The Jesus Dynasty

The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity by James D. Tabor

It is the most difficult of tasks to have a reasonable conversation with someone about the man now known as Jesus Christ.

Just my first sentence has already raised hackles throughout the land.

The problem is what we all bring to the table. You read the first sentence as a member of one of three groups:

You could be a Christian. Even that tells me next-to-nothing. Are you new in your faith or have you believed for a long time? Are you a serious believer or is your Christianity more like your ethnicity; inherited from your family like the color of your skin and the shape of your eyes? Are you open-minded to discovering new aspects of the faith or have you discovered all there is? Did you struggle for years to come to an understanding, or did you accept practically from the womb?

You could be a religion other than Christian. Again, that tells me little. Were you taught to be hostile to Christianity, benign or even open? Do you even know what Christianity is? Is your idea of Christianity governed by those around you who claim to be Christians? Do you perceive Christianity as a threat to your faith?

You could be Atheist, but even this choice offers no help. Did you grow up religious and come to reject it or have you never connected with a faith? Do you really believe in nothing larger than yourself, or are you just adamant that it’s not the “Christian God”? Have you studied for years and concluded that a belief in a higher power is a delusion, or do you simply not care?

You see the dilemma. Every one of us (including me) brings thoughts, attitudes and beliefs to the conversation. We do that with everything, but the subject of Jesus is much more sensitive. There are many who believe that Jesus is God, and to have any conversation about Jesus as a human being is close to blasphemous. (You know people like this. Perhaps you are one.) There are others who have been so hurt by the Church, Church people, or something that happened to them they equate with Church, that talking about Jesus in any capacity (other than as a swear word) will make them shut down totally. (You know people like this. Perhaps you are one.)

Beginning to see the difficulty? The previous paragraphs have contained no shocking information, no bold assertions or allegations; no revealed truth of any kind. A simple recitation of the obvious is all I have thus done, and yet a sizable portion of the audience (still reading, that is) are already tense, nervous, hostile, wary, or any other manner of emotions one generally doesn’t wish for when writing a book review.

Such is life.

For anyone left, I do have a book for you. A book you may not agree with. A book I don’t agree with, at least all of it. I’m not even competent to comment on some of it. (There are 24 pages of end-notes, and true to my nature, I am checking every single one of them before pronouncing any opinion, so I will at least have a thorough reading of the background information.)

But all that aside, I am wholeheartedly recommending The Jesus Dynasty to anyone who thinks they can handle it.

Before I tell you what the book is, let me tell you what it is not: The Da Vinci Code. As I wrote about that book earlier this year, I had a good time reading The Da Vinci Code. But by no means is it history, let alone good history. Anyone with a competent understanding of historical sources would laugh at the book’s preposterous claims.

Therein lies the problem. The reason the book was such a smash—I believe—was that the vast majority of people had never heard anything like it. Most people don’t read Biblical Commentary, Biblical History, Biblical Archeology, or any other academic field when it comes to the Bible. If they know anything about it, it’s what they are told in Church, or what they cobble together from various TV movies and politicians/celebrities du jour seeking to use/abuse the text for whatever goal they currently have.

That’s an issue because while James Tabor’s book The Jesus Dynasty is not some sensationalized page-turner filled with illicit sex implications, it is written from a academic point of view.

What do I mean by that? Well, Tabor as a historian does not necessarily take the Bible’s word as absolute for what it says on the life and times of Jesus. That sentence right there will upset many of you. Yet it’s nothing new. For several centuries there has been a firm understanding that the Gospels (and other books of the New Testament, and for that matter the Old Testament) were written with a polemical purpose in mind, not a historical one.

A polemic is a work making an argument of a controversial or revolutionary nature, usually counter to the current status quo.

That sounds confusing, so let’s get specific. When it comes to the Gospels (the first four books of the New Testament, Matthew Mark, Luke and John), Biblical historians generally believe several things, each increasingly difficult to handle for someone who takes the bible literally:

A) The books’ titles are not necessarily the names of the authors (this isn’t very controversial, as the most conservative of Scholars believe that)

B) The books were written 40 to 70 years after the time of Jesus.

C) The books were written by people who never knew Jesus personally.

D) The books were written very specifically for targeted audiences of that day and time, and thus the “legend” of Jesus was often changed somewhat to fit the theological argument the author was making.

This last point is the most contentious, although in some ways it is also readily accepted by conservative scholars. For example, the author of John (and for simplicity we’ll call all them all by the books’ traditional names) was writing in Greece, where they already had a tradition of gods. Most scholars agree it is for this reason that rather than dwell on the childhood of Jesus, John gets to a miracle right out of the gate, the wedding at Cana. Why does John do this? Because the main god in Greece at the time (in terms of worship) was Dionysius, and John needed to show that Jesus was a provider of nourishment as well.

I’m oversimplifying, but what I just wrote isn’t controversial. What is controversial is the idea that the authors might change events to fit their needs. Note: most Biblical scholars would agree that the authors of these gospels weren’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. It was just that they had specific audiences and specific messages they were dealing with. In other words: they were not attempting to write history. For example, Mark (the first Gospel written) was writing wholly to Jews, right after Israel was crushingly defeated in the war against Rome. John was writing in Greece. Different audiences, different times, different agendas.

I realize I have gotten far a field, and probably unnecessarily. If you’re the kind of person that needs this explained, you’re almost certainly not going to enjoy a book like The Jesus Dynasty. And that’s fine. I’m not judging anyone, and I’m not criticizing anyone for their faith. (Although one doubts I’ll get the same reciprocity.)

I guess I just want people to be able to discuss things so badly that I bite off more than I can chew.

For the rest of you, The Jesus Dynasty is simply fascinating. Tabor is a very respected Biblical Archeologist, and spends much of his time in Israel excavating. His book makes some rather unconventional claims, and veers into the land of supposition quite often. Then again, most of what we believe today is based solidly on tradition, and virtually none of it on fact, so I don’t see why interpolating and extrapolating from the sources is all that horrible, especially when you are careful to lay it out that way.

In fact, what’s ironic is that Tabor actually uses the Gospels for much of his re-assessment, far in excess of many Biblical histiographies. I’ve read several dozen, and most take a hostile or indifferent view to the Gospels.

I read a Christianity Today review of Tabor’s book, and the reviewer seems to respect the man imminently. (It’s harder to find a more conservative source than Christianity Today.) Nonetheless, the reviewer seemed baffled that Tabor didn’t accept Biblical accounts for things. Tabor himself explains it this way, like when he gets into the subject of who Jesus’s father might have been:

Although only Matthew and Luke assert the “virgin birth” of Jesus, and the teaching is found nowhere else in the New Testament, the belief that Mary’s pregnancy resulted from a divine act of God without any male involvement developed into a fundamental theological dogma in early Christianity. For millions of Christians any suggestion that Jesus was conceived through the normal process of human sexual reproduction, even if somehow sanctified by God, is viewed as scandalous if not outright heresy. But history, by its very nature, is an open process of inquiry that cannot be bound by the dogmas of faith. Historians are obligated to examine whatever evidence we have, even if such discoveries might be considered shocking or sacrilegious to some. The assumption of the historian is that all human beings have both a biological mother and father, and that Jesus is no exception. That leaves two possibilities—either Joseph or some other unnamed man is the father of Jesus. {page 59}

This idea is certainly not new or radical, although the examination of the evidence leads Tabor to some interesting possible conclusions.

Tabor’s main thrust is a completely different idea of Jesus and his message. He talks (rightly) about how Jesus was a Jew, and how Jesus never meant to be anything but a Jew, and how that belief influenced him. Some of his ideas rehash what I’ve read elsewhere (although with much more textual, factual and other evidentiary support), but some of the conclusions are new (at least to me, and from what I gather, new to the Biblical History scene period).

Why should you care? Because Tabor is a good writer, and seeks to write a reasonable account of a man that is fundamentally different from what you’re used to. If you don’t care about Jesus as God, you should still be interested in this book. Tabor treats Jesus as totally human. (In fact one of the arguments, very well laid out, is that the belief of Jesus as God did not come about until considerably after his life on earth.) I mean, we’re talking about the most influential person in human history. No one even comes close.

If you are a Christian, I think you should still be interested. Unless you’re just that much smarter than everyone who has ever lived, there is more you can learn on Jesus, your faith, and what you believe. Reading this book won’t force you to change your ideas. Maybe you’ll disagree with everything. That doesn’t make the ideas unimportant. In fact, if you read Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty and honestly examine the ideas for what they are and still come out believing everything you currently do, you can do so with the knowledge that your beliefs have only been strengthened from a challenge.

And as for the rest of you, there are ideas here you need to be thinking about. I’m not asking anyone to change their mind because of one book, but if The Jesus Dynasty merely gets you thinking about the life of Jesus and what that meant, how can that be anything but good?