The Jesus Dynasty
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| Author | James Tabor |
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| Language | English |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
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Publication date
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April 4, 2006 |
| Pages | 378 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 64487282 |
| 232.9 22 | |
| LC Class | BT270 .T33 2006 |
The Jesus Dynasty is a book written by James Tabor in which he develops the hypothesis that the original Jesus movement was a dynastic one, with the intention of overthrowing the rule of Herod Antipas; that Jesus of Nazareth was a royal messiah, while his cousin John the Baptist planned to be a priestly messiah.
By his parents' marriage, Jesus was better placed to be King of Israel than Herod Antipas was. The two contradictory blood lines in the gospels are seen as compatible if one belongs to Mary and the other to Joseph. In such a case Jesus would have united a formidable list of families into his ancestors.
Jesus joined John the Baptist's movement - John was a close relative of Jesus (John's mom being Mary's aunt which makes jesus his second cousin)- and the two were prepared to bring about an uprising in Judaea, but John's arrest and execution caused Jesus to go underground to avoid the same fate. Eventually he resurfaced to carry on the Baptist's work alone.
Jesus was a charismatic teacher and possibly a faith healer. James, Simon and Jude were his half-brothers (since Jesus is not Joseph's son, in Tabor's view) and inherited the leadership after Jesus' death. His claim that the brothers of Jesus were members of his Disciples, has been called a misleading and fallacious reading of the biblical text. Tabor argues that the later, spiritualist, writings of Paul the Apostle polluted and effectively hijacked the movement, with the later Gospels following the Pauline point of view.
Tabor produces many supporting statements from the Bible and New Testament apocrypha, which escaped excision by the later Church fathers, intent on selling the Pauline message at the expense of Jesus' dynastic one. The argument produces a portrait of a real man in a tumultuous time, who really believed that his actions would accomplish the end of the Roman occupation and a return of the Jewish kingdom.
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