The Jesus Dynasty
by James D Tabor
(Harper Element)
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
by Anne Rice
(Chatto & Windus)
With all the hype swirling around The Da Vinci Code, it is not surprising that James Tabor’s book, The Jesus Dynasty, should be marketed in a flashy way: ‘Stunning new evidence about the hidden history of Jesus,” it says on the cover. But it is a much more sober book than that, the latest in a long series of works that attempt to locate ‘the historical Jesus” — that is, to extract the real historical figure from the mythology and theology. Tabor, an American professor of religious studies, does this by combining a close, contextual reading of the gospels and an examination of the latest archeological finds in Israel.
Re-reading and re-interpretation has been used to come up with some surprising theories about Jesus and early Christianity. An extreme example would be Barbara Thiering’s ‘pesher technique”, using the Dead Sea Scrolls, which treats the New Testament as a highly encoded document. Her conclusions are controversial, and closer to The Da Vinci Code than Tabor’s. The ‘Jesus dynasty” postulated by Tabor, on what seems solid scholarly evidence, is the continuation of the royal Jewish Davidic line, to which Jesus was the last major claimant. In Tabor’s view, he probably died on the cross, but was succeeded as head of his political-spiritual sect by his brothers.
Tabor also sees Jesus as one of two messiahs, as various ancient texts mention. There was to be a priestly messiah as well as the kingly one, and Jesus’s cousin John ‘the Baptiser” filled the former role. In fact, Tabor sees John’s and Jesus’s missions as identical, with John having been turned into a mere precursor of Jesus in later revisions of the gospels. (Tabor doesn’t mention it, but this is a tradition partly remembered in Freemason ritual.)
For Tabor, Jesus is very much a Jew of his time, inclined to apocalyptic thinking — a political revolutionary as well as a spiritual leader. The political and the spiritual, anyway, would have been indivisible in Jesus’s mind. He probably saw himself as a messiah, meaning primarily a liberator from oppression, and consciously fulfilled biblical prophecies such as riding into Jerusalem on an ass. The crucifixion brought his personal mission to an end, though he may have anticipated a last-minute divine rescue, which would make sense of his words on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Christians otherwise find them hard to gloss.)
For Tabor, the idea that Jesus was a divinity, God made flesh, is a later accretion. This is the Pauline version of Christianity, which helped it spread among gentiles uninterested in his mission to restore the old Jewish monarchy. Jesus’s divinity emerges only in the last gospel, John’s, written long after Jesus’s death. In this, Tabor agrees with many other commentators. Jesus may have seen himself as on a God-given mission, but he did not see himself as God.
Anne Rice has done a lot of research in the field of the ‘historical Jesus” and early Christianity, she says in the rambling afterword to her new novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. (I feel a trilogy coming on — or even a series akin to her apparently limitless Vampire Chronicles.) She has been investigating Jesus, she says, since she returned to the Catholic Church in 1998, and she has clearly read a lot of the same books as Tabor. Her Jesus is also first and foremost a Jew, and the period details are convincing, though he is also very much a Catholic Jesus, too. He is a divinity, and he is slowly discovering that he has supernatural powers. That much, at least, he has in common with Rice’s vampires.
The novel covers little more than a year in Jesus’s life, from the age of seven on. Rice’s coup is to write it in the first person, though she’s by no means the first novelist to fictionalise Jesus — Anthony Burgess, Norman Mailer, Jose Saramago, Nikos Kazantzakis, Michael Moorcock and Gore Vidal are just some of the names that spring to mind. But this is not Burgess’s very human Jesus, or Saramago’s bitter, betrayed Jesus, let alone Vidal’s comic, zaftig Jesus; Rice’s child Jesus performs miracles without quite knowing how or why, and discovers the truth about his mysterious birth by novel’s end.
Rice is less readable with each novel she writes, and this one is all in short, breathless sentences, filled with portentous conversations. She does, though, recreate a plausible first-century Judaic setting, while animating all the biblical and apocryphal stories, and cleverly implants in the young Jesus’s mind the image of crucifixion, this horrible death used liberally by the Romans against insurgents. It is very plausible indeed that such an image would haunt Jesus from an early age.
Otherwise, the novel is very talky and pretty dull. There is only one scene that comes vividly to life, a scene that also provides the only joke in the book. An aged Nazareth matriarch convinces some Roman soldiers, who are busy putting down insurgency, not to execute any of her kin by offering them food and wine. The Roman commander tastes the wine and says, ‘That’s very good wine.” Old Sarah replies, ‘For the sake of my family, would I give you bad wine?”