Jesus in the Talmud

38 Chapter 3and Jesus’ idolatry is identified as what many Babylonian Jews would haveexpected an idolater to do: to practice deviant or forbidden kinds of magic.However, the master’s pious condemnation of magic cannot conceal thefact that magic was regarded as perfectly acceptable and was widespread,not least in Babylonia. The many magical bowls from Mesopotamia,which were written in all likelihood by Jewish practitioners of magic, attestto this. 23Most remarkable, among the names that appear on these Babylonianmagic bowls are no less famous ones than our Yehoshua b. Perahya and,indeed, Jesus. Yehoshua b. Perahya issues a letter of divorce to femaledemons in order to stop their evil deeds—the prime example of a potentmagician whose decree is sanctioned in heaven. 24 Clearly not by coincidence,he appears also in some fragments of the Toledot Yeshu, the infamousJesus narrative. 25 Jesus has been discovered on a magic bowl publishedby Montgomery, 26 and recently Dan Levene has added anotherone from the Moussaieff collection. 27 The bowl (a curse) is written in JewishBabylonian Aramaic and points to the cultural context of SasanianPersia: 28By the name of I-Am-that-I-Am (ehyeh asher ehyeh), the Lord ofHosts (YHWH Tzevaot), and by the name of Jesus (> Ishu), who conqueredthe height and the depth by his cross, and by the name of hisexalted father, and by the name of the holy spirits forever and in eternity.Amen, amen, selah. 29This is a quite common adjuration that uses the most powerful names ofGod in the Hebrew Bible, the “I-Am-that-I-Am” from Exodus 3:14 (thename communicated to Moses by God), and the tetragrammaton YHWH(in the frequent combination “the Lord of Hosts”). What is unique, however,is the addition not only of Jesus (in the unusual spelling >Ishu) 30 butalso of the Father and the Holy Spirit, 31 that is, the invocation of the ChristianTrinity after the God of the Hebrew Bible. Shaul Shaked has discussedthe implications of this reference to Jesus and the Trinity in a bowl writtenin Jewish Aramaic and has convincingly concluded that our bowl was indeedwritten by a Jew. 32 Yet this does not necessarily mean that the bowlwas written for a Jew; rather, he suggests, that the clients who ordered the