A Fine Re-Cap by The New Yorker

[Minimalist]

of recent jesus 'scholarship.' Certain to contain something to piss off everyone.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/at...ntPage=all

The odd absences in Mark are matched by the unreal presences in the other Gospels. The beautiful Nativity story in Luke, for instance, in which a Roman census forces the Holy Family to go back to its ancestral city of Bethlehem, is an obvious invention, since there was no Empire-wide census at that moment, and no sane Roman bureaucrat would have dreamed of ordering people back to be counted in cities that their families had left hundreds of years before. The author of Luke, whoever he might have been, invented Bethlehem in order to put Jesus in David’s city. (James Tabor, a professor of religious studies, in his 2006 book “The Jesus Dynasty,” takes surprisingly seriously the old Jewish idea that Jesus was known as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Pantera

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/at...z0oDZ6S9W8