Customer Reviews

Jesus in the Talmud

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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

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.

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.

It has often been said that where there is smoke there is fire. Perhaps more on point "where there is smoke there is often fire." The theme of this book is that the Jewish Talmud presents the New Testament Jesus in the most unfavorable light. Heretic, blasphemer, self-idolator, born out of wedlock, magician, etc. Throughout the NT these charges are brought up against Jesus and are answered. Jesus' cures and wonder working are not the work of demons but the work of God. What appears in the Talmud written centuries after the ministry of Jesus were issues which were present during the actual ministry of Jesus.

With regard to him being born out of wedlock the NT offers some hints that at least some of Jesus' contemporaries thought of him as being born out of wedlock.

Matthew 1:1-18 lists four four women besides his mother Mary in Jesus' genealogy. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba out of a plethora of male ancestors. All our four of these women had been stained with some form of sexual sin or irregularities. Was this to show that God works through unchaste women and that even if rumors of Mary's infidelity were true it was less important? God worked through unchaste women before and he can do it again.

In Mark 6:1-6 Jesus is addressed as being the Son of Mary. In Jewish traditions the son was always identified as being the son of the father. This leads some to conclude that Jesus' father was unknown or uncertain. In Luke 4:22 the crowd asks if Jesus isn't the son of Joseph or in other words "Jesus isn't the son of Joseph." In John 8:41 the religious establishment responds to Jesus' accusations by declaring that they were not born illegitimately, as if by implication Jesus was.

In the non-canonical Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate), a late third century work, confirms that the accusation that Jesus was born illegitimate were well known. In Nicodemus 11:7-16 Jesus is questioned by Pilate concerning the status of his birth.

None of this "proves" anything other than that the accusations and implications made in the Talmud are mirrored within the Gospels themselves from the middle First Century to the early Second Century AD.

Where there is smoke there may be fire. Based on the author's premise the Talmudic verses about Jesus are a literary work in response to a literary work, the Gospels. The main point of the Talmud is not to "prove" anything to the Christians but to solidify the corporate identity of the Jewish people. To think that the Rabbis would not respond in kind with invective against an earlier invective found in the Gospels and Epistles is naive at best and arrogant at worst.

This is an iteresting book, though the topic is quite narrow and the audience will therefore be rather limited. Peter Starker does some commendable data mining in this book. As he concedes, there are only a few scattered, and usually indirect, references to Jesus in the Talmud. Nevertheless, Starker discusses and categorizes these references for us. He also draws some interesting conclusions on what the rabbis who wrote the Talmud (both Jerusalem and Babylonian versions) were trying to prove with their references to Jesus. The book is quite readable and well organized. It is a scholarly work, with copious footnotes and some helpful appendices.

Prof. Schaefer,

Initially I read reviews of your book, Jesus in the Talmud, that implied it revealed the dark side of Jewish Christophobia. However, after just a cursory perusal of your book, it is clear to me that you are enamored of Judaism and rather enjoy relating the vulgar and vile Talmudic screeds against Jesus of Nazareth.

I believe this is demonstrated in the following ways:

1. In the Introduction, you admit that many of the ideas in this book were generated by Israeli professor Israel Yuval, with whom you taught a class at Princeton. Yuval is clearly no admirer of Christianity.

2. Also you admit that you know little to nothing about the New Testament. Thus obviously you are not a Christian.

3. The book has many offensive and mocking comments, such as: "the Talmud makes a very bold and forceful argument" (33); "biting ridicule of one of the cornerstones of Christian theology (24); the Christians "need to be unmasked and defeated once and for all" (51); "The real power and authority still rest with their opponents, the rabbis" (62); "Jesus was rightly killed, and there is nothing that remains of him and his teachings after his death" (81); "Taken togethre, the texts in the Babylonian Talmud, although fragmentary and scattered, become a daring and powerful counterGospel to the New Testament in general and to John in particular" (129).

4. On this last point, I would suggest that "counterGospel" is hardly the right term. Since you are not a Christian and are unfamiliar with the New Testament, you probably are ignorant of the fact that Gospel means Good News. The Talmud polemic against Jesus Christ, while forceful, certainly contains no Good News whatsover. It attempts to negate the unique Christian Good News, without providing an alternative to replace it. Particularly this is so with regard to Gentiles, for whom the Talmud holds out zero spiritual hope at all. So your term "counterGospel" is misinformed at best, and cynical at worst.

5. Finally, I would press you on the Talmudic story alleging Jesus' father to have been a Roman named "Panthera". Many scholars, such as Dalman and Hereford, suggest that Panthera is a pun on the word Parthena, Virgin, suggesting that this story is rhetorical and not at all factual. Again your uncritical acceptance of this name seems odd, considering the depth of scholarship you seem to invest in this book, judging by your extensive list of footnotes and bibliography.

For all these reasons, I conclude that "Jesus in the Talmud" is a deadly earnest polemic against Christianity disguised as an unbiased scholarly review of the Talmudic accounts. It is a very dangerous Trojan Horse.

I am posting these comments on the Amazon website for your book.

Shabbat Shalom,
Menachem Korn

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 this product page. 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.

Traditionally most Christians are taught that Jews were a significant part of, if not protagonists, of Jesus crucifixion. From here spawns a breath of negative opinions ranging from hatred to distrust. Tolerance, or better acceptance, is very difficult to reach if we start from this obscure initial teaching.
This book opens the doors and windows for a new generation of Christians to correct the negative bias of intolerance and ignorance against Judaism. Within this pages lies the initial framework of a new paradigm that may help to pave a way for understanding, tolerance and finally complete respect and collaboration. Even though the book includes some crude and direct depictions of some very negative and even disrespectful rejections against Jesus by rabbis, as exposed by Mr Shafer within the Talmud whether they are correct or exaggerated, the book aims to present an understanding of the original clash of beliefs that Jesus caused within the prevailing Jewish community, specially for its leaders. Once exposed the crucial and profound schism that Jesus caused and the subsequent effort included in the Talmud to combat and eradicate his influence, modern Christians can begin to understand the present situation in a broader way.
It is for each reader to reach his or her own conclusions. For me, a deeper understanding of the events during Jesus life has enriched my core beliefs and faith. But most importantly, a road map to tolerance and collaboration is clearer because inlaying causes for offenses taken by Jews are identified and studied so the same can be avoided and prevented to become obstacles to tolerance and understanding.
When one understands what makes our neighbor mad, we have to decide whether to continue the offense or to avoid confrontation based on ignorance. This book definitely contributes to the latter.

There have traditionally been three schools of thought about references to Jesus in rabbinic literature: The rabbis had early source material and therefore have insight to offer on the historical Jesus; the references are not in any way historical and therefore of no value; or, they refer to another Jesus, not the founder of the Christian faith. Peter Schafer has combed the Mishnah, Tosefta, midrashim, and Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmudim to learn how Jesus was perceived by Judaism of late antiquity and arrived at a different conclusion than his predecessors: The references do, indeed, refer to Jesus Christ but are "highly sophisticated counternarratives to the stories about Jesus' life and death in the Gospels." In other words, the rabbis deliberately ridiculed Jesus, because they believed he had hijacked their religion and created their new nemesis: Christianity.

References to Jesus in rabbinic literature are few, scattered, and fragmentary, but there are more in the Babylonian Talmud than in the Jerusalem Talmud. Schafer posits that Jews in Babylonia of late antiquity had more freedom to criticize Christianity under Persian rule than did Jews in Jerusalem under Christian Roman rule. And the unflattering picture of Jesus in the Babylonian Talmud is a "glimpse of a very vivid and fierce conflict between two competing `religions' under the suspicious eye of the Sansanian authorities." In Schafer's eyes, references to Jesus in rabbinic literature do have historical value. They don't refer to the historical Jesus but reflect one stage in the historic conflict between Judaism and Christianity.

So Schafer's hypothesis is not trivial. But how much evidence does he have? Schafer finds eight independent references to Jesus in rabbinic literature, which take slightly different forms in different works. Some of these references are oblique and could only be construed as alluding to Jesus if taken in conjunction with other information. Schafer may be right that they refer to Jesus, but I was more convinced by some passages than others. One of his strongest arguments is that the source of the rabbis' information was the Gospel of John. This is interesting and supports the idea that the rabbis had no historical information to offer of Jesus but had more than a passing curiosity in Christianity. Schafer's argument in "Jesus in the Talmud" isn't airtight, but it is thoughtful and perhaps more likely than other schools of thought on the subject.

As an aside, any discussion of what Jews may (or may not) have done or said about Jesus seems to invite rancor. "Jesus in the Talmud" has been accused of being both anti-Jewish and anti-Christian. It may be useful to know that Peter Schafer is a Christian Hebraist and Director of the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. I presume that his attitude toward the perception of Jesus in rabbinic literature reflects a couple of things: He has dedicated his professional life to the study of Judaism so, naturally, tries to see things from that perspective. And he is a European Christian who does not believe religious literature reflects a literal truth or should be taken as such. So he tends to be amused and impressed by clever jokes made at Christianity's expense, where someone else might see vicious gossip or libel. It doesn't mean that he's anti-Christian, much less anti-Jewish.

Why don't we see such works more often? No, not because "the Jews" control "the establishment". Rather--as most (though not all) of the four- and five-star reviews here show--such a book would becomes a magnet to the ignorant antisemitic fringe, who shower the author with undesired praise and attention for "daring to say THE TRUTH about the evil Jews".

In fact, of course, Schafer's book does nothing of the kind--nor does he intend to. It was well known that the Talmud and other Jewish writings of the period express occassional anti-Jesus and anti-Christian sentiment. What's new is Schafer's claim that (a) the criticism wasn't random, but a parody and inversion of Christian sources, and (b) careful examination of precisely *what* the rabbis are parodying and inverting shows the sages of the Talmud were more aware of contemporary Christian writings (esp. the most antisemitic of the Gospels, John) than previously supposed. They reacted to the antisemitic biases of the Christian sources with their own anti-Christian bias.

The fascinating thing about this book is the "treasure hunt": how obscure references from dozens of seperate tractates are put together to show the coherent thought behind them. If the book has a weakness, it is that, by necessity, the rarity and obscurity of the material (in many cases criticism had to be disguised, for example by using pseudonyms for 'Jesus') sometimes force Prof. Schafer to guess more than he would like about missing material. But this is the general flaw of all historical works about obscure subjects; Schafer might be wrong in his thesis, for all we know, but he sure does his very best to show it is correct with the material available.

For the record, Schaffer of course knows very well that 99.99% of the Talmud has nothing to do with Jesus; that its (rare) anti-Christian sentiments express particular rabbis' opinions, and are not a command to all Jews to hate Jesus; and that, in any case, the vast majority of Jews are completely unaware of the very existence of these obscure Talmudic claims about Jesus. Unfortunately for the antisemites praising the book, Prof. Schafer hasn't "exposed the awful truth about the Jews"; he simply puts forward an interesting literary thesis.

But, hey, guys--thanks for showing everybody, in your enthusiastic though totally inaccurate reviews, everbody the *real* reason serious scholars dislike writing about such subjects. They're not afraid of making "the Jews in the establishment" their enemies; they just don't want to make *you* their friends. With friends like these...