I have been working on something that has interested me for many years now. This is the link, historically and mythically, between remnants of the family & friends of the historical Jesus in France - whether direct or indirectly connected with him. I hope to present more of these ideas in the Rhedesium magazine in the future.
My idea for the thesis began from when i read a strange sentence that Pierre Plantard uttered - it involves Herod Antipas and the political machinations around the birth of Jesus. From approaching Herodian family history and origins, Roman rule and and politics at the time and the life of first century Jewish women an interesting picture emerges.
So it was fascinating to read the following by Robert Price;
" ... [there are parallels] between the martyrdoms of Jesus and John, for both are put to death by a strangely reluctant profane tyrant, Jesus by Pontius Pilate, and John by Herod Antipas. But wait a moment, as Loisy pointed out, Luke, like the Gospel of Peter, seems to have known a version of the Jesus martyrdom in which it was Herod Antipas who condemned Jesus to death! (He has harmonised it with Mark only with difficulty, having Antipas first desirous of killing Jesus, then acquitting him, but nonetheless remanding him to Pilate!) Perhaps this is because they were the same [person]!"
This is Price's radical idea which Price himself said was
"... admittedly [a] far-fetched thought-experiment, which is all I claim for it".
In this context perhaps re-examining our "conventional ways in which we read ... documents.." is in order? Because currently anything which does not fit scholarly neatly set in stone explanations for troublesome texts is called "anomalous data" and we need to be brave to face the challenging anomalous data - not to reconstruct a new and fanciful life of Jesus but to try and approach the truth.