The Jewish Annotated New Testament (168 page)

The majority of anti-Christian materials in this latter period (third to sixth centuries CE) are in the Babylonian Talmud. Here, too, these texts are an exceptionally small part of that vast compendium. The Babylonian Talmud recounts stories about the trial and crucifixion of Jesus (
b. Sanh
. 43a), Jesus’ repudiation by his disciples (ibid.), Jesus’ punishment in hell (
b. Git
. 57a), and the dishonesty of Christian judges (
b. Shabb
. 116a–b; parodying Mt 5.14–17). Peter Schäfer (
Jesus in the Talmud
, Princeton University Press, 2007) has plausibly explained the concentration of these texts in Jewish Babylonia rather than the land of Israel. There, Christianity was known as the oppressive empire to the West, yet it remained a minority religion in the Zoroastrian East. Consequently, the rabbis spoke derisively of Christianity with impunity, something they could not afford to do in the Christian Roman Empire. Midrash
Ecclestiastes Rabbah
(edited sixth to seventh centuries) contains a collection of anti-Christian texts deriding the efficacy and authenticity of Christian conversions of Jews (
Eccl. Rab
. 1. 1.8).

Christianity strengthened its grip on Judaism in Europe, first during the Crusades and then during Inquisition of the High Middle Ages. There were two consequences for rabbinic traditions about Jesus and Christianity. One was the Christian suppression of many rabbinic anti-Christian texts which were removed from manuscripts and printed editions of the Talmud by Christian censors (e.g.,
b. Sanh
. 43a and
b. Git
. 57a). Ultimately this practice of suppression led to Christian burning of Talmud texts and other rabbinic books. As a second consequence, this church oppression led Jews to circulate anti-Christian texts, such as a scurrilous “biography” of Jesus, in rabbinic communities of Europe. These texts expressed rabbinic disdain for their Christian rulers.

No rabbinic text, including the earliest, offers any historic evidence regarding Jesus or first-century Christianity. All rabbinic writing reflects the attitudes of the editors toward the Christianity of their own times, at least two centuries after the death of Jesus. By this time, copies of the New Testament and other early Christian writings were circulating in various forms throughout the Roman Empire and the East. Further, rabbinic texts often reflect the interpretations of New Testament that were being offered by the various church fathers in their eras and locales. It is highly unlikely that rabbis read the New Testament per se.

It is important, in looking at these rabbinic texts today, to take account of the various historical contexts in which they were written or edited. By the time the Talmud was coming into final form, Christianity was the dominant religion of the Mediterranean world and beyond. Negative expressions in such writings reflect negative experiences in the time of their creation. Quoting such texts without explaining these contextual influences can grossly distort one’s understanding of how Jewish tradition views Jesus.

JESUS IN MEDIEVAL JEWISH TRADITION

Martin Lockshin

The medieval period is not a sharply delineated one. It extends from the centuries after the fall of Rome in 476 CE up to the beginnings of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century. For the purposes of surveying Jewish thought, the medieval period can be said to begin with the conclusion of the formation of the Babylonian Talmud in the sixth century CE.

The earliest medieval Jewish criticism of Jesus originated in the ninth century in the Muslim world. This work, known as the “Polemic of Nestor the Priest,” exists in two forms: an Arabic version, the “Disputation,” and a Hebrew translation, the “Polemic.” The work contends that Christian claims of Jesus’ divinity cannot be supported from the New Testament and are also contradicted by the events of Jesus’ life: gestation and birth (considered unbecoming for a divine being), Jesus’ prayers to God (why, if Jesus were divine, would he pray?), and particularly a shameful death (crucifixion seen as disproving divine status). Within Christendom, only beginning in the thirteenth century did Jewish writers criticize, in ways similar to that of the “Polemic,” the character of Jesus or point out the disparity between the Jesus of the Gospels and common Christian dogma. These writers also argued that claims about Jesus as the second person of the Trinity are not philosophically tenable. The most sustained criticism of Jesus is found in the late fourteenth-century satirical work
Be Not Like Your Fathers
(Hebrew title
al tehi ka
’
avotekha
) by Profiat Duran, a Spanish Jew. It is a satiric letter purportedly commending Christian beliefs while actually undermining them.

In general, Jews in medieval Christian countries did talk about Jesus, but not the Jesus of the Gospels. The most important source of Jewish (mis-)information about Jesus was the scurrilous Hebrew biography
Toledot Yeshu
(
The Chronicle of Yeshu
). “Yeshu” was the preferred form of Jesus’ name for most medieval Jews, probably because the more accurate name, Yeshua, is associated with the Hebrew root that means salvation. Other (insulting) terms for Jesus included
ha-talui
, the hanged one (see, e.g., R. Eliezer ben R. Yoel Halevi,
Sefer Raavyah
1051).

The provenance, date, and even original version of
Toledot Yeshu
are unclear. The book is rarely mentioned explicitly by Jewish writers, for obvious reasons: It would have been dangerous for a Jew to own or perhaps even mention an insulting biography of Jesus. The work survived in part because it was disseminated by Christians who wished to rouse animosity against Jews.

The most common version of the story depicts a Jewish woman named Miriam engaged to a Jewish man named Yo
ḥ
anan. A villainous character, Joseph Pandera, disguised himself as Yo
ḥ
anan and raped Miriam when she was menstrually impure. The child thus conceived, Yeshu, was intelligent but impertinent. Learning in a deceitful manner how to pronounce God’s Name (YHWH, the tetragrammaton), he used this knowledge to perform supernatural deeds, thus seducing people into following him and seeing him as divine. After many twists and turns, the rabbis put Yeshu to death by hanging him on a cabbage plant (!).

A work like
Toledot Yeshu
was meant to make oppressed Jews of medieval Christendom feel better by satirizing their oppressors.

The Jewish idea that Jesus was a sorcerer is found in the Talmud (e.g.
b. Sanh
. 43a and 107b); the New Testament (e.g. Mt 12.24) reports that the charge was leveled against Jesus in his lifetime. But
Toledot Yeshu
greatly expands and develops this theme. Other medieval Jews alluded to Jesus as the paradigmatic false prophet described in biblical texts such as Deut 13.2–6. For example, Joseph Bekhor Shor (late twelfth-century Northern France) states in his Bible commentary: “How much more so if he performs miracles through sorcery, as Yeshu did, bringing [back to the Holy Land] sorcery [that he learned] from Egypt” (see
b. Sanh
. 107b).

The image of Jesus as a false prophet and false messiah appears explicitly in the uncensored versions of Moses Maimonides’s
Mishneh Torah
, his code of Jewish law (
Kings
11). After describing in some detail how the true messiah can be recognized, Maimonides adds:

So also Jesus of Nazareth who imagined that he was the messiah and was put to death by a Jewish court, was prophesied about by Daniel, who said (11.14) “the lawless sons of your people shall assert themselves to establish the vision; but they shall stumble.” Could there be a greater stumbling block than this [episode of Jesus]? All the prophets had said that the messiah would save Israel and redeem them, would gather their exiles and strengthen the commandments [of the Torah]. But he [= Jesus] caused Israel to be put to the sword, caused their remnant to be exiled and degraded, switched their Torah [for another one] and led much of the world to worship someone other than God.

After this scathing attack on Jesus, Maimonides concludes however, with what may be the most liberal Jewish statement about Jesus from the High Middle Ages. He says that despite the many evil outcomes of Jesus’ life, it also led to some crucial positive developments:

All the actions of Jesus. … only serve to pave the way for the coming of the [true] messianic king, and to improve our world [by leading all of humanity, eventually] to worship God together, as it is written (Zeph 3.9), “For then I will make the peoples pure of speech so that they all invoke the LORD by name and serve Him with one accord.”

Maimonides thus concludes that when the true messiah comes, his mission will have been prepared for by Jesus: even if the preparation has been inadvertent, it will result in good, because great numbers of those outside the Jewish community are now aware of the coming of a messiah. Christian belief thus can be seen, from the Jewish perspective, as producing a benefit for non-Jews. The wider question raised by this approach then becomes: Is Christianity the means by which non-Jews can come to worship the God of Israel?

JESUS IN MODERN JEWISH THOUGHT

Susannah Heschel

The emancipation of Jews from political repression and into secularizing Christian society in the eighteenth century elicited a Jewish interest in Jesus; the principal focus was less an appreciation for Christianity than a justification of Judaism. For example, the noted Jewish German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) sought to win Christian tolerance of Judaism by reminding his audience of Jesus’ Jewishness: he wrote in his
Jerusalem: or, On Religious Power and Judaism
(1783) that

Jesus of Nazareth himself observed not only the law of Moses, but also the ordinances of the rabbis; and whatever seems to contradict this in the speeches and acts ascribed to him appears to do so only at first glance. Closely examined, everything is in complete agreement not only with scripture, but also with the tradition.

Such an emphasis on Jesus’ faithfulness to Judaism initially had to proceed with caution. Mendelssohn writes in an unpublished note in 1770,

It is a disgrace that we should reproach Socrates and Plato because they were pagans! Was this a flaw in their morals? And Jesus a Jew?—And what if, as I believe, he never wanted to give up Judaism? One can only imagine where this remark would lead me.

The answer: into dangerous waters, no doubt, given the generally negative views Christians at the time had toward Judaism. The Jewishness of Jesus was known but not to be publicized.

The next generation saw in Germany the rise of the
Wissenschaft des Judentums
, the historical study of Judaism, which emphasized scholarship on the Second Temple period. Participants in this movement sought not only to elucidate developments in Jewish history, but also to demonstrate how early Christian texts can be clarified with reference to Jewish sources, particularly rabbinic texts. Scholars representing this movement include Abraham Geiger (1810–74), Joseph Salvador (1796–1873), Heinrich Graetz (1817–91), Levi Herzfeld (1810–84), and Joseph Derenbourg (1811–95). In arguing that Jesus can best be understood by studying the Gospel texts in the context of Jewish sources, these scholars were not attempting to build bridges between Synagogue and Church, but to change the prevailing Christian view of Jewish history. Whereas the general Christian view portrayed late Second Temple Judaism as moribund, ossified, heartless, and spiritless, these scholars presented a Judaism of depth and vitality; moreover, they located at the heart of Western civilization not classical Greek or Roman civilization, not Aryan culture, and not the New Testament, but Jewish biblical and rabbinic literature and culture. These Jewish historians argued that even Enlightenment thought, with its claims to secularized, scientific forms of knowing and its insistence on tolerance and diversity, was the product of Judaism, not Christianity. They claimed that while Christianity demanded belief in established dogma, Judaism permitted freedom of belief and required only ethical behavior.

The initial step taken by Jewish historians was to redefine the nature of Judaism during the era when Christianity developed. In 1829, the German-Jewish scholar Issac M. Jost (1793–1860) published the first extensive history of the Jewish people since Josephus wrote his
Antiquities of the Jews
in the first century. Jost simply followed the New Testament narrative that depicts the Pharisees as narrow-minded and hypocritical, responsible for their own destruction and for Jews’ turning away to Christianity. By contrast, thirty years later, Abraham Geiger, one of the founders of Reform Judaism, inaugurated a new era of scholarship in 1857 with his magnum opus, the
Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel
(
The Original Text and Versions of the Bible
), one of the nineteenth century’s most important works of Jewish scholarship. Geiger defined two tendencies in early Judaism: the liberal Pharisaic and the conservative Sadducean. His Pharisees, far from being the figures of hypocrisy depicted in the New Testament, attempted to liberalize and democratize
halakhah
, Jewish religious law. The Sadducees, whom Geiger associated with the priests of the Jerusalem Temple, represented the aristocratic elite who sought to preserve their privileges by a conservative reading of
halakhah
.