A book misused by anti-Semites

Peter Schaefer's "Jesus in the Talmud" is a perfectly serious, scholarly study about whether Jesus is mentioned in the Talmud, and if so, in what contexts. The author is a professor of Judaic studies at Princeton.

Unfortunately, the book is misused by anti-Semites, which explains the rather tense customer reviews on Amazon. Note also that Amazon has paired the book with some overtly anti-Semitic works, perhaps because customers who buy this book, also buy such literature.

In and of itself, the fact that competing religions insult each other is trivial. Of course the Talmud insults Jesus and the Christians. Just as Christian sources insult Jews! What makes the issue less than trivial to many people is the long history of Christian, anti-Semitic persecution. One common argument in anti-Semitic discourse is to accuse the Jews of being "Christ killers" or even "deicides". The Talmud seems to admit that the Jews did indeed kill Jesus, which explains why anti-Semites love to quote it. Naturally, it also explains why modern Jews often claim that the Talmudic references to Jesus are really about somebody else (the references are very cryptic and bear little overt resemblance to the New Testament). While this reaction may be understandable, it's factually wrong: the Talmud *does* contain negative references to Jesus. To more sober people like myself, this simply indicates that Jews in antiquity didn't like Christians, hardly big news.

"Jesus in the Talmud" points out that the Talmudic references to Jesus aren't intended as pieces of information on the historical character Jesus of Nazareth. The observation that the Talmud lacks value as a historical source on the "real" Jesus is therefore beside the point. Yet, most scholars who studied the issue took this approach to the material. Schaefer's angle is different: he sees the Talmudic statements as a veiled polemic against Christianity as it looked like during the period when the Talmudic tractates were written down, neither more nor less. It seems other scholars have been too mesmerized by the constant search for the "historical Jesus" to appreciate this rather obvious point.

The Talmud claims that Jesus was the bastard son of Miriam and a certain Panthera. That this is a reference to Jesus of Nazareth is obvious, since we know from an earlier, non-rabbinical source (Celsus as quoted by Origen) that such a tradition did indeed exist among Jews already during the second century. The name Panthera is a deliberate distortion of parthenos (virgin), hence mocking the virgin birth. Schaefer belives that the distortion is based in a magical practice of reversing the letters in a name to exorcise its bearer. In other parts of the Talmud, Jesus is accused of sexual immorality. During the second century, Christians were indeed accused of sexual orgies, as reported by Justin and Tertullian. In the Gospel narratives, Jesus socializes with sinners and prostitutes, and Mary Magdalene was often identified as a former prostitute. This could be used to claim that Jesus himself must have been a sinner. The Talmud further claims that Jesus had five disciples, but Schaefer points out that the conversation between these fictitious disciples and the Jews is really a polemic against Jesus himself. For instance, one of the disciples claim to be "The Branch", and another implies that he is Israel, the Son of God.

To a modern reader, the most obvious Jewish response to the Christian charge of having killed Jesus should be blatant denial. But that is anachronistic. The Babylonian Talmud was edited in the Persian Empire, where the Jews were out of Roman reach. There, the Jews could boldly proclaimed that they *did* kill Jesus, according to the Talmud by stoning (posthumously, Jesus was hanged on a pole). Schaefer points out that this doesn't convey any historical information either. The Persian Jews weren't really commenting on an actual historical event centuries earlier in Palestine. Rather, their point was that Christians were heretics, and it's not wrong to execute such people. The Jewish message to the Christians was: if this Jesus was indeed killed by the Jews, they did the right thing, since heretics deserve death.

I recommend this book to all serious students of Jewish-Christian relations.