Panthera: Christian creation, not Jewish?

So claims Christopher Zeichmann, in this excerpt from a new book. The basic gist is that this was a Christian anti-Jewish polemic:

Early Christian writers placed the accusation in the mouths of fictional or stylized Jewish opponents to defend the virginal conception, police Christian belief, and portray Jews as hostile outsiders. Rabbinic references to the “son of Panthera” are late, fragmentary, and too ambiguous to support the idea of an organized Jewish anti-Christian polemic.

INNteresting. 

My first counter-thought is, then how did it wind up in the Toledoth Yeshu? Did rabbis forget entirely about its Christian origin? (Zeichmann doesn't claim the whole TY is a Christian creation, or even with largely Christian roots. He knows that's simply not possible.)

Zeichmann notes that its first Jewish reference is in the third century CE, in the Tosefta. He also notes the Tosefta refers to a "heretic" named Yaakov, who invokes the name of Yeshu to try to heal someone from snakebite. Is this a play on "Yohanan the Dyemaker" in Toledoth Yeshu, generally regarded as John the Baptizer? Both it and the Jerusalem Talmud's story play off the idea of Jesus the Magician, which appears to be a strain of thought from early on in the TY.

Second, why did it already arise in the second century? Wasn't Christianity still too small to be issuing bank-shot anti-Jewish counterblasts, at least ones with enough legs to get the attention of Celsus? 

Zeichmann says:

[T]here are two major flaws with the prevailing opinion that the Panthera legend was the product of Jewish slander and largely perpetuated by Jews. First, Christian texts claiming that real, historical Jews were the primary articulators of the Panthera legend are deeply unreliable. Second, it is not clear that the earliest Jewish references to “Yeshu son of Panthera” refer to the Christian figure of Jesus. Let us consider these issues in turn.

Well, let's see now. 

He goes on to claim that since we don't have Celsus' own words, who claims to be quoting a Jew, we can hardly know what Celsus actually said. Well, that's true of ANYTHING where Celsus is being refuted by Origen.

He then claims the Jewish Yeshu has but few points of comparison with Jesus. 

Yes, but isn't that the whole point? The TY, for example, is largely a scurrilous screed. Zeichmann approaches the Jesus Seminar's use of the "criterion of dissimilarity," or perhaps its overuse.

Zeichmann then says it's the Babylonian Talmud that conflates ben Stada and ben Panthera, and after the conflation, makes the new person to look more like Jesus.

Interestingly, Zeichmann only references the TY twice.

I just don't buy the idea that some Christian, pre-170 CE, would have made this story up to kneecap Jews and specifically over a dispute about Mary's virginity or not.

Going beyond that, Zeichmann claims this is Christian projection of doubt about the virginal conception. Also unlikely. 

Plus, this is not the only time Zeichmann has had an "out there" interpretation. (Among other things, he posits a gay relationship between the centurion and servant of Jesus' healing in Matthew 8/Luke 7, though his focus is more on the interpretation history of the passage. Where he really goes wrong, on that link, beyond that, is the assumption this is based on a historical event. The idea that Capernaum, largely Jewish, had an actual centurion, per both Matthew and Luke and presumably Q behind it [I take John as derivative from Luke] is simply a non-starter. Yes, Antipas had elements of his army partially, and in places, organized on Roman lines, but that's not a guarantee. Besides, at no more than 1,000 people there, Antipas would have had no more than a small constabulary. Zeichmann has a much more detailed discussion of the discussion, and pros and cons, here.)

Finally, an author who five-star ratings-bombs his own book before it appears in print, as Zeichmann did on Goodreads? (I one-star rating-bombed in response to set the scales back to even.) 

Neil Godfrey thinks Rene Salm has refudiated Ken Dark, and tries to bankshot Carrier

 I had added Vridar to my blogroll, with all of its problems, because of some of Godfrey's comments and observations about Carrier.

But, now, with this piece by him, it seems that Godfrey's real goal is just to slam-dunk on Carrier.

First, here's what I said as a comment there:

Salm isn't even an academic or with an academic degree. (Sigh.) 

I've read Dark's long piece from 2020, and browsed some of his later online writing. 

I've also read an even more recent piece from Bruce Chilton, on Jesus as "mamzer" and a likely solution, that the Bethlehem near Jerusalem wasn't the only Bethlehem, and that there was another ... Six miles or so southwest of Nazareth. 

I'm not an academic, but I do have a graduate theological degree. (And, unlike Carrier, while I'm here, I read Hebrew as well as Greek.) Otherwise, if Neil's primary purpose is slam-dunking on Carrier, I can, and do, do that on my own. 

So, no, this impresses me not. I had added Vridar to the blogroll for my own site on critical religion. May be time to undo that again.

There you go.

Second, here's my piece from 2021 about Dark's big 2020 piece, refuting Jonathan M.S. Pearce and his mythicism-lite. (He later got refudiated on other things.)

Per that, and per what I told Godfrey, Salm has no graduate or even undergraduate degree relevant to the field. 

In a second 2020 piece, Dark notes that his claims about specific sites at Nazareth have often been misconstrued in the media. I'm sure Salm, not an academic, tagged along. Finally, here's a 2024 piece, a precis of his most recent book, in essence, discussing the reliability or not of oral history.

I haven't yet pulled Vridar back down, with the idea of keeping it up for shits and giggles if nothing else. 

What if there were another Bethlehem?

Yes, what if?

Bruce Chilton looks at that idea near the end of a long essay on just what it meant for Jesus to be a mamzer, above all in terms of parentage, but also in terms of birthplace.

What IF there were another Bethlehem?

One further north than the famous one.

One so far north as to be just 7 miles from Nazareth?

And that (also undercutting mythcists once again) existed in the first century CE.

There is such a place. Chilton knew about it decades ago when doing his PhD. We now have more.

As for what this means?

Chilton postulates that Jesus was conceived a mamzer, which could mean nothing more than Joseph diddling Mary after betrothal but before marriage. They were from Nazareth. He took her to Bethlehem for the birth. Birth narratives arose from that.

(Rural poor areas may have differed from Jerusalem on the issue of post-betrothal sex. Chilton says a general Galilee vs Jerusalem difference is not proven.)

The second Bethlehem? Joshua mentions one in land alloted to the tribe of Zebulon. Chilton says Talmudic-era texts have more. And archaeology confirms the site mentioned above. 

Beyond that? You'll have to read for yourself. On this piece, at least, Academia does not allow a copy-paste, at least not with legible words. 

Disagreeing with Massimo, but seeing where he comes from on Stoicism

 Near the end of a long discussion via Substack notes, about the nature of Stoicism, after I mentioned "ontological dualism," then re a response from him, made sure I was being understood correctly, he said:

I simply don't see that as true.

My response, which I didn't originally send? This:

We’ll agree to disagree on that, too, but I think the Logos is just as much a non-materialist entity, if you will, as karma is in Buddhism and Hinduism. I know they were determinists, just like Enlightenment Deists (even if they didn’t recognize it). I see it as similar to Aristotle’s “prime mover”; the Logos has to sit outside the material world, just like the Deist “wind up the clock” divinity.

It's how I've always understood Stoicism.

And that's true even if the Stoics didn't understand themselves that way. 

The conversation did fully open my mind, though.

I realize that part of why I have seen it this way is that, I see it as "not working" due to self-referentiality problems, the exact ones that Hofstadter, Gödel and Tarski have like liked to write about, only universe-wide. 

The way I see it is, we have a dilemma, and a real one, not a false one.

Accepting at face value Zeno's claim that Stoicism was monistic?

We either say he got that claim wrong, which allows the general Stoic edifice to remain, albeit with making Zeno look like a clueless metaphysician, or ...

We say that he was right on that Stoicism was monistic, and he had created a self-rotting edifice.

I don't know which is more "charitable."

I do know that either angle makes me realize far more than before how overrated Stoicism is in some ways. 

Of course, the central platform of Stoicism, the reason so many people are ga-ga over it via neo-Stoicism, is ethics. So, Stoicism's ethics are either part of that rotten edifice, and ditto for neo-Stoics, or they're dualistically based even as neo-Stoics don't realize this. If, per Hume's dictum (with preceding sentence) that:

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Is at least more true than false, then a principle of living ethically according to reason and nature is more false than true. That's what got me started with Massimo; it's been a long, long time — before I became a secularist, to put it bluntly — that I've read seriously in Stoicism. I didn't realize that its use of "passion" has nothing to do with Hume's passions.

And, while I think Hume is not totally true here, just as he is not on "is ≠ ought," I do think on that, and this, both issues, he's more right than wrong. In the run-up to that dictum, he noted that most people of his day felt that passions needed to be the slave to reason, and so explained his inverse. See here. And, of that, he said:

I think, again, that this may not be 100 percent true, but it's more right than wrong. 

In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.

The crux of what Hume is getting at comes a few paragraphs later, with this definition:

A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification. When I am angry, I am actually possest with the passion, and in that emotion have no more a reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five foot high. 'Tis impossible, therefore, that this passion can be oppos'd by, or be contradictory to truth and reason; since this contradiction consists in the disagreement of ideas, consider'd as copies, with those objects, which they represent.

Followed by this observation:

According to this principle, which is so obvious and natural, 'tis only in two senses, that any affection can be call'd unreasonable. First, When a passion, such as hope or fear, grief or joy, despair or security, is founded on the supposition of the existence of objects, which really do not exist. Secondly, When in exerting any passion in action, we chuse means insufficient for the design'd end, and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects. Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it.

In other words, if a passion is justly formed, it's impossible to reason it away. 

I would go further, and state that claims that one can do so are itself a passion, though an ill-formed one. Of course, I like petard-hoisting.

I think devotees of all Hellenistic philosophies could learn from Hume. Even Cynicism made strong claims for human reasoning. At least it, unlike Stoicism and Epicureanism, rejects determinism.

Now, per Hume's other dictum, yes, his dictum on the passions and reason may not be totally true. After all, if "is ≠ ought," theoretically, we can reason our way beyond passions. But, can we? Beyond me going with petard-hoisting snark, per Hume's third bon mot about how we can never truly apprehend ourselves, we may never be able to so totally detach from ourselves as to truly abstractly reason with a bracketing — a phenomenological bracketing or epoche — of passions.

I see this to be more true the older I get, even as I wish it were not the case. 

That then said, related to that? Hume has a big problem here, and it's a personal one as a professional one, because he was a big practitioner of it.

It's called "motivated reasoning."

That then said, this doesn't let Stoicism off the hook, or the petard. It's easy to engage in — and to fling accusations of others engaging in — motivated reasoning. That in turn suggests again that actual reasoning is harder than St. David presents and much more so than Zeno claims. 

We very much aren't letting Stoicism off the hook. Per a later comment to Massimo:

So, whether Zeno was wrong in assuming that you can have a monist Logos, and ignoring all the self-referential issues that causes, which being literally universal in size, certainly satisfies Gödel et al on being a sufficiently large issue, or whether, if I’m charitable on accepting Zeno’s monistic stance, we then say per what I just said, and that theoretically means the edifice is rotten (yes, that’s a bit harsh, but I’m OK with it), there we are. 

I don’t see that as a false dilemma but a real one, and I know that, per the Cretan liars paradox and other things, self-referentiality problems were known to Zeno. 

As for the eternal recurrence? That of course means the Logos gets nuked along with everything else. 

Behind this, Zeno makes assumptions about the rationality of the universe, as well as of H. sapiens, that probably aren’t warranted. Can I hop in a Tardis and introduce him to non-local subatomic particles? 

Per Hume on Kant, I’ve been awakened from some sort of slumber.

And, that last sentence is as true as anything. 

This sets aside the issue of Stoicism being a hard determinist philosophy, and who exactly is trying to achieve ataxaria admidst such determinism. And yes, that last part was snark.

Fuck around with Pope Leo XIV and find out

 After the Society of St. Pius X, who had had bishops previously excommunicated by Pope John Paul II restored by Ratzi the Nazi, aka Benedict XVI, decided to ordain four new bishops, one wondered just how hard Leo would come down.

Wonder no more.

He not only excommunicated the four, but the entire order. 

Last Wednesday's ordination came 38 years to the day after JPII excommunicated Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the anti-Vatican II group.

Beyond that, the Swiss event was itself not wholly authentic, as the sermon was not in Latin. Yes, that was the norm pre-Vatican II, but that's the whole point. Vatican II made the liturgy as well as the sermon accessible.

Beyond that? Neither the Tanakh nor He Kaine Diatheke was written in Latin. 

As to why?

After Benedict reversed the excommunications, Francis continued dialogue. Leo might have done that, but, even if SSPX's two remaining bishops were aging out, he wasn't prepared to go further at this time, and so surely felt he had to draw a hard line.

FAFO will now be seen, in English, throughout the Vatican world. 

Top blogging of April-June 2026

 This is, per Blogger stats (which may or may not include bot hits) the most-read posts of the last three months. That does not necessarily mean they were written in the past three months, and "evergreen" posts will be noted.

The usual counting backward, per Tom Lehrer and Wernher von Braun:

 

No. 10 is about the ahistoricity of the last one-quarter of Acts, even when judged by the historicity of the rest of the book and is from 2022.

No. 9 is about what John Drinkwater got wrong on Nero, Tacitus and early Christianity, in his bio of Nero and is from 2021. 

No. 8 is new, from within the last couple of months, about what Texas Observer got wrong vis-a-vis Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico's liberal Presbyterianism within larger Presbyterian, and mainline Protestant, denominationalism.

No. 7 ties broadly to No. 10, but is new; it's about Berenice, sister of Agrippa II, and it is more specifically about reality vs legend in her life. 

Four straight posts about wrongness of others' interpretations, eh? 

No. 6, also new, continues the trend, as I excoriate an article about "Catholic" "womenpriests." That's scare quotes for both because per the excoriated article, both are earned. It's also raised my skeptical antennae about the site that posted the original link.

No. 5, is also new, and my take on a great article by Bruce Chilton talking about "godfearers" in Acts. In this case, it's him pointing out what others have gotten wrong. 

No. 4 relates to No. 10, and also to the theme here. I call out Adam Gopnik for a semi-fail on his understanding of the historical Paul.

No. 3? Even more so. I refudiate philosopher friend Massimo Pigliucci over his defense of determinism. (More refudiation is upcoming, related to the Stoicism and neo-Stoicism that is a prime driver of his determinism.) 

No. 2? An oldie but a goodie: "More proof the Buddha was no Buddha." Indirectly, it's also a refutation of Robert Wright. It's from way back in 2007.

No. 1 is about fascism, or "lutefash," in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and of added importance with appeaser LCMS incumbent president Matthew Harrison just being elected to another term, with a whole 50.1 percent per this Substack. It's from 2023.

And, of course, besides the countdown idea in general, Lehrer's piece ties well with No. 1 on the list. 

A roundup of biblical criticism stuff in re Amateur Exegete

 Uhh, no, librul evangelical on Patheos, Paul's family didn't become Roman citizens when made freedmen of the Sergius Paulus family. First, being freed did not have to guarantee Roman citizenship. Second, Paul himself was not a Roman citizen.

Uhh, no, independent scholar of Christianity (I am one, too) Acts is not highly accurate. Instead, especially in the last one-quarter, it's HUGELY INaccurate. 

Both of those (and more) came from one of the worst recent posts by Amateur Exegete, who also there has a video clip of Robyn Walsh telling you "Paul was not a Christian." No shit, sherlock. (I'm not that high on her in general.)

An otherwise very good article on Mark and the Messianic Secret undercut itself by claiming Herod was not Jewish. I agree with the locale and the likely dating (though I would date it much more narrowly around 71 CE and not have such an open-ended terminus ad quem).

Speaking of, I found his Goodreads page. Per books we have in common (don't know if this will show for third-party readers) I'm more underwhelmed, especially on his love for Ehrman. Worse yet, he's touted one of the books in which he's way wrong on one of his posts. (We're only two stars apart, not three, that said.)