The CNN news release on the web that Paul Verhoeven, the Hollywood director and Jesus Seminar participant, has written a biography of Jesus that attributes Jesus' birth to a rape of Mary by a Roman soldier is old news. In dealing with the theories of Jim Tabor in Dethroning Jesus (pp. 178-79) I wrote the following about this claim that goes back to Celsus and the late second century.
"Finally, Tabor appeals to the “Pantera” tradition. This common
name for Jesus’s alleged father emerges from Celsus, an anti-
Christian writer from around AD 180. Celsus describes Pantera as a
Roman soldier. Tabor then alludes to an even later teaching from a
Jewish text from the Tosefta (t. Hullin 2.24) that describes a man
named Jacob who passed on the teaching of “Jesus son of Panter.” He
goes on to discuss a gravestone found in Germany of a Tiberius
Julius Abdes Pantera of Sidon, who belonged to a Roman cohort of
archers (Tabor 2006, 63–70). To wrap up his survey of Pantera,
Tabor remarks, “Is it remotely plausible that among all the thousands
of tomb inscriptions of the period this might be the tombstone
of Jesus’s father—and in Germany of all places? The chances
seem infinitesimal but the evidence should not be just dismissed out
of hand” (2006, 70). He concludes, “Our best evidence indicates that
Joseph who married the pregnant Mary was not the father of Jesus.
Jesus’s father remains unknown but possibly was named Pantera, and
if so, was quite possibly a Roman soldier” (2006, 72). We can agree
with Tabor that Joseph doesn’t appear to be Jesus’s father. Ironically,
both the virgin birth tradition and the ugly rumors spread by some
about Jesus’s origins point in this direction. Moreover, Tabor’s explanation
for solving the dilemma is an excellent case of a divide created
by worldviews concerning the ways in which God can act.
In the end, Tabor steps back from the brink of fully adopting
this theory while at the same time leaving the impression that it is
quite plausible. One thing he [Tabor] knows: the virgin birth is impossible.
To support his stance, he presents a string of questionable readings
of ancient texts, including an appeal to late texts and an exaggeration
of the contrasts between the Gospel texts; he supplements these
dubious readings with the discovery of a gravestone with the common
name Pantera. Should we mention that the texts Tabor appeals
to have a biased perspective, a point usually made to disqualify the
claims of Christian texts from being accepted as historical? We have
taken this side trip exploring the theory of Pantera and the discussion
of Jesus’s origins to show how far some go to try to fill in what
they perceive as gaps in the record. Ultimately, however, Tabor’s
alternative theory is very much a stretch."
So this claim really is not news to anyone familiar with the polemics surrounding Jesus. Tabor was right to say the chances of this being true are infintesimal. Any suggestion that this idea is plausible, much less that it is likely as Verhoeven claims, is the stuff of Hollywood.
Not only is Darrell right in all of the above, but we can make an informed guess as to why the rabbinic literature chose on several occasions to refer to such an individual, variously named Pandera, Panter, Pantera, or Panthera/os. The Greek word for "virgin," used already two centuries before the time of Jesus in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures at Isaiah 7:14, was parthenos. In denying the Christian claim of a virginal conception, later writers naturally used garbled versions of the same Greek word to for the putative name of some supposedly real father of Jesus. But the much later dates of the literature in which these clames are made combine with the parasitic nature of the name(s) chosen (i.e., parasitic on the already existing New Testament) to virtually guarantee the secondary and inauthentic nature of the traditions that Verhoeven now fancifully embellishes.
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