Jesus in the Talmud

AcknowledgmentsThis study has two roots. The first goes back to the late 1970s, when Iread Johann Maier’s book Jesus von Nazareth in der talmudischenÜberlieferung, which appeared in 1978. I was stunned by the eruditionand meticulous scholarship of my colleague at that time at Cologne University,which nevertheless left me deeply dissatisfied. Having worked myway through the book’s sophisticated arguments and painstakingly preparedcharts, I was left wondering: what an expenditure of time and energy,just to prove that there is no Jesus in the Talmud and that the Talmudis an unreliable historical source for Jesus and early Christianity. Ihad the feeling that somehow the wrong questions were asked, or ratherthat the chimera of a rationalistic and positivistic historicity was evoked,almost as if to evade the real questions. True, and to be fair, our notion ofJudaism and Christianity—and of their mutual relationship—has changedconsiderably over the last thirty years, but still the sources cry out for amore nuanced approach that takes into consideration the difference betweenpure factuality and a longer and complex process of Wirkungsgeschichte(reception history).I always wanted to get back to the subject, but it took until the springterm of 2004 at Princeton University that I finally had a chance to realizethis desire. When my friend Israel Yuval of the Hebrew University, whospent that term at Princeton as a visiting professor in the Department ofReligion, suggested that we address in a joint seminar the topic of “HowMuch Christianity in Talmud and Midrash?”—the larger and much discussedquestion of rabbinic responses to Christianity—I enthusiasticallyagreed and proposed to include the Jesus passages in the Talmud. Thismemorable seminar belongs among the most exciting and rewardingteaching experiences in my life, not only because of a uniquely congenialgroup of students (undergraduate and graduate) as well as of colleagues(our Princeton colleagues Martha Himmelfarb and John Gager