History Forum / General / General Topics / April 2006

The hidden history of Jesus, his royal family, and the birth of
Christianity. Based on a careful analysis of the earliest Christian
documents and recent archeological discoveries, The Jesus Dynasty offers a
bold new interpretation of the life of Jesus and the origins of
Christianity. www.jesusdynasty.com

A REVIEW:
As James Tabor, the author of "The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of
Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity," a much more
plausible consideration of the historical Jesus, writes, "What we have to
realize is that the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John were written between
forty to seventy years after the death of Jesus by authors who were not
original witnesses and who were not living in Roman Palestine." Mark, the
earliest of the gospels, was written 30 years after Jesus' death and like
all the gospels was altered by scribes over the years to make it better
conform to the emerging Christian orthodoxy.
 The oldest manuscripts of Mark, for example, do not report any appearances
of the resurrected Jesus at all; they end with the two Marys and Salome
fleeing in astonishment from the empty tomb. "Pious scribes," Tabor writes,
"who copied Mark made up an ending for him and added it to his text sometime
in the 4th century A.D. -- over 300 years after the original text was
composed." The ending printed in most Bibles -- "a clumsy composite of the
sightings of Jesus reported by Matthew, Luke, and John" is clearly not by
the same author. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible published in
1946, which printed the added ending as a footnote, caused such a "storm"
that the nonoriginal ending had to be put back in later editions.
 Readers who have only recently learned, via "The Da Vinci Code," of the
complicated history of the New Testament, are much better served by books
like Tabor's than by conspiracy-mongering like "The Jesus Papers." Tabor
chairs the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina
at Charlotte, has studied the Dead Sea Scrolls, worked on archaeological
excavations in the Middle East and is the editor in chief of the Original
Bible Project, "an effort to produce a historical-linguistic translation of
the Bible with notes." Like Baigent, he doesn't believe in the literal truth
of the resurrection, but unlike Baigent, he keeps his religious beliefs to
himself.
 Like all efforts to re-create historical events from the New Testament,
"The Jesus Dynasty" is by necessity highly interpretive and contestable, but
it's certainly more grounded than the fantasias of "The Jesus Papers." Tabor
is primarily interested in recovering the history of Jesus' immediate
family -- his mother, four brothers and two sisters -- who, he maintains,
played a far more important role in the young religious movement than is
generally known. The exact configuration of Jesus' extended family is pretty
hazy; Tabor suspects that an elderly Joseph married the teenage Mary when
she was already pregnant by another man and then died a few years later,
leaving Jesus at the head of a large family.
 Jesus' brothers -- sons of Joseph or perhaps of Joseph's brother, who
according to tradition was likely to have married Mary after Joseph's
death -- took over the church in succession after Jesus' death. The eldest,
James, stood for the continuation of the original identity of Jesus'
movement. It was a profoundly Jewish, messianic sect that believed Jesus to
be divinely inspired but not divine, that foresaw a coming "Kingdom of God"
that was earthly rather than heavenly, that sought the restoration of Jewish
self-rule in the form of a king descended from David, that did not view the
celebration of the Eucharist as the symbolic consumption of Jesus' flesh and
blood and that considered Jesus himself to be well and truly dead.
 "There are two completely separate and distinct 'Christianities' embedded
in the New Testament," Tabor writes. The version that triumphed -- Jesus as
God in human form, born of the eternally virgin Mary, whose death mystically
atoned for the sins of humankind, who rose from the dead and inaugurated a
new covenant with God that superceded the necessity of following Jewish
law -- is largely the creation of Paul. Tabor's mission with "The Jesus
Dynasty" is to recover what he can of the vein of Christianity led by James,
the one that "lost" and that eventually withered away.
 Although messiahs and messianic movements seem to have been a dime a dozen
in the Jewish world before, during and after Jesus' lifetime, as the Jews
fought their doomed battle against their Roman overlords, Tabor believes
that John the Baptizer was among the most galvanizing. "The Jesus Dynasty"
seeks to restore John to some of the status he enjoyed before Christian
theologians reduced him to a mere precursor of the Christ. In actuality,
Tabor argues, John's radical cause was fully in motion by the time Jesus, a
kinsman of John's, turned up to be baptized in the Jordan River at age 30.
"Jesus was a disciple of John and John was the rabbi or teacher of Jesus,"
not the other way around.
 Eventually, Jesus and John became "full partners" in a movement that
anticipated the overthrow of the corrupt civil and religious authorities in
Israel and eventually the entire world. They heralded the establishment of a
new age, in which the people would be ruled by two messiahs, a king
descended from David (Jesus) and a high priest descended from Aaron (John),
who would preside over the temple in Jerusalem. But John and Jesus didn't
advocate armed revolution -- they believed, on the basis of their
interpretation of passages in the Old Testament, that God would intervene
and effect the change when the right moment arrived. Although Tabor
describes their movement as "apocalyptic," he doesn't mean that they
expected the end of the world, only its utter transformation.
 Given this view, it's not surprising that Tabor considers John's execution
by King Herod to be "the most disappointing and shocking event in Jesus'
entire life." The loss seems to have inaugurated a new, darker vision of his
own destiny in Jesus' mind. In the best section of "The Jesus Dynasty,"
Tabor imagines the last few days of Jesus' life. Although the story is
familiar, as Tabor retells it, minus the supernatural elements and taking
the very Jewish nature of Jesus himself into account, it becomes new and in
its own way just as powerful.
 Tabor's Jesus is a man who considers himself chosen by God and who
reconciles himself to enduring terrible suffering before God's kingdom can
be established. He deliberately provokes a Jewish religious establishment
glutted on temple tributes, and the Roman authorities, known for their
creatively sadistic execution methods. "He firmly believed that if he and
his followers offered themselves up, placing their fate in God's hands,"
they could bring about the beginning of the new age, Tabor writes. Although,
as Tabor admits, we can never know Jesus' inner thoughts, it's possible that
even on the cross, "up until the last minutes, perhaps, Jesus believed that
God would intervene and save his life, and openly manifest his Kingdom."
 That hope was betrayed and eventually Jesus' own legacy was transformed
into a religion that, Tabor argues, he would have scarcely recognized. The
more faithful -- and more Jewish -- remnant of Jesus' following, led by
James and possibly two other half-brothers, became utterly overshadowed by
Paul's Christianity, a faith that swept through the Gentile world to become
the biggest religion on the planet.
 This is a remarkable enough story without a lot of folderol about Egyptian
mystery cults, faked deaths and the Holy Grail, plus it has the added
attraction of being rooted in some legitimate scholarship and it's better
written. "The Jesus Dynasty" surely has enough in it to challenge the
religious orthodoxies that many Americans were raised with, one of the
qualities of "The Da Vinci Code" that seems to have made the deepest
impression on the novel's fans. Of course, Tabor's never been in the
position to sue Dan Brown, but if his book can't win at least a few readers
away from "The Jesus Papers" this Easter, then, well, there is no God.

 -- By Laura Miller