of Jesus being a prostitute (De spectaculis 30:6).

Both Christianity and Islam have their prophet raise to heaven, but where the former did so after claiming to be 'King of the Jews', the latter chooses to stand on top, of King Solomon' temple to do so. Also for Christians the ‘Jewish Temple’( ‘unbelievers in the new Messiah’) was said to have been replaced as Apostle Paul explains to the Corinthians: “Do not be misyoked with unbelievers. For what fellowship exists between righteousness and lawlessness? Or what communion of light with darkness? What accord exists between Christ and Beliar, or what portion has a believer with an unbeliever? What agreement exists between the Temple of God and idols? For we are the Temple of the living God; as God said’ I’ will dwell in them and move among them, and I will be their God and they will be my people'.”

This rejection of the physical Temple did not last. Emperor Justinian, who built Hagia Sophia (changed into a Mosque), declared, “Solomon, I have surpassed you.”

As for Christmas; sometime around the beginning of the Common Era, a  Jewish girl comes to her fiancé with a problem. She is pregnant; he is not the father. The groom-to-be is understandably enraged. In his world, almost nothing brings more shame on a man and his family than a broken promise of virginity. Her explanation, that the baby was conceived by God, must have sounded, desperate.

In his book "Jewish Marriage in Antiquity," Brown University professor Michael Satlow points out that Roman law esteemed married men with children above married men without children and unmarried men as part of the social order). In fact, Jewish devotion to family predates the Romans by many years. And Roman historian Tacitus wrote around A.D. 100. "It is a deadly sin to kill a born or unborn child”.

The precise date of the birth of Jesus is unknown. According to Luke, it occurred (a terminus ante quem  pinpointed as the death of Herod) before the spring of 4 BC, and most likely in 5 or a little earlier. His birthplace is equally uncertain. Whilst Bethlehem cannot be absolutely excluded, it remains highly questionable. On the whole, a Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus of the main Gospel tradition, is to be preferred to the Jesus of Bethlehem of the Infancy Gospels. Even in the most factual fields, chronology and geography, the birth narratives leave our historical curiosity rather unsatisfied.

As for the genealogy of Jesus via Joseph; the substantial differences between Matthew and Luke are beyond dispute; in Matthew, only the name of Jacob is repeated; in Luke we find Joseph three times, and Mattathias mentioned under three other names (designating four) appears to be one and the same. In fact Matthew and Luke unwittingly confused the aim of the genealogies. For if in order to proclaim the virgin birth, they had to deny the real paternity of Joseph, they were unavoidably bound to undermine the royal Messianic claim of Jesus.

According to the Roman historian Sir Ronald Syme, the New Testament account is based on Luke's confusion of two notable events in Palestinian history, one dating to 4 BC (the death of Herod), and the other to AD 6 (the creation of the Roman province of Judaea). Each led to disturbances. The first followed the passing of Herod, and the second the census of Quirinius. More serious was the rebellion in 4 BC when Varus, the legate of Syria , needed the whole of his army to quell it. However, the crisis of AD 6 was better remembered because the imposition of Roman rule and taxation triggered off a long-lasting insurrection, launched by Judas the Galilean, and continued on and off by his heirs up to the great uprising in AD 66. (See Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus, 1995,p. 13).

The mistaken placement of Quirinius' census in the twilight years of Herod is put to good use in Luke's narrative. It enables him to achieve his main purpose and transfer Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem so that Jesus might be born in the town from where the Messiah was expected to originate. The reliability of Luke from the point of view of historiography falls short of what one might have expected from someone who boasted that he had 'carefully' investigated the records (Lk 1:3).By the time of Matthew, in the late first century AD, the story had gone through various evolutionary stages. (See Roger David, Tthe Virginal Conception: In Light of Palestinian and Hellenistic Traditions on the Birth of Israel's First Redeemer, Moses, 2000, p.4).

We are informed by one of the evangelist's contemporaries, the first-century AD writer known as Pseudo-Philo, author of what we know now as the Book of Biblical Antiquities or Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, that a significant novel feature entered the picture of the childhood story of Moses - the disclosure of his future role as saviour of Israel and destroyer of Egypt. Within the family circle it was Miriam, the elder sister of Moses, who played the part of prophetess. Like Joseph in Matthew, she first had a dream, and in the light of it she conveyed to her parents the part her unborn brother would play in the future: 'And the spirit of God came upon Maria by night, and she saw a dream, and told her parents in the morning, saying, "I saw this night, and behold, a man in a linen garment [no doubt an angel] stood and said to me, 'Go and tell your parents: behold, he who shall be born of you shall be cast into the water, for by him water shall be dried up, and by him will I do signs, and I will save my people, and he shall be the captain of it always.' And when Maria had told her dream, her parents did not believe her' (Biblical Antiquities 9:10). The same story is repeated in later rabbinic sources with the difference that here Miriam/Maria's prediction was acknowledged by her father after the birth of the child: 'Miriam prophesied, "My mother shall bear a son who shall save Israel".And when at the birth of Moses the house was filled with light, her father arose and kissed her, saying, "My daughter, your prophecy is fulfilled". (Exodus Rabba 1:22; Babylonian Talmud Sotah 13a).

This self-confident countermessage to that of the evangelists was possible only in the unique historical setting of Persian Babylonia, in a Jewish community that lived in relative freedom. The same could not be said of Roman and Byzantine Palestine, where the Christians aggressively consolidated their political power and the Jews therefore suffered.

But the Jewish legend was propagated in various forms and the revelation was not always restricted to the close family circle of Moses. The Egyptian ruler himself, the antitype of Herod, learned what was to happen. Here Flavius Josephus supplies the most significant parallel tale in his Jewish Antiquities, which was published roughly contemporaneously with Matthew. For Josephus awareness of Moses' part in Israelite-Egyptian relations inspired Pharaoh to sentence to death all the newborn Jewish boys. They had to perish in order to ensure the elimination of Moses. Such an understanding of the affair puts the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem in an entirely different light, with an Egyptian interpreter of their holy scriptures standing in for the Jewish chief priests approached by Herod. 'One of the sacred scribes [alleged to be a person with skill in predicting the future] announced to the king that there would be born to the Israelites at that time one who would abase the sovereignty of the Egyptians and exalt the Israelites, were he reared to manhood ... ' (Antiquities 2:205).

Josephus further recounts (Antiquities 2:210-236) that Amram, the father of Moses, also had a dream in which he was apprised that his son would become the future redeemer of the Jews. Afraid of breaking the royal command, yet intent on doing all he could to save his son, he constructed a papyrus basket and entrusted the fate of the child to God. As in the Bible, little Moses was found by Pharaoh's daughter, who adopted the boy and persuaded her father to make him his heir. The obliging Pharaoh took the baby in his arms, but Moses grabbed the king's crown, threw it to the floor and put his foot on it. The sacred scribe, who had foretold the birth of the liberator of the Jews, then realized who the baby was and advised the king to kill him. However, divine Providence in the person of Pharaoh's daughter quickly stepped in, and Moses survived - as would Jesus too, despite Herod's edict in Matthew's version of the story.
Thus Matthew's episode must have been modelled on tales with which both Palestinian and Diaspora Jews of his age were familiar. Its formation was further assisted by Herod's reputation as an insane and bloodthirsty ruler, capable of committing indescribable acts of savagery. Moses in biblical and Jewish thought furthermore, was both the deliverer of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage and the great Lawgiver on Mount Sinai . In the main Gospel of Matthew, Jesus performs the part of the new Moses with the Sermon on the Mount and its Beatitudes representing the new Torah (Mt P-7:29). The so called Golden Rule, 'Whatever you wish that man would do to you, do so to them', to which the evangelist appends, 'for this is the Law and the Prophets' (Mt 7:1 2) in fact is Matthew's quintessential summary of both the Torah of Moses and the Gospel of Jesus.

 

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