Jesus in the Talmud

9. Jesus in the TalmudThe Jesus passages in the rabbinic literature, most prominently inthe Babylonian Talmud, reveal a colorful kaleidoscope of manyfragments—often dismissed as figments—of Jesus’ life, teachings, and notleast his death. They are not told as an independent and coherent narrativebut are scattered all over the large corpus of literature left to us by therabbis. Even worse, only very rarely do they address Jesus, the object ofour inquiry, directly; in many cases the immediate subject of the rabbinicdiscourse has nothing to do with Jesus and his life: he is mentioned just inpassing, as a (minor) detail of an otherwise different and more importantsubject, or else he and his sect are carefully disguised behind some codesthat need to be deciphered. Nevertheless, our close reading of the relevanttexts yields a number of results that can be summarized and put intheir appropriate context.First and foremost, the fact must be emphasized that our texts, despitetheir scattered and fragmentary presentation, cannot be rejected as nonsenseand sheer fiction, as the fantasies 1 of some remote rabbis who did notknow and did not want to know anything about the Christian sect and itshero. Such a rash judgment can only be reached—and indeed has beenreached much too often—if the wrong standard is applied, that is, if therabbinic stories are combed for scraps of their historicity, for the historicaltruth concealed under the rubble and rubbish of lost or misunderstood