Jesus in the Talmud

48 Chapter 4in their world at the same time that they are very actively seeking to establishdifference.” 34This is certainly correct, and Boyarin takes great pains to assure thereader that he does not follow oversimplistic positivistic models but rather“new methodologies,” according to which R. Eliezer “no longer is a historicalcharacter in the first century, but a ‘fictional’ character in the thirdcentury,” and that he draws historical conclusions “not about events butabout ideologies, social movements, cultural constructions, and particularlyrepressions.” 35 Nobody would want to object to such an approach today:not the event as the firm and provable historical “fact” is at stake butwhat has developed around the event in all its complexity and historicalramifications. 36 Yet we should not draw too firm a line between the “historical”and the “fictional” character, between the “event” and the “culturalconstruction.” Both belong closely together, and even at the risk ofrelapsing into the bad habits of positivism I want to posit that the rabbiswith their stories, including the present one, reveal more than just theawareness (and recognition) of the breaking-off of Christianity from thecommon ground of rabbinic Judaism. Rather, this awareness and recognitionare not abstract constructs but deeply grounded in the reality and theexperience of what happened. Both can and need to be described in fullerdetail. As far as the stories about Jesus and his followers are concerned,they indeed reveal some knowledge of the Christian sect and of its hero,and this knowledge is not just a distorted and vague hodgepodge of thisand that, but a well-designed attack against what the rabbis experiencedas the reality of the Jewish-Christian message. 37Keeping these methodological considerations in mind, let us briefly reviewthe Eliezer story again. It combines two strands that both in theirown way respond to the New Testament narrative.(1) The first strand, the core of the story, is the charge against R. Eliezer,the alleged Christian heretic, of prostitution/sexual orgies. This accusationfits in very well with what we have heard so far about Jesus himself:that he was the illegitimate child of his mother Miriam’s liaison with theRoman soldier Pandera, that he himself led quite an indecent life andthat he was excommunicated by his teacher because of his frivolousthoughts. Jesus and sexual offense seem to be a recurrent theme in the(later) talmudic treatment of Christianity, and the Eliezer story is the ear-