James D. Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty. Simon &
Schuster, 2006.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
This book reads too much like those by Baigent,
Lincoln, and Leigh. It chronicles the travels, researches, and thought
processes of the author, trying to draw the reader along to the finish
line of his conclusion. I prefer to have the case set forth in a vacuum,
built up and defended on its own objective merits. As it is, Tabor’s
case is a chain of weak links soldered together by supposition,
possibility, and “what ifs.” Tabor often simply asserts, “I believe
that…” That is a matter of hunches, not evidence. I will simply leave
aside the archaeological side of his case, since I find it weakens his
case rather than strengthening it. What is his basic claim, and upon
what evidence does it rest? He believes that Jesus was a would-be king
with genuine Davidic credentials, which he inherited from his mother
Mary. Jesus’ legal father Joseph was of Davidic descent, too, but he
descended through King Jeconiah, whose descendants Jeremiah the prophet
disqualified from ever taking the throne (would that have mattered?).
Jesus was actually the son of Mary and of Pandera, perhaps even a
particular Tyrian Roman legionary named Adbes Pantera whose tombstone
Tabor visited in
Germany.
Joseph fathered no children and died young. His brother Clophas (a
harmonization of two gospel names, Cleophas and Clopas) begat James,
Joses, Judas, and Simon with Mary, then died or bowed out of the
picture, transferred to Germany, where Tabor saw his monument. But they
were all, as per the Levirate marriage custom, considered Joseph’s sons
and heirs.
Everything is
wrong with this. Tabor is willing to take both gospel genealogies as
true and historical. That they conspicuously fail to agree is grist for
his mill, for like a couple of obscure Catholic apologists, he
gratuitously makes the Lukan genealogy the family tree of Mary, even
though it plainly says it is the line of Joseph, her husband. He decides
that the Jewish jibe that Jesus was the bastard son of the Roman Pandera
was true and not a pun on the virgin (parthenos) birth claim,
just because Pandera was a common name for Roman soldiers, ignoring the
fact that even the pun theory requires such, as there wouldn’t have been
a joke to get unless there were actually men named “Pandera.” The hardly
reliable Epiphanius tried to co-opt the slur by saying that Pandera was
part of the name of an ancestor of Jesus. And that’s good enough for
Tabor.
Tabor
swallows the obvious Lukan fiction of John the Baptizer being Jesus’
cousin as a historical fact. He gratuitously posits that “Nazareth”
(for which there is no extra-biblical evidence till later centuries) is
named for being a settlement of many who belonged to the lineage of
David, and hence stemmed from the “branch” (netzer) of David.
This is fantasy. Another Lukan figment he accepts is the trial of Jesus
before Herod Antipas. From Mark he absorbs the error of making Herod
Antipas woo away the wife of his half-brother Philip. Herodias was
actually the wife of Antipas’ brother Herod.
He has an
interesting discussion of the presence of three different Marys at the
tomb, an improbable circumstance, he suggests, even though, as he
acknowledges, “Mary” was the most common female name among contemporary
Jews. I have many times been in a room with two or three other Bobs, so
pardon me if I don’t see it as that odd. But the empty tomb narratives
are hardly historical reporting anyway. Nonetheless, Tabor reasons that
for one of the Marys to be Jesus’ mother (John
19:25) and
another to have sons named Joses and James (Mark 15:40), names also of
Mary’s sons, is too much. So maybe the other Mary is Mary the wife of
Clopas (John 19:25). And maybe she is a fictive doublet of Mary, Jesus’
mother, which would explain why “they both” have sons with identical
names. This doubling would have resulted in a later attempt to suppress
Mary’s levirate marriage as somehow unseemly, or perhaps just as a
mistake. Like Robert Eisenman, Tabor notes the fascinating fact that
“Cleophas” (and its variant “Alphaeus”) come from a root meaning
“replacement, substitute.” And Tabor says that would fit with this man’s
having been Joseph’s brother standing in for him to beget children for
his name. But then are we to suppose that his parents named him because
they foresaw his future task? “Cleophas” would be better understood as a
subsequent epithet. But who would this man be a substitute for?
Tabor is
building toward the venerable theory of Adolf Harnack and Ethelbert
Stauffer (never mentioned in this book), that Jesus was a messianic
king, and that in his absence, James, then Simeon his brother, took over
as “caliphs” in his place, as Abu-bekr, Umr and Uthman did after
Muhammad’s passing. Tabor even points out how the name “Cleophas” comes
from the very same root as “caliph” (though he seems to think it is an
English word. I have to think he means that “caliph” is the Anglicized
version of the Arabic khalifa). So I should think Eisenman’s
approach would make more sense of these intriguing bits. Eisenman
realizes none of the narratives of the gospels, and hardly the Nativity
stories, preserve any real sequences of events, but that all gospel
narratives must be decoded, reflecting, at best, dim echoes and clues of
what was really going on. And in this case, surely the “Cleophas/Alphaeus”
business must denote that James the Just as the brother of Simeon bar
Cleophas (and therefore another “son of Cleophas”) barely conceals the
fact that James and Simeon were both “Cleophas,” the caliph, or
stand-in, for Jesus.
Tabor makes
James the Just the secret identity of the Beloved Disciple, but how can
that be, since John, whose exclusive property the Beloved Disciple
character is, makes clear that Jesus’ brothers were derisive skeptics
(John 7:3-5)? Tabor simply posits that the brothers of Jesus were among
the twelve disciples, so he must discount this verse, as well as Mark
3:31-35. His refutation? Nothing more than to say that, if the brothers
were among the twelve, then scholars have been misreading these
passages. Right.
Again,
Eisenman sees the link but makes more sense of it: the twelve were
indeed fictive doublets, by and large, of the Pillars, the ostensible
“brothers of the Lord.” For Eisenman (to whom, by the way, Tabor gives a
friendly shout-out in his Acknowledgements, but to whose work he never
once refers in the body of the book), these names are islands on the
surface, emerging from a vaster, hidden mass below, the outlines of
which can still be dimly discerned. But Tabor is handicapped by taking
way too much of the narrative surface as is.
Tabor makes
Luke a Paulinist and imagines that he was not eager to uphold the
leadership rights of the Heirs, the relatives of Jesus. But this is a
bad misreading of Luke-Acts, where the implication is that the family of
Jesus were disciples already before the resurrection (compare Luke
8:19-21 with Mark 3:20-21, 31-35 and see Acts 1:14).
Tabor recaps
Strauss’s theory that John 3:22-24 attests an interim period in which
Jesus acted as an apprentice of John, sharing his baptizing work. (Of
course, the casual reader would never guess anyone before Tabor had come
up with the theory.) You can decide if that is more plausible than the
alternative scholarly guess that Jesus baptizing represents simply an
anachronistic retrojection of Christian baptism into the narrative so as
to depict the competition between the two emerging sects and to have
John give his blessing on the winners (John 3:25-30). But if they were
indeed colleagues this means they might have conspired together to
become the dynamic duo of Qumran saviors, the Priestly and Royal
Messiahs. Yes, maybe so. Maybe not. In any case, another old theory. And
maybe they derived their revolutionary timetable from Daniel’s prophecy
of the Seventy Weeks. Could be. Who knows? I don’t think Tabor does. He
is winging it, merely speculating.
There is
little or nothing new in this book. It is but a pale ghost of Eisenman’s
magisterial James the Brother of Jesus. It is dedicated to Albert
Schweitzer, which is no accident, since it basically recapitulates his
theory that Jesus expected he would usher in the apocalypse by his
ministry of healing, preaching, and exorcism, but that John the
Baptist’s shocking death made him reconsider, making him realize for the
first time that he might have to die, too, taking the Great Tribulation
onto his own shoulders. To this add Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover
Plot, which Tabor’s book greatly resembles in its imaginative
mind-reading of Jesus and how he might have-cum-must have
applied various scriptural prophecies to himself, then endeavored to
fulfill them.
One might
apply Tabor’s own words to his book as an epitaph: “It is amazing what
firm opinions have been built upon such shaky foundations” (p. 165).