Jesus in the Talmud

Peter Schäfer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400827619
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

Scattered throughout the Talmud, the founding document of rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, can be found quite a few references to Jesus--and they're not flattering. In this lucid, richly detailed, and accessible book, Peter Schäfer examines how the rabbis of the Talmud read, understood, and used the New Testament Jesus narrative to assert, ultimately, Judaism's superiority over Christianity.
The Talmudic stories make fun of Jesus' birth from a virgin, fervently contest his claim to be the Messiah and Son of God, and maintain that he was rightfully executed as a blasphemer and idolater. They subvert the Christian idea of Jesus' resurrection and insist he got the punishment he deserved in hell--and that a similar fate awaits his followers.
Schäfer contends that these stories betray a remarkable familiarity with the Gospels--especially Matthew and John--and represent a deliberate and sophisticated anti-Christian polemic that parodies the New Testament narratives. He carefully distinguishes between Babylonian and Palestinian sources, arguing that the rabbis' proud and self-confident countermessage to that of the evangelists was possible only in the unique historical setting of Persian Babylonia, in a Jewish community that lived in relative freedom. The same could not be said of Roman and Byzantine Palestine, where the Christians aggressively consolidated their political power and the Jews therefore suffered.
A departure from past scholarship, which has played down the stories as unreliable distortions of the historical Jesus, Jesus in the Talmud posits a much more deliberate agenda behind these narratives.

1. Jesus’ Family

The rabbinic literature is almost completely silent about Jesus’ lineage and his family background. The rabbis do not seem to know—or else do not care to mention—what the New Testament tells us: that he was the son of a certain Mary and her husband (or rather betrothed) Joseph, a carpenter of the city of Nazareth, and that he was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, and hence of Davidic origin. It is only in the Babylonian Talmud, and there in two almost identical passages, that we do get some strange information that may be regarded as a faint and distorted echo of the Gospels’ stories about Jesus’ family background and his parents.¹ Since neither source mentions, however, the name “Jesus” but instead resorts to the enigmatic names “Ben Stada” and “Ben Pandera/Pantera” respectively, their relationship to Jesus is hotly disputed. I will analyze the Bavli text in detail and demonstrate that it indeed refers to the Jesus of the New Testament and is not just a remote and corrupt echo of the New Testament story; rather, it presents—with few words and in the typically discursive style of the Bavli—a highly ambitious and devastating counternarrative to the infant story of the New Testament.

The version of our story in Shab 104b is embedded in an exposition of the mishnaic law, which regards the writing of two or more letters as work and hence forbidden on the Sabbath (m Shab 12:4). The Mishna discusses all kind of materials that might be used for writing, and of objects upon which one might write, and states that the prohibition of writing includes also the use of one’s own body as a writing object. From this the logical question arises: But what about tattoos?² Are they, too, to be regarded as writing and hence forbidden on Sabbath?³ According to R. Eliezer, the answer is yes (they are forbidden on Sabbath), whereas R. Yehoshua allows it (in the Tosefta parallel it is the Sages).

The Tosefta and both the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud elaborate further upon this Mishna. According to the Tosefta, R. Eliezer responds to the Sages: “But did not Ben Satra learn only in such a way?”⁴—in other words, did he not use the tattoos on his body as an aid to facilitate his learning (hence, weren’t they clearly letters and therefore forbidden to be “written” on Sabbath)? This is bad enough, but the two Talmudim come up with an even worse explanation of why tattooing one’s body on Sabbath is forbidden, when they have Eliezer ask: “But did not Ben Stada bring forth witchcraft from Egypt by means of scratches/tattoos (biseritah) upon his flesh?”⁵ In all three versions the Sages dismiss R. Eliezer’s objection with the counterargument that Ben Satra/Stada⁶ was a fool and that they would not let one fool’s behavior influence the implementation of Sabbath laws.

It is within this context that the Talmud (Shab 104b)⁷ proceeds with a clarification of the enigmatic “fool’s” family background. The text is only preserved in the uncensored manuscripts and printed editions of the Bavli; I quote according to Ms. Munich 95 (written 1342 in Paris), with some variations in the footnotes:

(Was he) the son of Stada⁸ (and not on the contrary) the son of Pan-dera?

Said Rav Hisda: the husband

was Stada, (and) the cohabiter/ lover

was Pandera.

(But was not) the husband

Pappos ben Yehuda and rather his mother Stada?⁹

His mother was [Miriam],¹⁰ (the woman who) let (her) women’s [hair]¹¹ grow long (megadla

neshayya).¹²

This¹³ is as they say about her¹⁴ in Pumbeditha: This one turned away from (was unfaithful to) her husband

This is a typical discourse of the Bavli, which tries to clarify the contradiction between two traditions: according to one received tradition, the fool/magician is called “son of Stada” and according to another one he is called “son of Pandera.”¹⁵ What, then, is his correct name?¹⁶ In other words, the Talmud is concerned about the problem that the same person is called by two different names and not about the question of who this person is (the answer to this latter question is obviously presupposed: everybody seems to know it). Two different answers are provided.

First, Rav Hisda (a Babylonian amora of the third generation and an important teacher at the academy of Sura; d. 309 C.E.) suggests that the person in question had, as it were, two “fathers” because his mother had a husband and a lover,¹⁷ and that he was called “son of Stada,” when referring to the husband and “son of Pandera,” when referring to the lover. Against this, an anonymous author comes up with a different solution: No, he argues, his mother’s husband was not some “Stada” but rather Pappos b. Yehuda, a Palestinian scholar (not portrayed as a sage and without the title “Rabbi”) of the first half of the second century C.E., and in fact it was his mother who was called “Stada.”¹⁸ If this is so, the last step of the mini-discourse in the Bavli continues, we need to explain this strange name “Stada” for his mother. The answer: His mother’s true name was Miriam, and “Stada” is an epithet which derives from the Hebrew/Aramaic root

(“to deviate from the right path, to go astray, to be unfaithful”). In other words, his mother Miriam was also called “Stada” because she was a

, a woman suspected, or rather convicted, of adultery. This anonymous explanation is located in Pumbeditha, Sura’s rival academy in Babylonia.

Hence, it becomes clear that both explanations begin with the assumption that our hero’s mother had both a husband and a lover, and that they only disagree about the name of the husband (Stada versus Pappos b. Yehuda). The name Pandera for the lover is made explicit only by Rav Hisda but seems to be accepted in the Pumbeditha explanation as well, because it presupposes the mother’s adultery and does not suggest another name for the lover. That Pappos b. Yehuda is identified as the husband originates from another story in the Bavli, transmitted in the name of R. Meir, that Pappos b. Yehuda, when he went out, used to lock his wife in their house—obviously because he had reason to doubt her fidelity (b Git 90a). This behavior on the part of Pappos b. Yehuda is quite drastically compared to that of a man who, if a fly falls into his cup, puts the cup aside and does not drink from it any more—meaning that Pappos b. Yehuda not only locks away his wife so that she cannot go astray but that he also refrains from intercourse with her because she has become doubtful.

The dubious reputation of our hero’s mother is further emphasized by the statement that she grew her hair to a great length. Whatever the original meaning of the odd phrase,¹⁹ the context in Shabbat 104b/Sanhedrin 67a clearly suggests that Miriam’s long and apparently unfastened hair was indicative of her indecent behavior. Another passage in the Talmud (Er 100b) describes the epitome of a “bad woman” as follows: “She grows long hair like Lilith

),²⁰ she sits when making water like a beast, and she serves as a bolster for her husband.” Similarly, the story in Gittin continues with a “bad man who sees his wife go out with her hair unfastened²¹ and spin cloth in the street with her armpits uncovered and bathe with (other) people”—such a man, it concludes, should immediately divorce his wife instead of continuing to live with her and having intercourse with her. A woman who appears bareheaded and with long hair in public, this seems to be presupposed here, is prone to all kinds of licentious behavior and deserves to be divorced.²²

If the Bavli takes it for granted that our hero’s mother was an adulteress, then the logical conclusion follows that he was a mamzer, a bastard or illegitimate child. In order to be put in this mamzer category it did not matter whether his biological father was indeed his mother’s lover and not her legal husband—the very fact that she had a lover made his legal status dubious. Hence the uncertainty that he is sometimes called Ben Stada and sometimes Ben Pandera. But nevertheless, the Talmud seems to be convinced that his true father was Pandera,²³ his mother’s lover, and that he was a bastard in the full sense of the word.

Searching for evidence outside the rabbinic corpus, scholars have long pointed to a remarkable parallel in the pagan philosopher Celsus’ polemical treatise

, written in the second half of the second century C.E.²⁴ and preserved only in quotations in the Church Father Origen’s reply Contra Celsum (written ca. 231–233 C.E.). There, Celsus presents a Jew²⁵ as having a conversation with Jesus himself and accusing him of having “fabricated the story of his birth from a virgin.” In reality, the Jew argues,he [Jesus] came from a Jewish village and from a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. He [the Jew] says that she was driven out by her husband, who was a carpenter by trade, as she was convicted of adultery. Then he says that after she had been driven out by her husband and while she was wandering about in a disgraceful way she secretly gave birth to Jesus. And he says that because he [Jesus] was poor he hired himself out as...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Jesus’ Family
• 2. The Son/Disciple Who Turned out Badly
• 3. The Frivolous Disciple
• 4. The Torah Teacher
• 5. Healing in the Name of Jesus
• 6. Jesus’ Execution
• 7. Jesus’ Disciples
• 8. Jesus’ Punishment in Hell
• 9. Jesus in the Talmud
• Appendix: Bavli Manuscripts and Censorship
• Notes
• Bibliography