For a moment when one reads the title of James Tabor’s latest book, The Jesus Dynasty (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), one may be forgiven for thinking this is a book that grows out of the debacle surrounding Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, with its claims about Jesus’s marriage and descendants. But even a cursory glance at this study makes clear that this is a serious work written by a genuine archaeologist and historian, and its claims—for example, the brothers of Jesus were among the Twelve, the resurrection was a spiritual rather than physical event, and Jesus was a disciple of John—are meant to be taken seriously. This is far from fiction, though it involves no small amount of historical conjecture, as we shall see.
I must say at the outset that it is a pleasure to read such a well-written book, and one that takes so seriously the interface between the New Testament, history, archaeology, and the story of earliest Christianity. Absent from this study are wild theories about Gnostic gospels being our earliest and best sources about the life of Jesus, thank goodness. Equally refreshing is Tabor’s willingness to take serious the historical data not just in the synoptics but also in the Gospel of John. Furthermore, Tabor is convinced that the James ossuary is indeed the ossuary of the brother of Jesus and has a genuine inscription on it. He is equally clear that both the canonical gospels and the James ossuary provide evidence for the fact that Mary and Joseph had other children besides Jesus. So far, so good. But unfortunately there are many flies in the ointment, however smoothly the ointment is sometimes applied in this book. I will deal with these problems under three headings—presuppositional problems, archaeological problems, and historical and exegetical problems.
PRESUPPOSITIONAL PROBLEMS
In the beginning of the second major part of his book, Tabor reminds us that we should not give much if any credence to later apocryphal stories about Jesus in the second-century document known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, much less even later legends about Jesus traveling to India or Great Britain! I quite agree. I wish he had taken his own advice and ignored much later traditions from the so-called Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, and even later Jewish traditions about Jesus on which he bases important conclusions in this study. Tabor rightly stresses: “Historians give such legendary material little credibility. We have to face the fact that thirty years of Jesus’ life are simply missing and attempts to fill them in with legends and fables do nothing to advance our quest for the historical Jesus” (p. 87). Undaunted, however, since both nature and historians abhor a vacuum, Tabor proposes to fill in the gaps with the help of archaeological and later historical tidbits, using some gospel tales while dismissing various other parts of the gospel evidence. Let me give an example.
Tabor sternly reminds his audience, while discussing Jesus’s burial, the empty tomb, and his “appearances,” that “[h]istorians are bound by their discipline to work within the parameters of a scientific view of reality. Women do not get pregnant without a male—ever…. Dead bodies don’t rise—not if one is clinically dead—as Jesus surely was after Roman crucifixion and three days in a tomb. So if the tomb was empty the historical conclusion is simple—Jesus’ body was moved by someone and likely reburied in another location” (pp. 233–34). Tabor has come up with a location as well: in Galilee, outside the city of Tsfat. Who knew! This conclusion is based on the testimony of a sixteenth-century mystical rabbi named Isaac ben Luria, who had no independent knowledge of any early evidence about the death and burial of Jesus (p. 238).
Sadly, I have to say that Tabor has no right to lecture anyone about what is historically plausible if he is going to go chasing after these sorts of red herrings from a much later era. This is not the mark of a good historian who limits himself to the earliest and best evidence we have. Furthermore, one might ask, Which scientific view of reality does Tabor have in mind in the stern reminder cited above? There are actually quite a few such views, and many of them include the possibility of what we might call miracles. Does he really not know that there are plenty of good historians and scientists who do indeed believe in miracles, and who in no way see that as a violation of their critical judgment or commitments?
It is not a good historical principle to rule out causes of events in advance of examining the evidence, especially when none of us has an exhaustive knowledge of either historical or natural causation. The proverbial anti-supernatural bias is no more a good historical presupposition than the naïve assumption some people make that everything requires a miraculous explanation, as when someone talks about a demon or spirit causing him to catch a cold, and so on. All data needs to be critically analyzed, of course, but no one should rule out the miraculous from the outset.
Tabor’s assertion that “the assumption of the historian is that all human beings have a biological mother and father, and that Jesus is no exception” (p. 59), suggests that this is some sort of monolithic credo of all modern or critical historians when it comes to the miraculous. This is simply false. I might add that the assumption “Miracles cannot happen and therefore do not happen” is a faith assumption, not something based on empirical evidence or a careful study of history. There are thousands of credible testimonies to miracles even in our own era. Though we like to pride ourselves on our open-mindedness in modernity, in fact ancient historians were far more open-minded when it came to the miraculous than some modern historians. One might ask, What happens, then, when one takes these sorts of skeptical assumptions, following the modern scholarly credo of “justification by doubt” (discussed in my Introduction), and applies them to the archaeological, historical, and literary evidence about Jesus and his earliest followers? What happens is the kind of presentations we find all too often in Tabor’s book.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
Tabor’s book begins with hard archaeological data and its analysis. He discusses, among other things, the so-called Talpiot tomb—a first-century tomb found in 1980 in the Jerusalem suburb of East Talpiot—which contained ossuaries that bear various names similar to or the same as the names in Jesus’s family. The discussion is crisp and interesting, but all is not yet disclosed as to how this might be connected to the historical Jesus. I say this in part because the Talpiot tomb is not a recent discovery, and various archaeologists involved with it in the past have dismissed or denied the suggestion that it has any connection with Jesus’s family. Furthermore, while there were ten ossuaries in the Talpiot tomb, one went missing, as the British say. The suggestion that the missing one is the James ossuary, found in a different location, does not make sense of all the data we have about the latter ossuary, which was found in the decade prior to the discovery of the Talpiot tomb. Nevertheless, the idea can’t be entirely ruled out, for it is possible that the owner of the James box does not remember correctly when he bought that ossuary. But Tabor will also pique our curiosity with other archaeological evidence.
Tabor trots out for us the shop-worn tale of Mary being impregnated by a Roman soldier named Pantera (p. 64ff.). As he rightly notes, this story first appeared in a work written by a Greek philosopher named Celsus (circa A.D.178) titled On the True Doctrine, which is a polemical document Origen was to take on. Tabor then points to rabbinic traditions, predicated on the word of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, which refer to Jesus as the “son of Panteri.”
The problem with this evidence lies in its dating. The earliest Jewish text that includes this idea is the Palestinian document known as Tosephta t. Hullin 2.22–24. This is not a first-century text at all; 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 was a pagan. As even John Dominic Crossan recently said on the CBS 48 Hours “Mystery of Christmas” show we both appeared on in December of 2005, these stories about Pantera are 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.
Tabor is right that all four gospels suggest Joseph was not Jesus’s father. What he fails to say is that we need to consider the source and sort of the remarks we find in John 8:41 and Mark 6:3. They don’t come from Jesus or from his disciples; rather, they come from skeptical outsiders or even opponents. Gospel of Thomas saying 105 is much too elliptical to support Tabor’s reasoning at this juncture. In my view it may well be that the “son of Panteri” polemic is a rebuttal to the Christian “son of a parthenos” claim of the followers of Jesus. This is typical of the kind of punning and wordplay that went on in debates beginning with Jesus and the Pharisees and continuing with his followers and other Jews unpersuaded by the gospel.
Tabor’s enthusiasm for the possible connection of a Roman soldier named Pantera with Jesus propels him to go on a trip to Bad Kreuznach in Germany, where there is a gravestone with this name on it. To be specific, we have the name Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, a soldier that the gravestone says was from Sidon. Tabor, with a great deal of creative imagination, links this fact with the story in Mark 7:24 where Jesus enters a house in Sidon and doesn’t want anyone to know it. Could this have been the home of Jesus’s actual father? Let’s consider the evidence Tabor presents us with.
Tabor is right that the names Tiberius Julius suggest that this soldier was a slave who became a freedman and a soldier. Since Tiberius came to rule in A.D. 14, and since our man presumably received the name and the Roman citizenship for his service in the army, that service must have come after the year 14. The gravestone also mentions that this soldier’s unit was the first cohort of archers and that the soldier served some forty years in the army, dying at the age of sixty-two. In all likelihood we are meant to think he died with his boots on. This in turn would mean he became a soldier at the age of twenty-two.
German theologian Adolph Deissmann concludes from this inscription that Pantera died in the middle of the first century. If this is correct, it follows that (1) Pantera was not a Roman soldier in 2–6 B.C., the period in which Jesus was born (as Tabor acknowledges); and (2) if indeed this cohort of archers went to Dalmatia in A.D. 6 and then on to the Rhine in A.D. 9, as Tabor avers (p. 69), then our man Pantera was not even yet with them, or if he was, he had only just become a soldier in the first decade of the current era, not in the period 2–6 B.C. In other words, the calculations are off by a least a decade. Thus, Tabor is wise in the end to back off and more weakly suggest that Jesus’s father was “possibly” Pantera (p. 72).
Another troubling feature of the Pantera-as-father position is that it ignores the Mary we know from the gospels. She grew up in a strict honor-and-shame culture, and she was exceedingly young when she became betrothed and pregnant—probably, as Tabor suggests, barely a teenager. We then have to ask how such a girl would even have met Pantera of Sidon, a man who lived more than forty miles away in a different province and was not yet a soldier. Even more to the point, since young daughters were closely watched and protected in devout Jewish homes, she would never have been alone with any strange man at that age, much less a pagan. The historical implausibilities of this whole scenario suggested by Tabor and others are too great to be given real credence. I agree with Tabor’s lament that we should not abstract Mary from her first-century Jewish milieu (p. 74), but unfortunately he is the one who opens the door to this particular implausible scenario.
What we learn from these archaeological discussions is that Tabor has a propensity to argue well beyond what the evidence suggests, and sometimes beyond what it allows. This is especially clear from Tabor’s discussions of the recent finds at the Suba cave in the Judean hills, where a water installation and drawings suggesting Christian life and baptism were found. Interpreting one drawing as depicting John the Baptist, Tabor suggests that the cave may have been a place where John the Baptist, and perhaps later Jesus, practiced baptism on those who came to them. As Tabor admits, however, the drawing on the cave wall probably dates to the fifth century A.D. (p. 132).1 And certainly we have no hard evidence that John the Baptist himself ever was in the cave or used it. What we have evidence of is that this was a pilgrimage spot for later Christians and that some sort of water and anointing rituals were likely performed here.
Tabor admits there is no hard evidence for his view, but his enthusiasm for what he has helped to uncover leads him to say, “I am convinced that the Suba cave is our earliest archaeological evidence related to John the Baptizer—and very possibly to Jesus himself” (p. 133). But what is the basis of this enthusiastic conclusion? Tabor makes the same mistake many of us do. His enthusiasm for something he has discovered or learned propels him to overreach, to draw conclusions that outstrip the historical evidence. As the British would say, “He over-eggs the pudding.” Unfortunately, Tabor does it with such regularity that he piles one overly enthusiastic conclusion or idea on another, building uncertainty upon uncertainty, until we have an edifice with very shaky foundations at crucial points.
James Tabor has a very active imagination. He paints a scene for us on pages 151–52 of him sitting outside the Suba cave imagining Jesus himself baptizing people in this cave—perhaps even his own disciples and family. It is a nice bucolic picture not well grounded in any historical evidence. It is precisely this sort of material that will lead many to conclude that Tabor is simply eccentric, and unfortunately this will lead them to dismiss a good deal of material in this book that should be taken seriously. As another example of Tabor’s eccentricity, he is a latter-day disciple of Albert Schweitzer’s position that Jesus was trying to be an earthly messiah. This view continues to get a hearing in scholarly circles long after one would have rightly thought it had had its day. Let’s see what Tabor says about Jesus’s eschatology in general and Schweitzer’s position in particular.
HISTORICAL AND EXEGETICAL PROBLEMS
Tabor gives us a helpful summary of where his speculative eschatological argument is going (p. 121). He takes the Schweitzerian point of view about Jesus (see his dedication on p. vii) with all its liabilities but also its possibilities. Here is his summary: “Jesus is best identified with what might be described as the Messianic Movement of 1st century Palestine. It was intensely apocalyptic, and though sharing certain ideas with the Essenes, it had a much broader appeal to rank-and-file Jews of all persuasions, united in their hope for God’s deliverance[,]…who expected a radical change based on the messianic predictions of the Hebrew Prophets…. God would intervene to fulfill those messianic predictions” (p. 121).
Tabor avers, with Schweitzer, that Jesus was not a violent revolutionary or Zealot, but one who believed that God would soon and suddenly intervene in human history, and there would be a violent overthrow of the Roman Empire and its lackeys, and a reestablishment of the rule of Jews in the land of Israel. Given that belief, Jesus appointed twelve governors for the tribes (the disciples), trained them, and prepared for the end. When the end didn’t come as soon as expected, Jesus went up to Jerusalem to throw himself on the rack of history in order to make it turn. This effort, alas, failed: the dominion of Rome was not suddenly displaced by the kingdom of God, with Jesus and the Twelve ruling over it.
Tabor also tells us that a mystical Paul who claimed to see the risen Lord in essence invented what later became Christianity, involving a view of Jesus as both divine and human. This conclusion then is leveraged so as to suggest that there was in the beginning another form of Jewish Christianity (less Christological, but tastes great) that Tabor wants to trace back to James. In fact he wants to argue that three or four of Jesus’s brothers were amongst the Twelve originally chosen by Jesus, who was trying to set up a royal dynasty, and that after the death of Jesus it was the holy family who took over the movement. So much for the role of Peter as depicted in Acts 1–4 and Galatians 1–2.
For whatever reasons, scholars often seem to enjoy setting up contrasts between Jesus and his followers, particularly Paul. Tabor is one who fits this mold. Tabor states boldly: “There are two completely separate and distinct ‘Christianities’ embedded in the New Testament. One is quite familiar and became the version of the Christian faith known to billions over the past two millennia. Its main proponent was the apostle Paul. The other has been largely forgotten and by the turn of the 1st century A.D. had been effectively marginalized and suppressed by the other” (p. 261). This latter was of course the Christianity of James. One wonders why Tabor does not draw attention to the canonical documents called Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation, which also all reflect early Jewish apocalyptic thinking. Apparently it is not true that there was a move to marginalize this form of thinking when the canon was beginning to be drawn up.
Besides the fact that Tabor dramatically overplays the contrast between James and Paul as individual thinkers and apostles, he also portrays a picture of early Christianity as involving dueling banjos, which is also false, as I have shown in this study. The fact that this conclusion of Tabor’s is familiar and not unique does not make it true. On the one hand, Tabor allows that Paul was accepted into the inner circle of Jesus’s followers by the pillar apostles (p. 262). On the other hand, he thinks that what Paul preached radically distinguished him from the other apostles. Following Schweitzer, Tabor speaks of Paul’s Christ mysticism and thinks that Paul promulgated an otherworldly gospel about a preexistent Christ who came to earth, died and rose, and returned to heaven in glory. But this is to stop the tale before the end of the story, for as Tabor admits, Paul believed that Jesus was coming back, perhaps in his own lifetime. Further, Paul believed that the kingdoms of this world were going to get a divine makeover when Jesus returned. In other words, the end of the story is not up there or out there somewhere; it is down here.
But we must consider some of the exegetical particulars of Tabor’s argument, for the devil is in the details, as they say.
Proposition 1: Jesus the Baptist, Disciple of John?
Let us first consider Tabor’s portrait of John the Baptist. In Tabor’s view, John saw himself as carrying out the mission announced in Isaiah 40:3 and Malachi 3:1. While he may have spent some time at Qumran, and he used the same texts that those Essenes did to envision his mission, his approach to the coming conflagration was not to withdraw, purify, and thereby save oneself (as the Essenes’ was) but rather to call the nation to repentance and baptism in preparation for what was to follow. John took a more extroverted, the Essenes a more introverted approach to the interpretation of those prophetic texts.
Tabor believes John began his mission in the spring or summer of A.D. 26 (p. 125). He also believes that John saw himself in the mold of Elijah, calling even the authorities and rulers to account as Elijah had done. He believes that John deliberately picked the location of Aenon near Salim, just south of the Sea of Galilee, as this was very near Tishbe, the home of Elijah. As Tabor says, it was also near the major thoroughfare used by Galilean Jews to go up to the festivals in Jerusalem, especially those who wanted to avoid going through Samaria.
Tabor then suggests that soon thereafter Jesus himself came to be baptized by John and heard the call of a different Isaianic text (Isa. 42:1). “By such a response he was publicly joining and endorsing the revival movement John had sparked…. [F]rom the time of Jesus’ baptism he was ready to take his destined place alongside John as a full partner in the baptizing movement. Together they were prepared to face whatever lay ahead in the prophetic roles to which each believed he was called” (p. 129). But did Jesus actually join John’s movement, or did he simply endorse it? Do we have any hard historical evidence that Jesus baptized people alongside John? And while we’re at it, do we have any hard evidence that John saw himself, or that Jesus viewed John, as the priestly messiah spoken of at Qumran? The answer to all these questions is probably no. John may well have, and Jesus more certainly did, see John as an Elijah-like prophet. This did not make him a priestly messiah figure.
I am wont to say, “A text without a context is just a pretext for what you want it to mean.” It is not enough to know either the archaeological context or the general historical context or even the textual history of particular verses. One must deal in depth with the primary source of information we have about Jesus and his first followers—namely, the New Testament texts themselves. In Tabor’s case, his love for archaeology leads him to see archaeology and historical context as primary sources and New Testament texts as secondary sources for his proposals. This is exactly the opposite of what should be attempted. The historical context and archaeology are important to an enterprise like studying the historical Jesus to the extent that they clarify, illuminate, or clearly refute what the New Testament says.
A good example of how this study is long on archaeological and historical context but weak on exegesis is Tabor’s treatment of Luke 7:28: “I tell you among those born of women, none is greater than John, but the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” This is a particular type of wisdom saying known as a contrast saying, and it is a singular mistake not to deal with both halves of the contrast. Tabor unfortunately wants to deal only with the first half of the saying, which leads him to conclude, “It is clear in the Q source that Jesus is declaring John to be greater than he” (p. 136). Tabor considers the second phrase to be a later Christian addition to the text. But this interpretation will not do. Not only is there not a shred of textual evidence that the second clause was added later, but such a reading destroys the very form of a typical puzzling wisdom saying for which Jesus was so famous. There can be no doubt that Jesus had a very high estimation of John and his ministry. Tabor is right that this fact must not be obscured or neglected. It is equally clear that he did not see him as a messiah or as greater than himself. There is simply too much evidence in our earliest gospel sources to the contrary.2
On what basis does Tabor argue that Luke 7:28b is a later addition? Grasping at straws, he appeals to a fourteenth-century document alleged to preserve the more original Hebrew version of Matthew. This purported Hebrew Gospel of Matthew is found in a rabbinic document called Even Bohan, written by one Shem-Tob Ibn Shaprut of Aragon. This document was part of the ongoing border war between Jews and Christians in the attempt to claim the Jewish heritage for one or the other of these two communities. If we actually examine this Hebrew Matthew, we see that it is material that has been edited to serve the polemical purposes of its Jewish author, reflecting the dispute between Jews and Christians that he was involved in. There is no historical evidence whatsoever that this document existed, even in an earlier form, prior to the third century.
It simply won’t do to take later evidence that has obviously been edited and shaped by a polemical controversy of a later era and proclaim it an earlier version of the Gospel of Matthew than what we have in our Greek text of Matthew! This is not merely an argument from silence, since we have no early evidence that the Hebrew Matthew even existed. It is an argument against the earliest and best evidence we do have. It violates all the basic historical principles about adhering to our earliest and best evidence in order to draw conclusions about a matter.
Let us take another example of how Tabor does not “look” before he takes exegetical leaps. On page 137 he deals with the Lord’s Prayer as presented in Luke 11:1–4. Already there is a problem: he simply assumes that the conclusions of Q specialists are right that Luke preserves the more original form. A simple and systematic study of how Luke edits his Markan material and how Matthew edits the same Markan material would have told him that Luke is a freer editor of his source material and that Matthew is consistently more conservative. But for the sake of argument, let’s just deal with the Lukan form here.
The text begins with the request of the disciples, “Teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples to pray.” Tabor takes this to mean, “Teach us to pray the same prayer John taught his disciples to pray.” Tabor even says, “Jesus repeats to them the prayer that he had learned from his teacher John.” But the Greek here surely does not mean this. The comparative term katho¯ s indicates that the disciples are not asking for Jesus to repeat the teaching he learned from John. Rather, they want to be taught to pray “just as” John’s disciples had been taught to pray. The comparison has to do with the activity of praying, not the content of the prayer. Notice something else as well: John’s disciples are distinguished from Jesus’s here, but Jesus’s disciples are comparing themselves to John’s. This is interesting and understandable, since Jesus had some earlier associations with John and seems to have drawn some of his disciples from John’s as well. But nowhere in any historical source do we even remotely hear about John teaching Jesus the Lord’s Prayer.
While Jesus may well have learned much from listening to John, we have no historical evidence that Jesus was ever John’s disciple. His baptism by John should not be interpreted as signifying discipleship. John baptized many people who did not become his disciples, and Jesus was probably one such person. In fact, the evidence suggests that John felt it would be more appropriate for Jesus to baptize him! John, as Jesus said, was more than a prophet. This does not mean Jesus saw him as either the messiah or his own teacher. Rather, he saw him as the final eschatological prophet, an Elijah figure who announced the coming of God’s divine saving reign on earth. Jesus, by contrast, expected no singular successor, and he did not include himself amongst the Twelve. Both of these facts tell us something about Jesus’s self-understanding.
Tabor, having gotten up a head of steam, is not only prepared to argue on the basis of questionable later evidence, and exegesis that is far from obvious. He is prepared to argue on the basis of silence itself. For example, he says, “It is no accident that the following year of A.D. 27 is largely blank in our records. That was the year of the joint work of the Two Messiahs—now lost to Christian history and memory” (p. 137). In this remark, Tabor is admitting to the fact that part of his most crucial and essential theory, that Jesus and John viewed themselves as the two messiahs mentioned at Qumran, is nearly entirely an argument from silence. One has to ask, Why should we think that either John or Jesus simply adopted the Essene view about two messianic figures? Nothing in their teachings suggests such a view. Indeed, nothing in the canonical gospels suggests that anyone saw John as the priestly messiah figure of Qumran at all, not even Jesus. This is pure conjecture.
It is Tabor’s historical reconstruction that while John was baptizing in the north near the sea of Galilee in the year 27, a sabbatical year when people would have had more free time to listen to preachers like John and Jesus, Jesus was baptizing in the south in Judea (see pp. 141–42). There are several problems with this reconstruction. One moment Tabor is prepared to give the Gospel of John its due for providing us with an eyewitness testimony enriched by accurate historical and chronological details. The next moment he chooses not to deal with the hard evidence of John 4:1–2, which suggests that Jesus himself baptized no one; rather, his disciples did the baptizing. That text notes that the Pharisaic observers of both practices noticed that Jesus was gathering more disciples than John. Apparently not wanting to undercut John’s ministry, Jesus stopped his activities and returned to Galilee through Samaria. Tabor dismisses John 4:2 as the work of a later editor (p. 149), though it’s clear that the same hand, writing in the same style—that of the Beloved Disciple himself—is responsible for the discussion in John 3 about Jesus and John.
The material in John 3:27–30 is also important to this discussion, for it has a parallel in the synoptics in Mark 2:19–20. In both these texts Jesus is called the “bridegroom,” while in John 3 John the Baptist declares himself to be the “friend of the bridegroom.” This comports with the saying of John the Baptist that he knew someone greater than he would come after him, whose shoes he would not be fit to tie or untie. It seems clear that in both our earliest and latest gospel evidence (and evidence in between), John himself denies that he is the messianic one, but he believes he has a special relationship to the bridegroom: he is the best man, as it were, meant to announce the coming of the bridegroom. Tabor’s partnership-of-equals idea about Jesus and John does not deal adequately with what evidence we do have on this matter. Even allowing for the gospel writers’ desires to place John clearly in Jesus’s shadow, there is still a clear pecking order in the earliest of these sayings, which indicates that neither Jesus nor John viewed the matter as Tabor suggests.
Proposition 2: James the Beloved Disciple?
The title of Tabor’s book, The Jesus Dynasty, is based on the argument that Jesus set up a family dynasty, with his brothers among the disciples. But will the evidence support such a theory? Consider Luke 6:14–16, which Tabor cites (p. 164). Tabor says that the phrase “James of Alphaeus” means James son of Alphaeus, and this is likely correct. As we saw in the case of Simon bar Jonah, Jewish men were normally identified by such patronymics. But Tabor then wants to turn around and read the adjacent phrase “Judas of James” as meaning Jude brother of James. This will not do. The Greek construction is the same in both cases, and the original audience hearing this wording would have assumed that the genitive modifier had the same sense in both cases. Immediately prior to the verse in question, when Luke wanted to say someone was a brother of another disciple, he inserted the word adelphos (for instance, “Andrew the brother of Peter,” v. 14). There is a good reason translations render the phrase “Judas of James” as referring to a son and a father. This is the natural and appropriate way to render the phrase if there is no further qualification, as in the case of Peter and Andrew. This in turn means that this Judas cannot be the one who was Jesus’s brother. But then neither was Simon the Zealot or Jacob listed as one of Jesus’s brothers. This logic cannot stand close scrutiny, and with its demise so also goes most of Tabor’s theory about a Jesus dynasty.
Furthermore, where is Jesus’s brother Joseph amongst the Twelve? In a desperate move Tabor suggests that Matthew/Levi son of Alphaeus is actually Joseph (p. 164), even though no gospel text or later source even remotely suggests this. But then no source suggests that Mary was married to Clopas who is really Alphaeus either, as Tabor argues. The facts simply won’t fit this theory, no matter how hard Tabor strains to accommodate them. The reason why the New Testament is silent about Jesus’s brothers being amongst the Twelve (something Tabor calls the best kept secret in the New Testament) is that they weren’t! Tabor suggests that only John 7:5 (“Not even his brothers believed in him”) argues against his theory (p. 165), but of course we saw in Chapter 6 that Mark 3:21–35 (where Jesus’s family wonders if he’s lost his mind) is clear on this score as well and cannot be dismissed. It is ironic that in the process of dismissing such evidence Tabor then adds, “It is amazing what firm opinions have been built upon such shaky foundations” (p. 165). Unfortunately, this remark can more aptly be applied to his own argument.
Tabor also theorizes that James was the Beloved Disciple (pp. 206–7). This will not do on several accounts, though Tabor apparently cannot imagine Jesus bequeathing his mother to anyone else. But let’s think through the narrative logic of John’s gospel for a minute:
Lost altogether in the discussion is our earliest source for information about James—namely, Galatians 1–2, which encompasses Paul’s account of his visits to Jerusalem. On the first occasion Paul goes up to Jerusalem in the mid to late 30s to see Peter, and he also sees James. Peter is mentioned first on that occasion. Fourteen years later Paul goes back with Barnabas and Titus and talks of seeing James, Peter, and John, in that order. Paul says these are the men reputed to be the “pillars” of the Jerusalem church, as we saw in earlier chapters. Then finally Paul reports that men were sent from James to Antioch to check out what was happening there.
These revealing narratives reflect the change in leadership amongst the inner circle in Jerusalem—from Peter first and also James; then James, Peter, and John; and finally James alone, because Peter has moved on as evangelist of Jews and is found in places like Antioch. It’s clear, then, that by the late 40s James is the head of the Jerusalem church. There’s no evidence whatsoever in Paul about a Jesus dynasty that was in place there from just after the death of Jesus.
Tabor has a very different reading of Galatians 1–2. He thinks that Paul had to consult with James on his first visit to Jerusalem, though the text says merely that Paul “saw” no other apostle except James the brother of Jesus. Galatians 1:18 is quite clear: Paul went to Jerusalem to spend time with Peter. The verb histore¯ sai refers to his consulting and learning from and conveying information to this one person over the course of a fortnight. We may be sure the two men didn’t spend all that time debating the weather. James he merely “saw”; Peter he consulted with. Why? Because Peter knew the whole Jesus story from stem to stern, whereas James had not been present for as much of the ministry. He was at home with the family in Galilee, and perhaps even in charge of the family.
Tabor also wants to argue that Galatians 2:9 suggests that only Peter and John are seen as pillars, supporting James on his right and left. But in fact Paul calls all three of these men pillars, including James. According to Paul, the head of the church is not James; it is the risen Jesus, with these three men as human leaders of the movement. And both Galatians and Acts agree that Peter is the first human leader of this church, serving until he is replaced by James after Peter goes on the road witnessing to Jews.
I quite agree with Tabor that James has been given short shrift, and it’s my hope that this very book will help remedy that. But it will not do to displace Peter or Paul, who knows these eyewitnesses, with some “Jesus dynasty” argument. After all, we are talking about the leadership of the Jerusalem church, and only in a tenuous way about the rest of the movement, especially after the year 50. Tabor also wants to see James’s decree, discussed in Part 5 above, as being about Noah’s rules, but as we saw the decree is about eating in pagan temples and avoiding both the idolatry and the immorality that happen in such venues.
Tabor is certainly right that James was the overseer of the Jerusalem church from the late 40s until his death in 62. Various later sources, including Clement of Alexandria, even go so far as to suggest that Jesus chose James as overseer of the Jerusalem church (see Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 2.1.3). If he did so, he must have done it by some extraordinary means after Easter, because Peter was clearly the one chosen as the head of the Twelve, and he stayed leader in Jerusalem until he became itinerant. The theory that James and the holy family were responsible from day one for the continuation of the Jesus movement simply does not comport with the earliest evidence we have from Paul, the gospels, and Acts 1–12.
Proposition 3: Who Do You Say That I Am?
We are not done with surprises yet. The ghost of Schweitzer is conjured up once more on pages 166–67, where Tabor tells us that the phrase “Son of Man,” at least in future-oriented sayings, does not refer to Jesus. Indeed, it does not refer to a particular individual; rather, it stands collectively for the faithful people of God who will receive the rule from their messiah. Tabor thinks this is what Daniel 7 suggests. He maintains that the coming of the Son of Man refers to an event, not to a particular individual popping out of the clouds, and that Jesus thought his mission would lead right up to such a final event. There are too many problems with this scenario to deal with here, but I must list the most egregious mistakes involved:
More could be said, but this must suffice. Tabor is right that Jesus had a messianic view of himself, but not the sort that Schweitzer thought he had, as is very clear from Mark 13:32, where Jesus disavows knowing when the end will come. Nor does Mark 9:1 suggest otherwise, which in the Markan outline is seen to refer to the transfiguration of Jesus, not the second coming or end of the world.
AND SO?
We must be careful about the beguiling nature of an argument such as Tabor’s. His book is well written, with parts of it reading almost like a thriller. It has copious pictures of biblical sites with able commentary from Tabor. He is a good archaeologist and knows the various sites in and around the Holy Land well. However, his precise knowledge of the archaeological remains can lead one to think he also has precise knowledge about what is in and behind the biblical texts. This is not really the case in many instances. Many of the conclusions he presents in his book would be disputed by even the most liberal of New Testament scholars. Much of his analysis is pure conjecture. His hypotheses must be sifted with the same degree of rigor that Tabor uses in sifting the archaeological remains he digs up. When we do this, there are some fragments left, but not nearly as many as Tabor would allow.
By the time one gets to the close of The Jesus Dynasty, one realizes that Tabor is no dispassionate scholar, whose interest in Jesus, James, and Jude is merely academic. No, Tabor believes there is much at stake in studying the historical Jesus for Christianity today. He puts it this way: “If Christianity can give James his rightful place as successor to Jesus’ movement, and begin to realize that his version of the faith represents a Christianity with claims to authenticity that override those of Paul, even more doors of understanding between Christians and Jews will be opened. But just as important, in terms of Christian mission and purpose in the world the unfinished agenda of John, Jesus, and James can find new life and relevance in modern times” (p. 315, emphasis added). He goes on to suggest that the view of Jesus in the Koran comports with this reconstructed image of Jesus, through the eyes of James and perhaps the Ebionites. Tabor is hopeful that this form of Christian belief may be resuscitated, if not fully revived.
A fair bit of what Tabor says about Jesus and James is true as far as it goes, but it leaves out far too much, and indeed much that is central and crucial. Everyone in the inner circle of Jesus had seen the risen Lord. The testimony of the earliest sources is clear about this. It is not just the sayings of Jesus as found in Q that can or should be the basis of Christian faith. Christianity must also be about who Jesus was and what he accomplished by means of his life, death, and resurrection. We do not need to pose an either/or dichotomy between what we learn from the sayings of Jesus and what we gain from other materials. A both/and approach is much nearer to the truth. And part of this both/and approach must include a recognition that our chronologically earliest canonical witness to Jesus—that is, Paul—is neither a distorter of the truth about Jesus, nor a liar, nor one who is radically at odds with James or Peter or others on crucial matters of Christology and eschatology. Such a reading would be simply false. The differences come, as they so often do, in the sticky matter of praxis and how Christians might be together, live together, have fellowship together, while still being Jews and Gentiles.
Yet I must say in the end that Tabor has done us a great service in trying hard to integrate his great wealth of knowledge about and love of archaeology with the New Testament text and other historical sources. Would that more scholars would take archaeology and history seriously when they interpret New Testament texts. Though Jesus may not have intended to found a family dynasty, he certainly left a legacy and a following, and Tabor has given us some glimpses of that legacy. For this we should be grateful.