Jesus in the Talmud [Hardcover]

Peter Schäfer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Schäfer's fine new book should be of interest to a wide audience, and not only to specialists in the field of the historical interaction of Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity (who will be right to devour it). . . . Schäfer's book tells a fascinating story. . . . His great scholarship now provides Jews and Christians interested in developing a new and better relationship with a way to work through many of the hateful things that we have said about each other in the past, but without pretending that this bad past was not as bad as it really was or that it can simply be forgotten. . . . The sources that Schäfer adduces are virulent and dangerous, but his analysis of them leaves one unexpectedly full of hope. -- David Novak, New Republic



In the talmudic references to Jesus . . . Schäfer persuasively finds sophisticated 'counternarratives that parody the New Testament stories,' composed by Jews who evinced a precise knowledge of the New Testament. The true accomplishment of Jesus in the Talmud is to show how certain talmudic passages are actually subtle rereadings of the New Testament, 'a literary answer to a literary text.' With considerable skill, Schäfer weaves these together until they can be seen to form an intricate theological discourse that prefigures the disputations between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages. -- Benjamin Balint, First Things



Meticulously researched and argued as well as clearly and accessibly written, this most intriguing--albeit radical--book is sure to spark interest, debate, and controversy. An essential purchase for academic religion collections and theological libraries. -- Library Journal



In [this] book Schäfer has proven himself not only a formidable scholar of ancient and medieval Jewish texts . . . but also a talented author from whose hands the text flows like the water to which the rabbis likened the Torah. -- Galit Hasan-Rokem, Jewish Quarterly Review



Peter Schafer's Jesus in the Talmud reviews well-trodden territory but derives new and important readings from this familiar evidence. Applying contemporary historiographical methods, Schafer offers a convincing explanation of the talmudic texts about Jesus. -- Ruth Langer, Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations



Peter Schafer deserves great merit for having taken up a subject whose reexamination has been overdue for a long time already and that is of major interest to New Testament scholars, Talmudists, and historians of ancient Judaism alike...The great achievement of this book is that it reopens the discussion of texts that are of greatest significance for the study of the relationship of Judaism and Christianity in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It presents the Jewish intellectual elite in a new light, as active respondents to Christian claims and allegations and forceful combatants in the Christian-Jewish dispute. -- Catherine Hezser, Review of Biblical Literature



Schafer's excellent study shows that, by ridiculing fundamental Christian claims, Babylonian Jewry rejected any notion that the old covenant had been superseded by the new, Judaism had nothing for which to reproach itself: its superiority over Christianity was incontestable. -- Anthony Phillips, Church Times



Peter Schäfer...provides a sophisticated treatment of the subject of Jesus and other figures in the New Testament in Talmudic literature. This subject has a long history, but have never been undertaken with the kind of rigor and sensitivity to contextual factors, including the differences between the evidence available in the Babylonian versus Jerusalem versions...Clear and accessible reading for the non-specialist, this is a careful, scholarly treatment that sets the agenda for future studies -- Jewish Book World



One of the greatest Hebrew scholars, Peter Schäfer, published a book on a very controversial and difficult subject--Jesus in the Talmud. Jesus in the Talmud is a work of great value. Although the author declares that the book is not a scholarly treatise, but only a kind of extensive essay, the investigation is thorough and all its theses are excellently and fully argued. -- Maciej Tomal, Palamedes



Peter Schäfer's Jesus in the Talmud is already being picked up by anti-Semitic Web sites as proof that Judaism harbors blasphemous beliefs about Jesus. Yet, it is an important book by a meticulous scholar, the head of Princeton's Judaic studies program. It is also a truthful book and should be received in a spirit of truthfulness. -- David Klinghoffer, Hadassah Magazine



Schäfer bases his clearly written and exquisitely informed work on a collection of the fragmented texts about Jesus from the heart of the rabbinic period, a cluster of passages he assembles from material scattered throughout the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds and contemporaneous rabbinic literature. The simple gathering of these newly translated texts in one place makes the book an excellent English-language resource for researchers and laypersons alike. -- Stephen Hazan Arnoff, Haaretz



This remarkable monograph is required reading for anyone interested in the reception of the NT in rabbinic literature. -- M. J. Geller, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament



[C]ertainly the best modern study of this topic. -- Simon Gathercole, Journal for the Study of the New Testament



This is a very interesting book, and the author's arguments are both logical and unique. -- W. Pretorius, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae



Schafer's erudite sailing through the 'sea of Talmud' is evident on every page; and, to the extent his thesis is correct, he relocates Talmudic Jesus tradition from Jesus research in the first century to Jewish-Christian relations in late antiquity. -- Michael A. Daise, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus

From the Inside Flap

"Peter Schäfer's remarkable volume on Jesus' enigmatic place in Talmudic literature is a work of erudition and depth. It will bring deeper knowledge to students and teachers of Judaism and Christianity."--Elie Wiesel

"When the premiere 'Christian-Hebraist' of our era turns his attention to Jesus in the Talmud, everyone interested in ancient history and modern interreligious dialogue must take notice. Peter Schäfer carefully sifts through all of the literary evidence from that great monument of late-fifth-century Babylonian Jewish culture with fresh eyes and striking insights. His final chapter, focused on why the Babylonian Talmud could sustain such anti-Christian rhetoric, is a scholarly tour de force."--Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, Jewish Theological Seminary

"From the opening pages of Jesus in the Talmud the reader senses that something new and important is about to be unfolded. It is, and the unfolding of it is pure Schäfer: straightforward and plain-speaking, argued densely, yet with great clarity, provocative, but finally persuasive. And yes, exciting too."--F. E. Peters, author of The Children of Abraham

"This is an exceptionally engaging book. Professor Schäfer has subjected to close scrutiny all the passages relating to Jesus in the Talmudic and other rabbinic literature produced in Palestine and in Babylonia in late antiquity. His aim is to use them to discover the rabbis' attitude to Christianity. While the force of the argument suggests this book should be mainly of interest to students of rabbinic Judaism, I believe that the subject matter will ensure that it has a much wider readership. It sheds light in places on the way the gospel traditions evolved particularly in Palestinian and Syriac-speaking Christianity."--Nicholas de Lange, University of Cambridge

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; Third Edition edition (January 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691129266
• ISBN-13: 978-0691129266
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,036,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Biblical Scholarship, March 15, 2009

By 

Eric Bergerud (Albany, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jesus in the Talmud (Hardcover)

I heartily second the glowing reviews Jesus and the Talmud has received from the scholarly community across the board. This is an important book, ably described by many scholars in the "Editorial Reviews" section. I would like to add, in particular, to the praise toward the book's clear and very accessible style. I teach and write history for a living, and not all academics make things so easy on their readers.

I suppose the David Dukes of the world will find ammunition in Schaefer's work as long as the people they appeal to don't read it. I suppose also that some Jewish readers who do not understand the world of the distant past or the Middle Ages might have bruised feelings. Such are the dangers when entering into waters that spill onto some very ugly history of the last hundred years.

I find Schaefer's argument completely convincing. Considering the rapid spread of the "Jesus movement" in the 1st century (and especially when considering that Jesus' earliest followers, like Paul, came to the synagogues spread throughout the ancient Mediterranean,) it strikes me as naive to believe that many, perhaps most, Jews of the era never heard anything of the "good news" and that what they did hear they simply ignored. It also certainly makes sense that Jews in and around what is now Israel, whose rabbis compiled the Jerusalem Talmud, would have been much more circumspect when dealing with the new Christians than those living in the Mideast whose leaders created the Babylonian Talmud. It would be interesting to know what Jews thought of the early Christians during the Temple period, but other events were much closer and important. After the Jewish revolts against Rome in Judea (66-135 CE)Jews remaining in Roman territory had good reason to keep their heads down. Jews in the Fertile Crescent, however, were either at the fringe of the Roman Empire or, before Constantine, living under Sassanid Persian rule, a friendlier environment. There rabbis could write what they believed.

And as Schaefer shows, the leaders of Rabbinic Judiasm, displayed no affection for the increasingly powerful Christian movement. How could they? Political and cultural pluralism were not commonly found outside the contemporary world. the Christians claimed that a Jew was the revealed son of God. With an issue like this it is hard to find grounds for polite disagreement. If the Christians were right, the foundations of Rabbinic Judaism were built on sand. In the event, the Christian message was rejected by most Jews. (And, although Schaefer's book by necessity deals with the writings of the Jewish religious elites, I think it a fair assumption that ordinary Jews understood their leaders and agreed with them.) It would be likewise difficult to believe that as Christianity became the biggest religion in the world that the guardians of the Torah and Talmud would or could ignore it. So, in disparate pieces, rabbis constructed an alternate narrative that struck not at Christianity itself but upon the figure of Christ. This narrative represented literal history no more than did the Gospels and like the Christian writings were filled with symbolism. No doubt this reflected deeply held and sincere feelings. It was also important to discourage Jews in Christian lands to solve a lot of problems and simply convert. So, what developed, according to Schaefer was a kind of counter-narrative to the Gospels that portrayed Jesus as illegitimate, a trickster, a monumental liar and a betrayer of his people. Naturally this implied Christians were, at best, dupes. So, if this led some rabbis to picture Jesus as sharing a particularly grisly corner of hell with Titus, destroyer of the Temple, it all made sense.

In the long run, of course, this situation developed an ugly chemistry. Christians often viewed Jews as particularly nasty infidels and Jews responded with quiet contempt. Indeed, the segregation of the Jewish from the Christian communities in Europe was a reciprocal relationship. Jews lived in an often hostile environment. However, if isolation was not enforced inside the community, its leaders feared (with good reason I'd guess) that conversion would eat away at the heart of Judaism itself.

This is the kind of subject that must be addressed if we are to understand fully the relationship that existed over nearly 2,000 years between Christians and Jews. As it stands the shadow of the 3rd Reich makes it very difficult to describe the full and complex web that made up this relationship over time. It has done so to the extent that recent accounts that have emphasized a series of outrages committed by Christians against the Jews have, in my view, obscured the superstitious, parochial and violent atmosphere that existed throughout Christian lands until the French Revolution. For instance, much has been made understandably about the murder of Jews along the Rhine and in Jerusalem during the First Crusade. However, it is almost certain that far more Christian Cathar "heretics" were killed during the Albigensian Crusade. And if Jews suffered pogroms and discrimination in Early Modern Europe, they were better off than eccentric women in rural Europe some 30,000 of which were killed as witches. I am not trying to compare horror stories here. But at some point and at some level we have to accept the past as it was, a fascinating but often crude and brutal place. And we should realize that this brutality was apportioned with a kind of ugly equality.

The point to remember is that we do not live in the world of antiquity or the Middle Ages. And Hitler is dead and disgraced. Scholars of all stripes should continue "full steam ahead" in studying the intersection between the forces that shape history and religious faith as it played out in the past.

Eric Bergerud

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars stretched thesis, but interesting, September 21, 2010

By 

Ian Wright (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jesus in the Talmud (Paperback)

Kudos to Dr. Schaefer for taking on a very thorny topic.

There's an old bit by the Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce on the charge against his people for the crime of deicide:

"Alright, I'll clear the air once and for all, and confess. Yes, we did it [killed Jesus]. I did it, my family. I found a note in my basement. It said: 'We killed him, signed, Morty.'"

Turns out that, at least from the Babylonian Talmud's point of view, he wasn't joking. Not only does the Bavli claim full responsibility for the Crucifixion, but it short-shrifts Roman involvement in an anti-historical twist that leaves the reader thinking that the Sanhedrin had the power to execute heretics. It didn't, at least not according to standard sources. Under Roman rule, capital punishment was reserved to the secular, not the religious, courts.

The rise of the Internet saw a concomitant increase in 10 cent, non-Jewish Talmud scholars with a penchant for quoting the steamier passages thought to concern Jesus. Web pages are easily found in which Jesus is said to be boiling in hot excrement for all eternity, then offered as evidence of long standing Jewish perfidy.

Schaefer provides a scholarly context for these offending passages, claiming that they reflect an intimate knowledge of the Gospels. In fact, one cannot rightly make sense of the oblique references in the Talmud to the founder of Christianity without having the New Testament serving as the Rosetta Stone guide.

The professor's thesis is that the rabbinical rejection of Jesus as messiah amounts to a point-by-point denial of key beliefs that uniquely identified Christians in late antiquity. Thus, Jesus is not born of an immaculate maiden through the power of God, but is rather the bastard offspring of a Roman soldier named Pantheras. Moreover, Jesus did not come back from the dead after freeing the souls of captive sinners in hell, but is condemned to punishment for all eternity as an idolater and deceiver of Israel. The rabbis go over the checklist of Christian claims, crossing each out as they go. The general Talmudic formulas against Jesus take the form of "X is claimed about Jesus; not only not X, but Y," where Y is something shockingly shameful.

Talmudic narratives sometimes incorporate characters as stand-ins for actual persons who were of interest to the Jewish people for one reason or another, but could not be identified because of political climate. Names are changed, making it difficult sometimes to determine who or what exactly is being discussed in a given midrash. Professor Schaefer tries to distill the identities of these figures (Rabbi Eliezer being one example) to show how they correlate with Jesus. (Sometimes though, R. Eliezer is just R. Eliezer.) Again, the New Testament stories are assumed to provide the needed clues about the structure, correlates and reasoning behind Talmudic equivalents.

Probably the great weakness of the book is that it rests on quite a few deductions by the writer in the absence of hard evidence. The leap from boiling excrement to the Eucharist is probably one of the more glaring examples of scholarly imagination setting itself to solving a non-problem.

I suspect that much of the Talmud contains obscure topics dressed up in oblique language, such that their meaning and significance have been lost even to earlier rabbis. Among the mythological bric-a-brac of the Talmud is the claim that a male relative of Nero converted to Judaism. Lilith even gets a passing mention in one of the quotes in this book, proving that myth and folktales play a pedagogical role in rabbinical thought. Extricating this influence from fact seems to lead to a lot of suppositions on the part of scholars like Professor Schaefer.

The criticism is made stronger by Schaefer's own repeated admissions that the Talmudic Jesus is ahistorical, a prosaic figure confabbed together from sources like the New Testament, but with important details omitted or altered to suit the needs of rabbinical authorities. This is to say that solving the identity of R. Eliezer, Bunin, or any of the other alleged guises of Jesus assumes that the many volumes comprising the Talmud were edited so as to yield clear subnarratives. Yet it seems that the opposite case can be made, namely, that the Talmud has a lot of unredacted material that was never properly sorted and clarified. The Jesus passages are spread out as well. Schaefer is trying to solve a puzzle that isn't really a puzzle at all.

A blurb on the back of the book makes the claim that this volume will improve Christian and Jewish understanding. This is probably the stupidest thing you can say about it since if anything, the book's equating of the Eucharist to dung will only make a bad quote even worse. If the professor is right, then Judaism says little about Jesus, but what it does say is filled with incredible venom and hate.

Dr. Schaefer has written an interesting book that delves into history and other topics that make it worth reading, but I think the general thesis is stretched. I'm not sure many practicing Christians will care to sift through the arguments since much of the subject matter is scatological in nature.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent source of info, October 6, 2011

By 

John B. Todd (Boise, Idaho, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jesus in the Talmud (Hardcover)

This book is an exceptional source of information. It is well documented by a scholar with impeccable credentials. This is definitely not Political Correct material and it will never be found in main-stream media. This is a great source and it is a shame that the general public will never find this information; the boot of censorship in America being complete.