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>The Gospel of Matthew Subtly Admits Jesus' “Illegitimate” Birth
>One of the parallels that can be drawn between the Jesus of the canonical gospels from the Bible and the Jewish conception of Jesus from the Talmud and the Toledot is the narrative that Jesus was born fatherless. The shortest and earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, only speaks of the family of Jesus as being his mother and brothers, and there is nothing in the gospel about Jesus being born of a virgin. The character of Joseph, the “step-father” to Jesus, only appears in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. According to the anti-Christian philosopher Celsus, as well as certain passages in the Talmud and Toledot, the real father of Jesus was a man named Panthera, or Pantera. The Toledot also sometimes uses another name, ben Stada, although there appears to have been some confusion as to who Stada was exactly:
>“Ben Stada was Ben Pandera. Rab. Chisda [d. 309 CE] said: The husband was Stada, the lover Pandera. (Another said:) The husband was Paphos ben Jehuda; Stada was his mother; (or) his mother was Miriam, the women's hairdresser; as they would say at Pumbeditha, Setath da (i.e. she was unfaithful) to her husband.” -Shabb. 104b, G.R.S. Mead Translation
>According to the Toledot, Panthera was a Jewish vagabond, but Celsus, writing around 177 CE, instead identifies him as a Roman soldier. A statue monument in Germany dedicated to a Tiberius Julius Abdes Panthera, born in Sidon in Phoenician in 9 CE attests to it being a real name used by a Roman soldier, as Zindler has pointed out (139). Both Epiphanius and the eighth-century monk John of Damascus claimed that Panthera was a surname of one of Jesus' grandfathers, although they differed on whether it was from the paternal or maternal line. Some Biblical scholars have suggested that “Panthera” was a pun on the Greek word for “virgin”, parthenos, but the two words do not come from the same root
