Jesus of Nazareth, or, How a Half-Gentile Outsider Became a Jewish Insider, Turning Jewish Values Outside.
In Revolts broke out all over Roman occupied Israel in 4 BCE. A rebel in the Galilean town of Sepphoris named Judas, recounted Josephus in The Jewish War,
“broke open the royal arsenals, and, having armed his companions, attacked the other aspirants to power...Varus at once sent a detachment of his army into the region of Galilee adjoining Ptolemais, under the command of his friend Gaius; the latter routed all who opposed him, captured and burned the city of Sepphoris and reduced its inhabitants to slavery.”
It had taken the employment of three of the four existing legions of Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, before the rebellions were broken. The little village of Nazareth was about four miles from Sepphoris. Is it reasonable to presume that Nazareth suffered a similar rampage of Roman devastation? According John Dominic Crossan, a foremost scholar of the historical Jesus:
“In Nazareth around the time Jesus was born, men, women, and children who did not hide successfully would have been, respectively, killed, raped, and enslaved. Those who survived would have lost everything.”
Crossan speculated that Jesus would have grown up in a Nazareth dominated by stories about “the year the Romans came”. He also pointed out that this year, 4 BCE, was, “as best we can reconstruct the date”, the year that Jesus was born. This means that Jesus was born, as if by an insane coincidence, around the very same time that the Romans devastated, plundered, and raped the area where Jesus was born. “Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth?”, inquired evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. “Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question with a definite answer in principle: yes or no.” When the evidence for the confluence of the time and place of the Roman attack and Jesus’s birth are put together, it appears highly probable that Mary, Jesus’s Jewish mother, was raped by a Roman soldier.
This means that Jesus himself was very probably the product of the coercive violence of war. If so, then Jesus was not the “son of God”, but the son of a Roman rapist. This was no ordinary birth. Jesus, more than almost anyone else, was “born of sin”. If so, it also highly probable that Jesus knew, on some level, that he was born of rape, and thus, “born of sin”. Beyond normal, natural, or traditional conceptions, Jesus’s birth was truly extraordinary. Yet far from being a shiny new twenty-first century idea, the notion that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier goes back to the very earliest history of Christianity. While copies of the 2nd century Greco-Roman philosopher Celsus’s book, On the True Doctrine, may have been destroyed by the early Church, his basic anti-Christian arguments were preserved in the form of a rebuttal by the Christian apologist Origen. The following excerpt presents Celsus as an attorney prosecuting Jesus, his witness. This form is remarkable in that the philosopher demands reason and evidence of Jesus, not unquestioned faith in Jesus’s claims:
“Is it not true, good sir, that you fabricated the story of your birth from a virgin to quiet rumors about the true and unsavory circumstances of your origins? Is it not the case that far from being born in royal David’s city of Bethlehem, you were born in a poor country town, and of a woman who earned her living by spinning? Is it not the case that when her deceit was discovered, to wit, that she was pregnant by a Roman soldier named Panthera she was driven away by her husband—the carpenter—and convicted of adultery?”
Did Jesus’s mother Mary have the reputation of being a whore? The Greek word for virgin is parthenos, and it is possible that the legionary name Panthera (“the Panther”) was derived, sarcastically, from this Greek word. Less likely, but possible, is that the identity of Jesus’ father was uncovered in 1859 when an old Roman tombstone was discovered in Bingerbrück, Germany. The Roman archer Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera (c. 22 BCE-CE 40) would have been about 18 years old at the time of Jesus’s birth. Cohor I Sagittariorum that he served under was stationed in Judea at that time.
More on this later…
