Jesus in the Talmud

The Frivolous Disciple 37begs him to repent, but the student is convinced that he has committed acapital sin, which forever excludes penitence and forgiveness.This last part of the story (the excommunication of the student and theaborted repentance as well as the master’s conclusion about Jesus’ magic)is completely lacking in the Yerushalmi, where the story concludes withthe remark that the master becomes angry and that the student leaves himor (in one manuscript) 18 dies.It is obvious that the identification of the student with Jesus reflects alater stage in the development of the story: it is lacking in the Yerushalmiversion and attested only in some manuscripts of the Bavli version. Therecan be no doubt, therefore, that Yehoshua b. Perahya, whatever historicalreality stands behind this figure, has nothing to do with Jesus in the sensethat the story preserves some historically reliable information about thefounder of Christianity. But this is not what is at stake here. The fact thatJesus penetrated into the story at a later stage does not mean that the storydoes not contain any reliable information about the Bavli’s perception ofJesus. 19 On the contrary, the manuscript evidence clearly shows a tendencyduring the editorial process of the Bavli to identify the unknownstudent of Yehoshua b. Perahya with Jesus, a tendency moreover that ispeculiar to the Bavli and must have to do with the Bavli’s understandingof Jesus and his personality. 20Two features in the story underline this assumption. The first is thekind of idolatry the heretical student adopts when he believes that he hasbeen finally rejected by his teacher: he worships a brick, a custom thatmarkedly points to the cultural context of Babylonia. Any attempt to findbehind this brick worship some hidden allusions to Christian practices 21is completely misguided and misses the point. Our Bavli editor did notknow (and did not care) much about Christian worship and identified theidolatry of Jesus with what he regarded as idolatry in his Babylonianmilieu—brick worship. 22The second distinctively Babylonian feature is the explicit reference tomagic in the concluding statement by the master. We have seen alreadythat Jesus was connected with Egyptian magic (reminiscent of the infancystory with the magicians coming from the East[!] and the subsequentflight of Jesus and his parents to Egypt in the Gospel of Matthew); now weare in the center of Babylonia, the most ancient motherland of magic,