Jesus in the Talmud

[porphyry]

Probably most readers of this journal won’t know that there is a fairly extensive criticism of Jesus in the Talmud. It does not represent an independent source of knowledge about the historical Jesus (as my hero Morton Smith hoped), but consists of satirical inversion of well known biblical passages and Christian claims. For instance, Mary never co-habited with her fiancé and Joseph is not Jesus’ father? Of course not, say the Rabbis: everybody knows she was a prostitute and the father of her bastard was a Roman soldier named Panther (the Rabbis loved anagrams: if you scramble up the consonants—and they didn’t care about vowels—in Pantheros you get Parthenos--‘Virgin” get it?).

Back in graduate school I identified, to my satisfaction, a Rabbinic anti-Jesus polemic that has never been considered in that connection by other scholars. I never published it since I’m a little out of my depth in the Talmud. But the prospects of writing a convincing article has recently been bettered by the Publication of Peter Schafer’s new book, Jesus in the Talmud; for a start I can now be absolutely confident that no one else knows my interpretation of the passage in question without having to slog through 1000 pages in German (though I’ll still have to go through the indexes of the standard German treatments of the subject). I might be able to work on it in a few weeks.

But what I want to call attention to here is a little passage of Schafer, of the kind that can only be made by a German scholar writing in English. The book is fairly full of odd uses of idiom (you would think someone at Princeton UP would have fixed it), but the following is incredible (and I can’t think it was intentional):


And then follows the heated exchange regarding Jesus’ flesh and blood, which is hard to swallow not only for the “the Jews” ([Jn] 6:52) but even for his disciples (6:60). p. 127

Comments

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

Sounds interesting. I'm sure it won't be long before the Germans are writing better English than the natives; they are actually taught the language over there (grammar etc.). In fact, when I used to do a bit of university teaching, if one ever received a really well-written essay, one could be quite sure that the student was Dutch (we used to have quite a number of them on exchange schemes).