Jesus in the Talmud

56 Chapter 5But a serpent did indeed bite him!—[This is] the serpent of therabbis, which can never be cured!Now, what is it that he might have said?—One shall live by them(Lev. 18:5), not that one should die by them! 30The Bavli editor is clearly a match for R. Ishmael: not only does he noticethe obvious contradiction in Ishmael’s hypocritical reasoning (Eleazar b.Dama was already bitten by a snake), he exposes the real snake that bitpoor Eleazar: the rabbis. 31 Not the bite of the snake caused his death butthe bite of the rabbis who put their rulings above the Torah. The verse,which Eleazar did not have time to quote, states: “You shall keep my lawsand my rules; by doing so one shall live: I am the Lord” (Lev. 18:5); inother words, the Torah provides life and the rabbis death. This is a devastatingcritique of the rabbis that ultimately holds R. Ishmael—one of themost respected heroes of tannaitic Judaism—accountable for his nephew’sdeath. The rabbis, according to this critique, are only interested in theirown importance, not in the Torah—and could not care less about the individual’sdestiny.Moreover, the Bavli’s 32 critique of R. Ishmael implies that R. Eleazar b.Dama, according to the true meaning of the Torah (as opposed to the hypocriticalrabbinic “fence”), was correct and should indeed have beenhealed by the heretic Jacob. Hence, the Bavli editor disagrees with theview that only nonheretical Jews should be allowed to heal by “whisperingover a wound”: he pointedly includes the heretic. 33 Jacob’s attempt toheal R. Eleazar was perfectly legitimate because in a life-threatening situationsuch as happened to the rabbi, it did not matter whether or not thehealer was suspected to be a heretic. What only mattered was whether theword(s) he whispered were potent enough to save the patient. And obviouslynone of the players in our story ever doubted the effectiveness of theword to be used by Jacob: the name of Jesus ben Pantera/Pandera.We encountered the name of Panthera as Jesus’ father in Celsus’polemical treatise written in the second half of the second century C.E.and (as Pandera) in Bavli Shabbat/Sanhedrin; the Tosefta (with Panderain the Qohelet Rabba parallel) is the earliest attestation of this name inrabbinic sources. As I have argued above, nothing prevents us from assumingthat the name Jesus ben Pantera/Pandera refers to the Jesus of the