Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

sidenote about Jesus’s family is that they were all named after great
     heroes and patriarchs of the Bible. Jesus’s name was Yeshu, short for Yeshua or Joshua,
     the great Israelite warrior whose wholesale slaughter of the tribes inhabiting Canaan
     cleansed the land for the Israelites. His mother was Miriam, named after the sister
     of Moses. His father, Joseph, was named after the son of Jacob, who would become known
     as Israel. His brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, were all named after biblical
     heroes. Apparently the naming of children after the great patriarchs became customary
     after the Maccabean revolt and may indicate a sense of awakened national identity
     that seemed to have been particularly marked in Galilee.
    The argument in Matthew that Jesus’s virgin birth was prophesied in Isaiah holds no
     water at all, since scholars are nearly unanimous in translating the passage in Isaiah
     7:14 not as “behold a virgin shall conceive” but “behold, a young maiden (
alma
) will conceive.” There is no debate here:
alma
is Hebrew for a young woman. Period.
    For one particularly controversial argument about Jesus’s illegitimate birth, see
     Jane Schaberg,
The Illegitimacy of Jesus
(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978). Schaberg claims Mary was very likely raped,
     though it is not clear how she comes to that conclusion.
    Celsus’s story about the soldier Panthera is from his second-century tract
True Discourse
, which has been lost to history. Our only access to it comes from Origen’s polemical
     response to the work titled
Against Celsus
, written sometime in the middle of the third century C.E .
    It should be noted that both Matthew and Luke recount the “son of Mary” passage in
     Mark 6:3, but both fix Mark’s statement by pointedly referring to Jesus as “the carpenter’s
     son” (Matthew 13:55) and “the son of Joseph” (Luke 4:22) respectively. There are variant
     readings of Mark that insert “the son of the carpenter” in this verse, but it is generally
     agreed that these are later additions. The original of Mark 6:3 undoubtedly calls
     Jesus “son of Mary.” It is possible, though highly unlikely, that Jesus was called
     “son of Mary” because Joseph haddied so long ago that he was forgotten. But John Meier notes that there is only a
     single case in the entire Hebrew Scriptures in which a man is referred to as his mother’s
     son. That would be the sons of Zeruiah—Joab, Abishai, and Asahel—who were soldiers
     in King David’s army (1 Samuel 26:6; 2 Samuel 2:13). All three are repeatedly referred
     to as “sons of Zeruiah.” See Meier,
Marginal Jew
, vol. 1, 226.
    For more on the question of whether Jesus was married, see William E. Phipps,
Was Jesus Married?
(New York: Harper and Row, 1970) and
The Sexuality of Jesus
(New York: Harper and Row, 1973). Karen King, a professor at Harvard University,
     has recently unearthed a tiny scrap of papyrus, which she dates to the fourth century,
     that contains a Coptic phrase that translates to “Jesus said to them, my wife …” At
     the time of this writing, the fragment had yet to be authenticated, though even if
     it is not a forgery, it would only tell us what those in the fourth century believed
     about Jesus’s marital status.
    There are some great stories about the boy Jesus in the gnostic gospels, especially
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas
, in which a petulant Jesus flaunts his magical powers by bringing clay birds to life
     or striking dead neighborhood kids who fail to show him deference. The best and most
     complete collection of the gnostic gospels in English is
The Nag Hammadi Library
, ed. Marvin W. Meyer (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).
    For more on Sepphoris, see the relevant entry by Z. Weiss in
The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land
, ed. Ephraim Stern (New York: Simon and Schuster; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society,
     1993), 1324–28. For Sepphoris as a major commercial center in Galilee, see Arlene
     Fradkin, “Long-Distance Trade in the Lower Galilee: New Evidence from Sepphoris,”
     in
Archaeology and the Galilee
, Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough, eds. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997),
     107–16. There is some debate as to whether the
miqva’ot
(ritual baths) discovered in Sepphoris were actually ritual baths; Hanan Eshel at
     Bar Ilan is among those who do not think they were. See “A Note on ‘Miqvaot’ at Sepphoris,”
Archaeology and