I bought the book in 2001 and read it.
As I usually do when reading a book by an "unvetted" author, I began checking the notes and sources etc.
On page 29 of Bushby's book he writes:
The talmud writers mentioned Jesus' name twenty times and quite specifically documented that he was born an illegitimate son of a Roman soldier called Panthera, nicknamed the 'Panther'. Panthera's existence was confirmed by the discovery of a mysterious tombstone at Bingerbruck in Germany. The engraving etched in the headstone read:
Tiberius Julius abdes Panthera, an archer, native of Sidon, Phoenicia, who in 9 AD was transferred to service in Rhineland (Germany). 1
So, I go to the endnotes and find the reference to be: "Jesus the Magician," by Professor Morton Smith, 1978...
So, let's check the quote.
I happened to have Morton Smith's book on hand and pulled it off the shelf. I found the reference, only it was a bit different from the way Bushby presented it. Here's exactly what Morton writes:
"To suppose the name Pantera appeared as a caricature of a title not yet in use is less plausible than to suppose it handed down by polemic tradition. It was not a very common name, but we do know of a Sidonian archer, Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, who was serving in Palestine about the time of Jesus' birth and later saw duty on the Rhine. It is possible, though not likely, that his tombstone from Bingerbruck is our only genuine relic of the Holy Family."
Noticing that Bushby had created a quoted tombstone and made a reference to a book that he got it from, that wasn't quite as he presented it, worried me a bit.
I'm sure that he thought that the information from Smith's book could very well be presented as a "direct quote" from the tombstone. But, the fact is, we do not know exactly what the tombstone said and how Smith or other scholars came by their information. For all we know, there was a name on a tombstone, and a list of soldiers in other records and the two were matched together.
So, I went looking for the evidence of the tombstone.
What I found was that the "evidence of the tombstone" comes from rather questionable, (in my mind) sources. It is from a book by a couple of blokes named McDowell & Wilson and here is the quote:
"... Scholars have debated at length how Jesus came to have this name (i.e., ben Pandira) attached to his. Strauss thought it was from the Greek word pentheros, meaning 'son-in-law.' Klausner and Bruce accept the position that panthera is a corruption of the Greek parthenos meaning 'virgin.' Klausner says, 'The Jews constantly heard that the Christians (the majority of whom spoke Greek from the earliest times) called Jesus by the name "Son of the Virgin"... and so, in mockery, they called him Ben ha-Pantera, i.e., "son of the leopard."'[...]
"The theory most sensational but least accepted by serious scholars was dramatized by the discovery of a first century tombstone at Bingerbruck, Germany. The inscription read, 'Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, an archer, native of Sidon, Phoenicia, who in 9 c.e. was transferred to service in Germany.'...
"This discovery fueled the fire of the theory that Jesus was the illegitimate son of Mary and the soldier, Panthera. Even Origen writes that his opponent, Celsus, in circa A.D. 178, said that he heard from a Jew that 'Miriam' had become pregnant by 'Pantheras,' a Roman soldier; was divorced by her husband, and bore Jesus in secret.
"If 'Pantheras' were a unique name, the theory of Mary's pregnancy by the Roman soldier might be more attractive to scholars. But Adolf Deissman, the early twentieth-century German New Testament scholar, verified, by first century inscriptions, 'with absolute certainty that Panthera was not an invention of Jewish scoffers, but a widespread name among the ancients.'... Rabbi and Professor Morris Goldstein comments that it was as common as the names Wolf or Fox today. He comments further:
"It is noteworthy that Origin himself is credited with the tradition that Panther was the appellation of James (Jacob), the father of Jospeh, the father of Jesus [...] So, too, Andrew of Crete, John of Damascus, Epiphanius the Monk, and the author of Andronicus of Constantinople's Dialogue Against the Jews, name Panther as an ancestor of Jesus [...]
"Jesus being called by his grandfather's name would also have agreed with a statement in the Talmud permitting this practice. Whereas Christian tradition identified Jesus by his home town, Jewish tradition, having a greater concern for genealogical identification, seems to have preferred this method of identifying Jesus. Goldstein presents more evidence to argue the case convincingly." (The New Evidence, McDowell & Wilson, pp. 66-67)
Now, just who are McDowell and Wilson and what is their book all about???
The New Evidence
Fully Updated to Answer the Questions Challenging Christians Today
Features:
Updating research done in partnership with a special McDowell apologetics team, led and edited by top-rated evangelical apologist Dr. Norman Geisler and apologetics writer and author Bill Wilson.
Thorough indexes make it easier to find the argument or fact you need.
Fully updated to keep Evidence That Demands a Verdict the number one reference for evangelical apologetics for the next decade and beyond.
Josh McDowell, graduate of Wheaton College and Magna Cum Laude graduate of Talbot Theological Seminary, is an internationally recognized speaker and author. Through his books, films, and television appearances, Josh McDowell has become known as one of the premier defenders of the faith for today.
We notice, thus, that Bushby has utilized evidence that came originally from a book by a couple of invested Christian apologists... and we aren't even certain of their "proof" because we know how desperate Christian apologists can be.
What is more disturbing, however, is that he has attributed this quoted "tombstone" to Morton Smith.
Continuing to search for the elusive tombstone, we don't find very much except a lot of people quoting Bushby...
But, with persistence, I found that there is a book entitled:
Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum , by Theodor Mommsen. It is a complete survey of all the epigraphs and inscriptions unearthed anywhere in the Roman Empire and an ongoing project since 150 years and for as long as we continue to discover more inscriptions.
Through it we know, for instance, that Pilate was not, as the gospels claim, a procurator, but a legate, and hence not accountable to the legate of Syria, which explains a good deal of the reckless atrocities during Pilate's tenure. From this collection we also gain statistical insights in the average distribution of epigraphs and, corresponding to it, the degree of literacy in different parts of the empire at different times.
As reviewer, Michael Sympson says: "We lesser mortals are not likely to see this on our bookshelves at home, but for the archaeologist and historian it is an indispensable tool."
Sympson has, apparently, had a look at a library copy and tells us that, from in this book, we encounter:(numbers note the inscriptions)
XIII, 7514, and Dessau, Inscriptiones selectae, 2571
The inscription on the tombstone found in Germany reads:
'Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera of Sidon, aged 62, a soldier of 40 years' service, of the 1st cohort of archers, lies here.'
The stone is in Bad Kreuznach Museum.
Again, here is what Bushby wrote about the tombstone:
Tiberius Julius abdes Panthera, an archer, native of Sidon, Phoenicia, who in 9 AD was transferred to service in Rhineland (Germany). 1
Again, here is what Morton Smith wrote:
"To suppose the name Pantera appeared as a caricature of a title not yet in use is less plausible than to suppose it handed down by polemic tradition. It was not a very common name, but we do know of a Sidonian archer, Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, who was serving in Palestine about the time of Jesus' birth and later saw duty on the Rhine. It is possible, though not likely, that his tombstone from Bingerbruck is our only genuine relic of the Holy Family."
And here is what McDowell and Wilson wrote:
"The theory most sensational but least accepted by serious scholars was dramatized by the discovery of a first century tombstone at Bingerbruck, Germany. The inscription read, 'Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, an archer, native of Sidon, Phoenicia, who in 9 c.e. was transferred to service in Germany.'...
We notice that Smith makes no mention of the date: 9 AD as Bushby and the Christian apologists do... most curious. We also note that the original, the translation, does not have a date either. So we have two people who added a date to fulfill their own agendas.
And so, we find that Bushby is not quite reliable: he is grinding an axe.
It is very sloppy work and I can't help but hold the rest of his conclusions suspect, wondering how many other "proofs" he similarly twisted or used out of context. But, having found a crucial one in the first 29 pages of his book, I don't think I'm going to spend my life digging back on every single reference he has made. I've got better things to do and I can see right away that his agenda is to prove his theory no matter how he has to do it. And it is about as weird as the whole Jesus myth anyway.
